Joe Conrad, TS Eliot, Bob Dylan and Me
Of dry bones, broken stones (shored) and hollow victory
They're selling postcards of the hanging | They're painting the passports brown | The beauty parlor is filled with sailors | The circus is in town | Here comes the blind commissioner | They've got him in a trance | One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker | The other is in his pants | And the riot squad they're restless | They need somewhere to go | As Lady and I look out tonight | From Desolation Row
Allan Moult gives me hope for the future. In a typically understated e-mail—you know the type; "Where the fuck are you"—he drops a URL to a site he's "having a lot of fun with — Leatherwood Online, Tasmania's Journal of Discovery." Yeah, well, I've always enjoyed understatement... Visit Leatherwood Online and get sucked into an amazing project reflecting the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a forgotten country of great beauty. And sign up for updates.
Allan, as far as I remember, is an old-time South African who kicked the dust from shoes that had tramped old-time South Africa for too long. He once worked as a journo for The Star in Jo'burg but realized life had more to offer. So it has. Things are looking up for our Cobber from under Down Under. Leatherwood Online's preview issue is visually and textually stunning; and reminds me of much of that which we have here in South Africa. I'd have given my eye teeth to work on a similar metablog on Cape Town or the Western and Northern Capes but, so it goes.
Before we get down and dirty and start rambling (I've a two-month itch), I want to thank Allan for his typically South African / Tasmanian sense of PR. He's jolted me into realizing the need, after being offline for more than two months, to acknowledge the e-mails I've received. I also want to apologize to those to whom I've not responded, i.e. all of you, particularly those questioning my absence like good friends Tom, Frank and Tish, invitations to join the new monster of social software from equally good friends Michelle and Elaine, those offering the promise of stimulating and rewarding conversations through links and letters (Andie) and questions posed (the impossibly insightful and always delightful Yule Heibel).
Yep, I've been away... neither here, there, nor any place between. Sometimes we have go through these things in silence. Life has a way of working on many levels. I have heard the turning of the key. Right now, Wendy's just informed me that the ginger is growing. This has some bearing on what I have to say. Ginger is, after all, a tuber. One of the kids planted it in the garden (green and lush, shading a glaring sun) a while back and it's been lying dormant a while. We thought it was dead. It's not.
Life's like that. But, yes, on its own, it makes little sense, doesn't it? It ain't good to think of firing squads and bodies on the beach. And we are more than pubic hairs floating the piss streams of other people's lives (see Collected Phrases of Golby at 18). We are, in fact, the last twist of the knife.
Cinderella, she seems so easy | "It takes one to know one," she smiles | And puts her hands in her back pockets | Bette Davis style | And in comes Romeo, he's moaning | "You Belong to Me I Believe" | And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend | You better leave" | And the only sound that's left | After the ambulances go | Is Cinderella sweeping up | On Desolation Row
A while back, Joe Duemer bemoaned his students' lack of appreciation of literature, notably Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. By way of commiserating with Joe Duemer's ever optimistic view that some day he'll lecture an appreciative class, I commented that I was working on something. I was but, like much of that which I scribble, I chucked it. Why? Anger, I guess. Anger, not at Joe's students for being irredeemably dumb humans, but a deep-seated anger at the brutal, ugly, indifferent world I see us bringing into being. Anger at myself, too. Yeah, I thought... I'll show his students fear in a handful of dust. Joe's charges sparked something in me at the time and, because I've written much around and about Conrad's Kurtz and Marlow, I got stuck into a rereading of Victory. All the better to light a fire beneath their brains.
Yes, I was getting angry with myself. Life's a two-way street but I tend to lose sight of the other lane. My linear focus sometimes puts me on the side lined by the shrill riot squad of my choice. I don't like it. Victory became, I guess, the beginning of my recovery from an impotent response to the existential horror unleashed on a naive and unsuspecting world last year by the United States of America and all those who sail with her. Sometimes, words become noise for me, and noise a mind-numbing din suppressing all thought, deadening all feeling and passion. Reading Conrad and reveling in that of which Joe's young students have no appreciation, i.e. delicious irony, I found myself in Axel Heyst, the sorry fool, Scandinavian clown, and doomed chief protagonist of Victory. In Heyst, I could find that side of me I despise but pity (generously) and, in so doing, rekindled my empathy for the likes of the Swede, Kurtz, George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan and evil people in general. I realised that, Blogging for Bush, I'd become my own Romeo. It was time for me to leave; to rejoin the human race.
In Conrad's words, I heard the world again and, rather than continuing to follow trains of thought set in motion by the likes of the Vonnegut and Sartre I was reading, I chased down the music of voices from afar. The harmonicas started to play the skeleton keys and the rain. And today, writing this, these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.
Now the moon is almost hidden | The stars are beginning to hide | The fortunetelling lady | Has even taken all her things inside | All except for Cain and Abel | And the hunchback of Notre Dame | Everybody is making love | Or else expecting rain | And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing | He's getting ready for the show | He's going to the carnival tonight | On Desolation Row
I've always thrown myself into either selfishness or outright rebellion. Perhaps I was looking to do the latter but found the former when, in September 2002, the Satan in the White House, George W. Bush, decided to go for broke and kill as many people as it would take to impose his ignorant will on the world. Unilateral mass murder and global greed are not my scene no matter how much they are ours and I spontaneously resist them. Neocons, neoliberals... don't split hairs, they're all the same to me. If they have a rallying cry, it is "Exterminate the brutes." Setting up Iraq's invasion had taken decades of planning, a staged Pearl Harbor incident—falling towers—for which Bush and his gang will never be held accountable, the obliteration of Afghanistan, and the deaths of tens of thousands. American acceptance of the neocon agenda and global indifference to its execution set me (and millions of others) to raging for a year. Bush and his handlers crossed the line in the sands of the Mesopotamian desert and Western civilization's slide to perdition became at once an irreversible fall into ignominy, disgrace and oblivion. Afghanistan and Iraq costituted an horrendous perversion of the daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.
I guess those of us shouting our possible futures lost ourselves in the noise. Our hollow rebellion achieved nothing. As Camus points out, "Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic." The truth is that people like the U.S. president and similarly blinkered radicals on the other side of the fence will forever come and go, mumbling of Dickleangelo. By the by, I thought Bush did a pretty good job with Tim Russert on the weekend. He has potential great potential and, should he ever find himself out of a job, could become a spokesman for JINSA or some other prominent Middle Eastern lobby group dedicated to obliterating world peace.
By last December, I was sick of it all. A dumb blogger, I'd picked up on stuff the papers have yet to write. The banality of it all left me numb. I desperately sought my version of Saddam's spider hole, my shadow under the red rock. When the drumbeat hooves of the Riders of the Apocalypse threaten your sanity, self-preservation takes on the rosy glow of a healthy alternative to shouting at the Thunder, no matter its ugly source. Joe Duemer then roused me by proclaiming his bemusement at his students' inability to appreciate the social and dramatic irony suffusing Conrad's writing. Instead of drawing useless conclusions from their myopia, I thought I'd ask them to consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as they. Why not? Let's exterminate the brutes (the politicians and the students). Let's educate them and educate ourselves.
I guess, from a blogger's point of view, others' inability to comprehend the irony of America's actions bemused or confused me more than most. I am, after all, a furriner, a professional and a hard man to boot. So I couldn't blame them (the politicians, students, media, bloggers, etc.). People are people. Some are mathematicians; some are carpenters wives… Don't know how it all got started; I don't know what they're doing with their lives. Either way, there is, as the i Ching tells us, no blame (well, sort of). But, yes, my idiocy had tripped me up before and I'd stopped writing altogether. Faced with the mute intransigence of an ugly world, I had become one of Joe's students, had lost my sense of humour and had retreated completely from the Jug jug jug jug of Desolation Row... It was easy enough...
Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window | For her I feel so afraid | On her twenty-second birthday | She already is an old maid
For the record, and before I continue, it's amazing how a two-month hiatus can span a dramatic refocusing of one's view of the world and other people. Since early December, I have met people, been places and seen things way beyond the experience of most. I'm not free to detail the minutiae of where I've been, what I've seen or what I’ve felt but, as they say, I am here to jot a note reflecting the sum of that experience. I'll just have to rearrange faces and give them all another name; something Andie Miller feels I might have done for myself. I guess I have. It had been easy enough in my dark state of mind to take a decidedly 'inverse' view of writing. Words, as I have said, became noise. The chatter of the blogs and the media sickened me. We are all, to a degree, self-obsessed, but this fascination with the self booms out of the blogs like an exploding Thermobaric Pressure Bomb. One of the most beautiful pieces I read on blogging recently, contained this passage:
What makes me blog? It is a primary passion. I have often realized that blogging and Internet surfing in general makes me sad. I can't forget one evening after reading a paper on an hermeneutics colloquium in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, when, walking through the city, I discovered its streets quite empty. I was surprised by the great numbers of internet cafes to be found, though. Lots of young people in carrels staring at iridiscent monitors. Look at all the lonely people, I thought. It made me feel so sad. I thought that Internet surfing was such a lonely, melancholic activity. A form of ontological hunger.That's from Ernesto Priego's Resistances, Responses. Yeah yeah, I know. Things aren't quite like that. Blogging is, to put it simply (as Niek Hockx once did so eloquently), a way of putting stuff onto the Internet. It's called communication. Some have written great pieces reflecting the nature of blogging as a freely given expression of self in the past couple of months. They've written of the greedheads, self-promoters and traffic chasers with satisfactory disdain and demonstrated, more than adequately, that intelligent life survives. Chris Kovacs' explosive piece from the Korean Peninsula blew me away. I wasn't surprised by it—he always has been a great person and writer. Self-obsessed? Yes, Kovacs is self-obsessed. Does it matter? No. Why? Because our self-confessed punk always retains his sense of humour and, through it, shows his huge appreciation of life and other people. Life is not black and white, thank God. Kovacs is a rebel too. He'll make an unlikely bloody saint but I believe Father Christopher is leaning on the Pontiff to have Chris canonized by years' end.
"It's a long list, Father," slurred the Holy Father in sixteen languages.
"Fuck you, Lolek. They're my friends and if you omit them from the Heavenly Host I'll see you in hell," screamed Father Christopher (without malice—as a cheerleader would to his supporters on losing a primary).
Cardinal Ratzinger smiled nervously, signaled to the Vatican Guard, and then hesitated when Marek pointed his 30mm cannon at them.
"Oy yoy yoy," intoned the Pope, thinking how nice it would be to have a cup green tea. "It's a long way from Wadowice." He raised his piercing eyes, fixing my Spiritual Advisor to the end of his all-seeing Gaze. "I assume you've vetted the lot?"
"The lot—about the time the doorknob broke." Father Christopher's tone softened and, putting the palms of his hand together (as if in prayer), he bowed deferentially. "Saints all… the whole fucking bunch. Gave me coffee, Camels, books, music... those that couldn't wished they could. Wonderful people. They'd make a useful contribution to Heaven. Boost the Pilgrim Church on Earth and all that."
"Okay, then," mumbled the onetime Cardinal Wojtyla in Armenian, his thoughts returning to the afternoon spent with Magda on the banks of the Skawa. "We'll canonize them on Ophelia's twenty-second birthday."
"You don't want to do that," muttered Father Christopher. "She's already an old maid. Justin Timberlake's popped her iron vest."
"Eh?" The Pope brightened visibly, his eyes filled with a vision of Magda basking under Noah's great rainbow. "She bathed my feet with soda water, you know?"
"Ah, fuck it, I have to go, Your Holiness... er, Boss," stammered our Spiritual Advisor. "The New Agers and EGR Irregulars are battling it out at the Jesus Bunker and I have to give them oranges and lemons at the break. Besides, I'm having some people over for a workshop later this evening."
God's Vicar waved our leader out of the basilica. "Bring 'em on, boy. You go and take care of God's business. The peace of the Lord be with you always."
To her, death is quite romantic | She wears an iron vest | Her profession's her religion | Her sin is her lifelessness | And though her eyes are fixed upon | Noah's great rainbow | She spends her time peeking | Into Desolation Row
I later told Shelley that although I'd read some of Sartre's stuff as a kid, I'd never studied him. I therefore made a start, but didn't get very far. You know what it's like... you read about someone who's formulated a view of the world you take for granted and you think "Ho hum"? I guess I just agree with the guy. The ever-elegant Jonathon kept me going for a while because I wanted to answer a couple of questions he raised in my mind about the nature of angst, freedom, nausea, absurdity and myriad other clearly defined concepts. I never did get to comment on Jonathon's articles—which should not be missed—and probably won’t... philosophy is a discipline and I'm not disciplined. For what it's worth, the net result was a jaundiced view of others' interpretation of David Weinberger's statement, "We are writing ourselves into being." It's a statement with which I agree wholeheartedly, but it doesn't (with respect to David’s learning and insight) say very much. We're 'everything-ing' ourselves into being. It's what we fucking do... heh.
At some stage, Father Christopher's demented chattering doll and manservant RageBoy stuck up a poster of the movie Being There on my Spiritual Advisor's site. I liked it. Despite protestations by the whole blogging community, RageBoy is on the list Father Christopher has given to the Pope. I guess there is hope, even for one as depraved and irredeemable as RB. The juxtaposition of those two words, "being" and "there", is awesome. It's the story we tell ourselves. It keeps us going. It turns Desolation Row into Kovacs' street party. Mind you, they've never been very different. But, go on, admit it. We're a hopeless bunch of hosers, doomed to an eternal state of becoming.
However, if we can get people like Joe Duemer's students to wake up and smell the horror, this need not be what we professionals like to call a bad thing. There will no longer be any need to peek or judge. Once you've been to Heaven, you'll always remember Hell. For a while, though, (and forgetting
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood | With his memories in a trunk | Passed this way an hour ago | With his friend, a jealous monk | He looked so immaculately frightful | As he bummed a cigarette | Then he went off sniffing drainpipes | And reciting the alphabet | Now you would not think to look at him | But he was famous long ago | For playing the electric violin | On Desolation Row
Besides meeting strange people, feeling the rise and fall of a drowning spirit and seeing things most would not wish on their neighbours or Dick Cheney, I spent time with Joseph Conrad. Among other things, of course. Victory, in which pessimism and negation driven by a shared guilt triumph over love and devotion, tells the sad tale of the doomed Swede Axel Heyst, his equally tragic Lena and a twisted set of villains, all of whom echo or mirror aspects of Heyst's repressed character. Set on the remote islands of Sourabaya and fictitious Samburan in the steamy Malay Archipelago, Victory sees Heyst, weighed by his father's bleak outlook, distancing himself from humanity by taking to the one-time coal-mining island of Samburan, over which the jungle crouches, humped in silence, under a smouldering volcano.
Heyst, like Conrad's Kurtz, is a man who believes in 'progress'. Samburan was home to his former employer, the Tropical Belt Coal Company and, when the company pulls out, Heyst decides to stay behind. His decision did not surprise me. At the outset, Conrad spells out our commitment to hoarding natural reserves.
"There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as 'black diamonds.' Both these commodities represent wealth, but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket — but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel."Heyst should've worked for Bechtel. Like all sedentary men of progress, he spends his life vegetating—waiting for the coal-fired volcano above and behind him to blow him back to life, extinction, or a Washington D.C. think tank.
Much like the ginger tuber I spoke of earlier, Heyst goes into a self-imposed hibernation, neither living nor dead, with a little patience. And much like the colonial invaders of the Congo or Iraq, he pays no heed to the people who control his life and movement on the island; his Ariel-like Chinese servant Wang, or the Alfuro people who zealously retain possession of most of the island. Wang, to whom the sexually ambivalent and ultimately impotent Heyst relinquishes his manhood in the form of his revolver and his safety—his keys, typifies the European abroad. He is Kurtz without balls. A colonial, no matter his emotional or sexual inadequacies, needs to eat, however, and Heyst, nursing his contempt for humanity, heads back to Sourabaya for provisions. While there, he takes scornful pity on an English prostitute, Lena, harassed by the base German inn-keeper, Schomburg. Heyst takes Lena, a sensual woman, back to Samburan. The girl, not realising Heyst's vanity requires no response and makes a welcome of indifference, confuses her attempts to protect him for love. Back on Samburan, their futile attempts to coexist are marred by the Swede's lack of emotional commitment and inability to comprehend anything but a vague sense of his own desolation—which he projects onto humanity as a whole.
The raging Schomburg's altogether Teutonic and human response to Heyst's perceived onslaught on his manhood is to vilify the Swede absolutely, culminating in his dispatch—on the false promise of hidden treasure—of three inter-continental killers to murder the recluse. The languid homosexual and thoroughly evil Mr. Jones, his criminally insane 'secretary' and bisexual batman Martin Ricardo, and the apelike slave Pedro hit Samburan and, as the story burns to its inevitable close, we watch love's emaciated potential starve in a lush tropical setting that amounts to little more than an emotional desert. After the tempest, the island, purged of European violence and depravity by Wang, falls into the hands of the Chinese Ariel and his Alfuro wife.
Victory jerked me back to my senses and a healthy appreciation of irony—which, I suppose, I frequently equate to "humour". Balance, as they say, is everything and Joe Conrad has, if anything, a remarkable sense of balance. Accused of racism in Heart of Darkness, he uses homosexuality and misogyny in Victory to portray emotional dysfunction, sexual sterility and man's seeming need to indulge a ghastly appetite for gratuitous and brutal violence. If Kurtz's crime was a full appreciation of a barbarous life of violence lived under a thin veneer of sophistication, Heyst's was his infantile inability to realize any life at all.
Fuck the critics. I doubt Conrad was racist or homophobic. On the evidence, those making such accusations should look to themselves. No stunted bigot could produce such art. And if the motivating impulses in Victory are as suspect or contentious as they are in Heart of Darkness, Conrad's mastery of structure is as evident in the one as it is in the other. As each remarkable, brilliantly drawn character meets his or her match in another, we find their equal there too. Heyst's spectral former partner, the effete Morrison meets the mock martial masculinity of Schomburg (whose wife's resilience balances Lena's insecurities), the sexless Heyst meets the murderous violence of the sexually bent Jones, and the Oriental resourcefulness of Heyst's servant, Wang, meets the dumb obedience of Pedro's Caliban.
In perhaps the most gripping scene of the book and a piece giving full expression to Conrad's suggestive genius, Lena (who should have blogged as her sense of self relies on Heyst's verbal affirmation of her being) meets Martin Ricardo. If consensual rape exists, it does so because Conrad has written it. Lena's rape, so rudely forc'd and taken, is one of the finest pieces of writing I've read and should get even Joe Duemer's students steamed up. Conrad's artistry also allows for the most fluid yet tight narration. Time and sequence appear incidental only because they are not. Everything Conrad writes has something Andie Miller alerted me to, a force Poe called unity of purpose. Yet Conrad's is a unity of purpose based on artistic and human deception, mistrust and sexual ambiguity—and it results in an oblique style that is as sexually explicit as the novel's setting is unreal.
Victory's end is intentionally unsettling. Heyst's death by fire signifies—for me—his end while Mr. Jones's death by water foreshadows his and evil's eternal rebirth. Those definitely are not pearls that were his eyes. Recalling his lost partner Morrison, the emotionally and sexually detached Heyst's death was that of one of Camus's Byronic heroes, who:
"...incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action. To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exultation as one perishes in the flames of passion. One lives only in and for the moment, in order to achieve the brief and vivid union of a tempestuous heart united to the tempest."Ah, whatever... I'd moved on, up, out, into and—it now seems a logical, albeit instinctual step—back to The Waste Land.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world | Inside of a leather cup | But all his sexless patients | They're trying to blow it up | Now his nurse, some local loser | She's in charge of the cyanide hole | And she also keeps the cards that read | "Have Mercy on His Soul" | They all play on penny whistles | You can hear them blow | If you lean your head out far enough | From Desolation Row
Before I get into that though...
After reading Victory, I had no desire to reread Heart of Darkness. While the former depicts love's failure to penetrate reason and indifference, the latter hints at the difficulties we face in realizing it. I've dedicated several blog entries to Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now because their narratives said a lot about where I was at the time. Now, as Conrad's just pointed out, we're the sum of our selves, so I'm aware not of having to keep on keeping on as much as I am of being in a different space. Like the Hanged Man, a rereading was not on the cards. Or like Madame Sosostris, so I thought.
Besides, we never—and Joe's students would do well to mark this, escape Joe Conrad or our own hearts of darkness. We'd rather deny our selves than admit that. Just ask Bob Dylan. Reading Victory, I remembered deciding on first hearing it in the late 70s that Dylan's Black Diamond Bay was not influenced by Conrad's Victory; it told the story with the same lyricism T. E. Lawrence ascribes to Conrad:
"I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (do you notice how they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single sentence?) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops. It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think."But Joe's students wouldn't know what to make of this, would they? I mean, they're the sexless young men carbuncular watching old Cronkite reading the 7 'o clock news (let them have John F. Kerry). Who the fuck is Bob Dylan anyway? Like Heyst's, theirs is a deliberate, defensive act of detachment, damning them to an ignorance of themselves and a seat in what even South African sports commentators today refer to as the bleachers.
More (before continuing), I've a bone to pick with Loren, who feels Eliot's The Waste Land to be too cerebral and lacking in feeling. Loren, that poem has fucked with people's heads for decades only because their heads are fucked. I'm no teacher, critic or student. I have no formal education or inclination to delve into allusion. Yet, as a kid, the tempest that is The Waste Land went straight to my heart; not my head. Like Conrad, Eliot balances both the head and heart. Yes, The Waste Land is chock full of complex allusion, but that density stems from young Thomas's peculiar and, again, humour-filled sense of irony (he was 34 and the poem's birth had been a long and difficult one).
I guess, as is the case for most things in life, if you don't get the funny part, it's not worth the effort. Okay, back to the point... Which was? Ah, fuck it...
Across the street they've nailed the curtains | They're getting ready for the feast | The Phantom of the Opera | A perfect image of a priest | They're spoonfeeding Casanova | To get him to feel more assured | Then they'll kill him with self-confidence | After poisoning him with words
For my part, I've been listening to Eliot and Conrad through Bob Dylan for decades and, weird sod that I am, that small irony cracks me up. Why? Because since I've had Internet access, I've seldom found the three linked in any meaningful way. Most don't seem to get it. Yet, if Dylan's Desolation Row, structured much like Black Diamond Bay, is not Dylan's response to The Waste Land, I don't know what is. A while ago, Mark Woods pointed to Greil Marcus's Where Is Desolation Row?, in which Marcus likens the song to James Ensor's nineteenth-century painting, Christ’s Entry into Brussels. It's a good article, pointing to similar visions but, besides the vivid color and vibrancy of Ensor's painting, that's where it ends. You can find Desolation Row, with all the grotesquery, heroes, clowns and villains, as easily in Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I found these artists present at a tremendous site by Rickard A. Parker detailing Eliot's myriad allusions, all of which, for Loren's benefit, do little to add or detract from a careful reading of the poem. (I've just stumbled on the site's map. At about 1,000 pages, it's a bloody resource.)
Eliot preceded Dylan. Conrad preceded Eliot. Ensor preceded Conrad. Bruegel and Bosch preceded the mad Polack by 400 years. And Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet from the thirteenth century from whom all artists filch, preceded them by another two centuries. Yeah… No single person writes a book, poem, or song. Out of place in a relativistic world, art is as much a 'becoming' thing as we are. Let me say this much. If, on listening to Bob Dylan, I heard only Bob Dylan, I would not listen to Bob Dylan. Genius that he is, Dylan writes and sings from a particular time and place, one born out Walt Disney's triumph over taste. Dylan's Desolation Row, as apocalyptic as it is, portrays a secular world dominated by allusions to consumer Cinderellas and Robin Hoods stripped of sex. Dylan is a lyrical hyperlink pointing to the underlying rot portrayed by the likes of Conrad, Eliot and those who came before them, and to whom they allude.
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls | "Get Outa Here If You Don't Know | Casanova is just being punished for going | To Desolation Row"
In Desolation Row, wherein Eliot's unreal city spreads to cover the globe, Dylan defers to The Waste Land by specifically acknowledging both Ezra Pound and Eliot (fighting in the captain's tower), the former being the person to whom the latter dedicates his poem. This holds some relevance for Joe Duemer's little Bradford millionaires. Joe’s attempt to rouse his students from their river's tent might have failed, but Conrad's evocation of the Thames Estuary as a former dark place of the earth was not lost on Eliot, Conrad's words coming back to illuminate The Fire Sermon.
Eliot, with Pound's assistance, beat The Waste Land into shape over time. Initially, the epigraph of the Sybil from the Satyricon of Petronius was taken by a piece from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the passage in which, after Kurtz realizes the horror of a futile existence under the impassive gaze of a scornful crew member (yeah, leave it as it is... it reads fine), is dispatched with a grunt, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead". It's all heart and no head (and so much for the ignorant Black—his was an informed contempt echoing that of a Chinese servant on the lost island of Sourabaya).
However, as Rickard Parker points out in Exploring "The Waste Land", Pound felt the passage lacked the weight needed to convey what was to come. He was right.
Sheez... academics must be sick of this sort of shit... Eliot, in 1922, exposed our present sate of complacent idiocy. The Waste Land, as far as I can tell, and after listening to Eliot's reading, is Gonzo poetry at its best. Eliot's voice carries the truncated sneer of the latter-day poet as he slathers a sordid sexuality across the face of his work. His is the voice of a tired man who longs for the songs of the ancients to startle bored lovers' ears, to invest the walking dead with a sense of that which lies beyond their petty selves, to reignite the divine in the mundane, and return that which is holy to its rightful place. And, quite frankly, he sounds as though he couldn't give a damn whether people listen to him, Bob Dylan, Joseph Conrad or anybody else.
"Jesus fuck, it's about time," screamed Father Christopher, beating me about the head with an empty carton of Camel. "That's the lamest piece of shit I've ever read. Just lay it on the little fuckers. Give it to them straight and, em... hard. Heh..."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"For Christ's sake," raved my Spiritual Advisor, spittle speckling my monitor. "No Love Lost. Tell 'em. There's No Love Lost. It's all here—in the Jesus Bunker. And, of course, at Amazon as soon as I get it together..."
He appeared distracted, dropped the cigarette carton to the floor and headed for the kitchen. "I need some strong coffee. Check the PayPal account." He stopped. "Where's Marek?"
"He stayed behind. At the Vatican. Ratzinger asked him to spend the weekend with him at his place on the Starnbergersee. Marek squealed 'peekaboo' and cancelled his return flight. You'll have to send RB to get him, I'm afraid."
"Forget it. That little fucknozzle has a suicide-bombing mission in Boulder tonight. The New Agers are holding another Tofu Expo. Phil McGraw's in town with Oprah and a horde of emotional cripples in tow. Where're the girls?"
"They'll be here later. Our True Love Seminar and Workshop only begins at eight. Mel Gibson and the Caviezel boy will pitch at about nine. You fix the candles, incense, driftwood and copper?"
"Yeah. The fruited vines, synthetic perfumes, jewels and binoculars too."
"Don't forget the carvéd dolphin."
"Nah, it's ready. The sushi bar delivered."
"Good stuff. We'll be doing the Shakespeherian Rag tonight. Roquentin in the U.S.A."
"You betcha. We'll be looking into the heart of light, the silence." Father Christopher seemed mightily cheered and headed back to the kitchen, singing under his breath, "O O O O, it's so elegant, so intelligent..."
Now at midnight all the agents | And the superhuman crew | Come out and round up everyone | That knows more than they do | Then they bring them to the factory | Where the heart-attack machine | Is strapped across their shoulders | And then the kerosene | Is brought down from the castles | By insurance men who go | Check to see that nobody is escaping | To Desolation Row
I dunno... I'd started this as a note... If the priest wants a detailed exegesis of the works of Conrad, Dylan and Eliot, he can fucking well write it himself. Anyway, all we have left are the rats and sex.
While pondering the unwillingness of Joe Duemer's students to read a story narrated by a fictitious character who'd lived to tell Conrad's and our tale, I thought of rats; Eliot's rats. The connection made had nothing to do with the kids Joe tutors—I'm sure they're all fine people (reading a couple of their trial blogs a while back, I was mightily impressed by some of them). My thoughts of rats arose from my perception of the space in which Joe's students exist as opposed to that in which Eliot lived. Besides the obvious connections between Eliot's rats' alley and Dylan's Desolation Row, Eliot's fondness for rats (but, more especially, the cats that ate them) has always gnawed at me. How many of Joe's students have ever seen a rat, I wondered. How many have lived at all? What happens in America? Do they kill them all at 20?
In 1901, the British Imperial Army brought rats and bubonic plague to Cape Town. It was an ugly time. But it could not have compared with the ugliness of the front during WWI when trench rats swarmed the muddy lines of a four-year battlefield stretching across Europe and the bones of ten million dead. Surviving poison gas, millions of rats (each pair of rats would multiply four hundred times in a year) scavenged the rotting food from tin cans tossed over the top to litter No Man's Land, rummaging through piles numbering thousands of tins, setting up a nightly clatter that could be heard by the men in the mud. Gorged and emboldened by the ceaseless presence of the soldiers, the rats would snatch food, attack the wounded, run across soldiers' faces as they slept and would feed on the corpses of those killed during advances on the other side's lines. Starting at the eyes, the rats would finish off a corpse within a day or two.
One soldier described finding a group of dead bodies while on patrol: "I saw some rats running from under the dead men's greatcoats, enormous rats, fat with human flesh. My heart pounded as we edged towards one of the bodies. His helmet had rolled off. The man displayed a grimacing face, stripped of flesh; the skull bare, the eyes devoured and from the yawning mouth leapt a rat."The war and the Spanish Flu Epidemic (which over two years killed close on 70 million worldwide) ended four years before Eliot published The Waste Land. Rats run through A Game of Chess and The Fire Sermon like an arterial tide, sometimes unmentioned. They and the bones of the eaten dead must have left millions of Europeans with ghastly memories.
Yet, listening to Eliot's reading of the poem, I was struck by how his familiarity with his work lifts our lewd and bawdy lives of smut, lust and bored indifference way above the obfuscatory smoke and self-important analyses of pious academics. Bringing it all back home, Eliot places his art where it and our lives belong—with the reader or listener in the street—on Desolation Row. In a typically British tone, Eliot's voice gives new meaning to many phrases—sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting. His ironic humour, best evinced in his conversation with Stetson, tells me the First World War affected the literary editor's third decade profoundly. His "Come in under this red rock" reminds me of Father Christopher during his rebellious phase when, throwing over the traces and casting aside his frock, he terrorized the young sons of a local Smyrna merchant, Mr. Eugenides. Fetchin' Gretchen and a delegation from Rome backed by RageBoy put a quick end to that little scene, though.
A gallows humour must have carried many through the post-war years, not least Europe's artists.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune | The Titanic sails at dawn | And everybody's shouting | "Which Side Are You On?" | And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot | Fighting in the captain's tower | While calypso singers laugh at them | And fishermen hold flowers | Between the windows of the sea | Where lovely mermaids flow | And nobody has to think too much | About Desolation Row
Rats and sex. In Victory, Conrad uses a sexual retard and a supporting cast of inventive deviants to portray love's futility in the face of our often violent indifference to sex. There is as little love in The Waste Land, and as much sex. Eliot is blunt. Twentieth Century sex, as gratuitous pleasure, pain, duty, obligation, thoughtless off-loading or indifferent fuck, as rutting, rape or perversity, as hetero-, homo- or bisexual, or as style, fetish, or genre, shows us to ourselves in all our nakedness—Nero's Neptunes all. A complex person, Eliot's use of deeper or higher purpose (through his allusions to mythic characters) is ironic, humorous and devastatingly effective.
Wondering about the typist home at tea time, the rats scavenging rotting food from her empty tins; musing on her automatic hand, the broken fingernails on Margate Sands, Albert, Lil and Philomel, the wind under the door and other withered stumps of time, I thought not of the mildly seguing powers sex holds over me, but of the universes and worlds peopled by those to whom sex is not a sacred rite of renewal, a sharing of all that we are, a true and complete moment's surrender. Wendy and I recently watched a programme insert on bondage, wherein a university psychologist justified its increasing popularity as a therapeutic alternative to vanilla sex. Call me what you will, but when I get tired of vanilla sex, they can take me out and shoot me.
I thought of the ginger planted by my kids many weeks ago. It's now beginning to grow. It doesn't know or care, but then it's a plant.
Eliot and the tertiary psychologist left me wondering what hope or dream drives people for whom sex is automatic, unthinking, functional, utilitarian, something—among the other things—they do? What hope or dream is left for those who've been raped or abused; those for whom sex will always be an expression of a power representing not life, but violence or death? I don't know because I grew up to appreciate that moment's surrender as an unconditional expression of me. I guess their dream is a day-to-day reality, the dark and brutal world I see us bringing into being, the world in which anybody not busy being born is a busy dyin'. They stand condemned to hang suspended, nailed to lifetimes playing plastic Ophelias, forever romaticising the death of never-lived pasts. It was ever thus. I just need to be reminded of the fact more often than most.
Listen, Father Christopher's guests are starting to arrive for the workshop. Ah hell, it’s Dr. Phil and Oprah, with their horde of emotional cripples in tow. They’ve lost their way to the Boulder New Age Paint and Ochre Expo in Mudville. They’re entering the perimeter gates of the Jesus Bunker and Marek’s sent the Irregulars to the machine-gun nests. It's getting late—I gotta go.
I dunno... I'm as much into casuistry as the next Jesuit and I dig post-modernism in my own ill-informed way. But shit, you know, we've a lot to answer for. Unlike Loren, whom I admire greatly, I don't see Eliot's poem as negative at all. Why? Is it because I naively believe that, in having retained a sense of my religious and spiritual roots, I can choose to beat a path to redemption; that I at least stand a chance of seeing my own way through this mess? Am I, in my ignorance, perpetuating for myself a myth most intuit we no longer need? Am I, in my certainty of having got something right, reinforcing for myself the very narcissism against which my Spiritual Advisor and Mentor so valiantly wages Eternal War?
In short, have I adopted the fucking missionary position?
Well, yes and no but, really, I don't think so. The world has been a fuck up for as long as we've rolled in its dust. We are always of the idiot generation, the one that tries to impose real-world compromises on the un-real ideals that sustain us. There's nothing wrong in that; we're human. But taking ourselves seriously is a big mistake. Applying the same logic to ourselves as individuals, and expecting life to conform to our perversions—whatever their nature, is out-and-out lunacy. For Douglas Adams, the answer to these problems was 42 and for Brother Marek it's Peekaboo. I have no answers to offer but those that are there and they fall somewhere between the two.
Father Christopher's called for some ambient music. Gibson and Caviezel are rocking to the Black Eyed Peas and Where is the Love?. Dr. Phil is giving them decidedly strange looks and Father Christopher is fixing him a drink.
Allan Moult has just arrived with advance copies of Leatherwood Online. I wander over to chat to him. Coloured lights fill the garden and Sweet Melinda, Saint Annie and Angel (who just got back from the coast) are dancing naked in the Hyacinth Pool. Caviezel and Gibson have joined them. The Black Eyed Peas shake the earth, the stars stream like sparklers across the sky, and the halogen lights of the lookout towers on the perimeter fence sweep the surrounding forests and mountains. We know the Fundamentalists are getting restless, but it doesn't bother us. We're sitting on the deck overlooking the amphitheatre above the Jesus Bunker. I sip Coke; Moult whiskey.
"So you dumb bastard, how's tricks?" I ask him. He gives me a twisted smile, stands up, approaches McGraw and drops a Tasmanian Devil down the front of his trousers. As the pop-psychologist runs screaming onto the lawns leading down to the Jesus Bunker, the devil from under Down Under returns to his seat, and smiles.
"Ding-dong, bell," he muses. "It's his kind that sends the willing likes of Joe Duemer's students off to war."
"So it goes," I respond. "Trust me."
Note: A belated welcome to the sudden surge of visitors from Expecting Rain, a site dedicated to the peregrinations of the wandering troubadour, Bob Dylan. The title of the site is—obviously—taken from the song mentioned here, Desolation Row. Coincidentally, I'm reading a cheerful little book at the moment, Albert Camus' The Fall (among other titles). In 1956, Camus observed, much like Dylan:
"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted."Indeed. We shall see... For now, though, all I have added to this post is a link to an essay on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a book into which I'd dearly like to sink my teeth.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday | (About the time the door knob broke) | When you asked how I was doing | Was that some kind of joke? | All these people that you mention | Yes, I know them, they're quite lame | I had to rearrange their faces | And give them all another name | Right now I can't read too good | Don't send me no more letters no | Not unless you mail them | From Desolation Row
