The Feast of Reason; the Flow of the Spirit;
the Flugelhorn Explained; Jonson’s
Learned Sock; the Ceremony of Empanelment.
You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.
I have been pestered for details of my Ceremony of Empanelment for discussion panels. It is curious that after being vilified by the Council and accused of being ‘ironic’, I am finding at last some interest in my approach to chairpersonship. We can, I predict, confidently look to a reopening of the inquiry and the dropping of the life ban on my chairing of panels. I think my new status can be attributed to my having been a cultural delegate to the Baffin Island Festival of Ice Arts and to the Poor Knight’s Island Word Fest. My Ceremony of Empanelment is only one of the many ceremonies developed by the Cabaret Voltaire and recorded in the register of ceremonies at the Cabaret. It is an attempt to bring dignity and heightened anticipation to the panel discussion. Over the years the panel discussion has degenerated. I can remember when the panel discussion was the most exciting thing in Moruya on a Saturday night. The local Workers’ Educational Association would put on a panel discussion and the whole town would turn out. Farmers’ families on drays, fisherfolk, shepherds in their smocks carrying their crooks, the local crooks carrying their gats, labourers from the fields, the black smith, the town drunk, soldier veterans from the First World War in their Light Horse uniforms and on their old war horses, even the girls from The Homely Touch would close up for a few hours, putting coats over their flimsy and revealing gowns. We would all go to the Mechanics’ Institute to hear the head mistress of the local school, the post mistress, the town wit, the Methodist minister – even the Romans would be there, with their parish priest, Father O’Flaherty, throwing Latin tags around like confetti – President Frank from Rotary, the worshipful grandmaster from the Freemasons, and Matron Crisp from the district hospital. Nowadays, the panel members often haven’t met before they rush in and panel-on. Panel organisers tell them, ‘No need to prepare anything – keep it light.’ Or they are asked to ‘be controversial’. I tell my panel that they cannot decide to ‘be’ anything. Once they enter the solemn journey of Discussion in Public they will ‘become’, they will be ‘taken’, according to what used to be known as the flow of discussion. What a beautiful expression! Let us stop. Dwell on that expression for just a moment. The flow. Think also of the ice floe (ice is on my mind since my six months in Baffin Island wrestling walruses and flenching seals in an effort to clear my name). Think of gliding, of undulation, of the force of gushing; think of copious supply; think of the flow chart. Remember the expression ‘flow of souls’, that genial conversation which recalls for us the Feast of Reason. Feast of Reason! When was the last time anyone talked of the Feast of Reason? During the wretched inquiry not once did any of those cultured young arts administrators in their Calvin Klein jeans use the expressions ‘Feast of Reason’ or ‘Flow of Souls’. ‘There St John mingles with my friendly Bowl, The Feast of Reason, and the Flow of Souls.’ Do I recall that correctly? St John was of course, Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, a better orator, it is said, than a writer, and a dear friend of Pope. ‘My friendly Bowl’ refers to the glass of wine. My Ceremony of Empanelment was drawn from the Feast of Reason which was inaugurated during the French revolution and which is still celebrated in Moruya and other country towns. At the Feast of Reason during the revolution, religion was dethroned and a young woman was enthroned and worshipped as embodying Reason. The French borrowed Notre Dame from the Catholics for the show. That is why I had the thirteen-year-old girl standing on a pedestal behind the panel at last year’s festival. Got it now, dummies? She was dressed, you’ll remember, in a red Phrygian cap – the cap of liberty, identical to that which I wear with my chairing cloak. A white dress, a blue mantle and a tricolour ribbon, her head was filleted with oak-leaves, and in her hand she carried the pike of Jupiter-Peupel. The People as God. The climax of the feast was a panel discussion. The children who came in from right and left at my panel discussion last year were carrying the flaming torches of truth. Those kids had run all the way back to the festival hall after delivering a statement of account to the community on behalf of the arts. Even though hot wax from the torches of truth ran down the smooth skin of their pubescent arms not one cried or complained. Nor when I helped peel the wax from the light blonde hairs of their arms. Some had blistered feet from running the fifteen kilometres barefoot on hot asphalt. And there was the unfortunate situation when the swing bridge opened to allow a container ship through. How could I be expected to calculate everything? I asked for a couple of aides but the Council ignored my request and the responsibility for the consequences must rest with them. I was the one who bathed the children’s feet. I’d like that recorded. Why do I bother? For me the panel discussion is a continuation of the Feast of Reason and the symposia of Socrates. It is a hallowed activity. These days the panellists dash in, give their tired opinion, quote bits from their latest book, and out they dash to ‘do a TV chat show’ or whatever. Now do people understand why I tried to stop Nuuk from dashing off ‘to do a TV show’? As it turns out he wasn’t dashing off ‘to do a TV show’ but the point is, at that moment I was led to believe that was what he was doing. I thought he was leaving before discussion. I said that I could not release him before discussion – that was not permissible within the customs of the panel discussion. If one joins the flow of discussion one has to go the full journey through the isles of dispute to the shores of synthesis. As Blackstone said, ‘Every man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public but he must take the consequences of his temerity.’ I am aware that Bentham attacked Blackstone’s idea that the law and the constitution were a single organic structure. To continue, I did interdict Nuuk when he tried to dash off, in the words of the young arts administrator, ‘to do a TV show’. Hence the disintegration of the sacred five-hundred-year-old tribal fur coat. But let’s not go over the old ground. When we talk of the Flow of Souls we remember perhaps the flow meaning menstruation, fertility, the wonderful unpredictable chain of life which conception and birth set in motion. So with the flow of discussion. Discussion isn’t just ‘talk’, nor is it ‘chat’, discussion isn’t the delivery of set pieces. Tears come to my eyes when I hear a person ‘conceding’ a point. What a civilised and elegant act – how long it took our race to arrive at a cultural spirit which permits us to ‘concede’ a point without rancour! What a culture it is that allows us to be wrong without loss of face. At my panel discussion at the festival last year I wanted to bring alive an awareness of these noble historical antecedents at a time when we are in danger of losing everything. I despair when I see how slack it all is. My Ceremony of Empanelment does involve using a flugelhorn. Why did the members of the wretched inquiry think this was particularly comic? Why did they break into giggling whenever I tried to explain the role of the flugelhorn? Whenever I mentioned the word flugelhorn they would break into giggling behind their mirror sun glasses. No one laughs if the word guitar is mentioned so why laugh at flugelhorn? In the Ceremony of Empanelment I announce the start of proceedings by playing Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance on the flugelhorn, which, of course, was intended to bring to the mind of the audience and the panel (who at this point should be upstanding) the words of Othello: ‘Farewell, the tranquil mind; farewell content … Pride, pomp and circum stance of glorious war!’ The panel discussion, for both the audience and the panel, is the end of the tranquil mind, because a discussion is a perilous engagement, likened by Othello to glorious war. It is a glorious engagement of minds. Or should be. Obviously most audiences would find their minds going to Milton’s lines: ‘And pomp, and feast, and revelry,/With mask, and antique pageantry,/Such sights as youthful poets dream … /Then to the well-trod stage anon,/If Jonson’s learned sock be on.’ Th
e ‘sock’ refers to the light shoe worn by comic actors in ancient Greece and so ‘sock and buskin’ meaning the theatrical profession as a whole. We recall ‘sock it to me’, a famous theatrical expression. Now does everyone see why it is I played Elgar on the flugelhorn? My point is this: when you are present at a panel discussion you are witnessing the enactment of the progress of Western civilisation. When we arrived at a time when people were able to sit together with divergent points of view, under the guidance of a mutually acceptable chairperson, and talk about their differences in public – why, that’s the grandest activity of all, the grandest sight in the history of the human race! This seemingly commonplace activity made parliament possible, the law became possible, the universities were born. And the inquiry could not understand why I wept when I talked about what the panel discussion meant to me. As I dried my eyes I saw the young arts administrators exchanging glances and twirling a finger at their ears. Writing yellow stick-on notes. Oh yes, I saw them. All I wanted to do was to bring this home to everyone in a celebratory way – after all, ‘celebration’ means a communal remembering. I wanted to also bring together a universe of association to show how all books are linked in reference to each other, how all written works are linked to the oral tradition, how all conversations are endlessly connected back to the first uttered word of our race. It was said in the findings of the inquiry on page 5,699 that ‘maybe I attempted too much’. This led me to despair. To be accused of ‘attempting too much’ – and we wonder why we have a self-credibility problem! It is to the credit of the inquiry, though, that they permitted me to bring a delegation of the townsfolk of Moruya to appear at the inquiry as witnesses to the special place of the Feast of Reason and the flow of spirit in the life of this nation, at least among the simple people, ordinary working folk. The inquiry did give an afternoon to listen to the shepherd, some of the fisherfolk, the blacksmith. The delegation has asked me to convey to the Council their appreciation of the cut lunch and fruit cup which was prepared for them by the staff. They ate it on the lawn while the inquiry members went off to wine and dine at Tony’s. Maybe the fruit cup had a little too much water in it but fruit cup is hard to get right when mixing large quantities. I suppose what I am trying to say is that it has to do with heritage. If you grew up in a home filled with works of art you will have an approach to the acquiring of a new work of art, different from that of a person who is beginning a collection. I grew up in a town where the Feast of Reason was part of life, where panel discussions were important. It is for that reason I wish to donate my mind to the national museum. Not because it is a great mind but because it contains within it rich tribal rhythms and practices which we may lose. By giving me back my panel at next year’s festival the Council will be allowing me to go on with my enactments of what is stored in the very marrow of my soul. That’s the point I’m trying to make.
The Deflowering in Detail but why the Fuss?;
the Wounded Muses and R.M. Williams, Bushman;
Poetical Disputes among the Younger Bush Poets;
Bricolage and Learned Discussion.
You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.
It seems to me that the inquiry gave an inordinate amount of time to the question of the deflowering of the thirteen -year-old at the re-enactment of the Feast of Reason, during my panel session at last year’s festival. I have the report before me this moment – of the 6,073 pages almost 3,000 are devoted to this so-called ‘incident of grave concern’. Tsh. Why the fuss? Where is the harm in one thirteen-year-old deflowering another thirteen-year-old in public? I am not blind to the attitudes found in the gutter press but, ye gods, this was an arts festival! These are fin-de-siècle times! I would like to go over the matter in some detail, but before I do, the binding and typography of the five-volume report leaves much to be desired. William Morris made us aware of the architectural possibilities of the book and printing: ‘The only work of art which surpasses a complete Medieval book is a complete Medieval building.’ Everything matters. The type face, the spacing of the letters, the design of the pairs of pages in an open book. How does the thing look when it lies open? Did anyone ask themselves this when crafting this report? I doubt it. Erasmus taught us that the margin should be twice as wide at the top of the page as on the inside, twice as wide at the outside of the page as at the top, twice as wide as the side of the page at the bottom. The inquiry’s report ignores these golden rules. Hence and formally, I typographically reject this report. I have already objected to the report because no one at the inquiry seemed to understand the motion that The Question Be Not Now Put. I thought this seriously damaged the inquiry’s credibility. Surely it would not have bankrupted the Council to have bound it in, say, white parchment? And the wire staples! The wire staple is to a printer what a wire coat hanger is to a fine tailor. It causes me pain to handle this report, to see my own spoken words encased in it. With Boethius, ‘I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded muses tell me what I must write.’ I still argue that it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that book production moved from scriptoria to the printers’ workshops. True, there was the practice of ‘putting-out’ of manuscript copying from the monasteries to the stationers in the twelfth century when laymen began to do the work that monks had done. The Carthusian monks thought that by increasing production they were spreading the word of God faster. Remember that they saw printing and copying as ‘preaching with their hands’. Likewise, the panel discussion in the other greater tradition of rationalism is ‘conversation as drama’. We all know that the sexual act can be a way of ‘explaining with the body’, as fist-fighting is a way of ‘arguing with the body’. Now do you get the point? My point all along has been that there is content in the execution. So many of our aesthetic styles, and in my own humble way the aesthetic of the panel discussion, is, quite correctly, a restless writhing away from the excessive order of print. The dramatised conversation of the panel discussion is so much more supple than the printed word. Yes, I was unable to explain to the inquiry why the printers in the sixteenth century were careless with manuscripts and incunabula and didn’t value them the way we do. We at the Cabaret Voltaire, too, are worried by the mania for preservation of the physical past which has gripped the world. The Cabaret Voltaire has told UNESCO that by the year 2010 more than twenty-five per cent of urban space will be taken up by ‘preserved past’ and that by the year 2075 there could be a serious shortage of urban space for ‘the present’ let alone the future. No, nor could I explain why the librarians at Oxford in the seventeenth century sold off Shakespeare’s first folio as superfluous after the third had turned up. Maybe the presence of the printing press diminished the value of the manuscript in the eyes of those times. Frankly, I considered these questions inadmissible. I could see where they were leading. I am not a scholar. I am a humble philosopher-muleteer member of the Cabaret Voltaire. Anything I know about these matters I learned from working with old printers when I was a twelve-year-old printer’s devil on the magazines Egotist, Freewomans Journal and the Little Review. I did argue, and argue well, that the printing press was a more important invention that the stirrup or the grist mill – although I suspected that this question was put to me as something of a joke by the clever young arts administrators who were sitting in judgement on me there at the inquiry. How we lose our virginity is rarely a matter of careful planning except in the best regulated families. Hence the deflowering. Another point: a person born in 1453 – the year of the fall of Constantinople – could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which more than eight million books had been printed, more than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in 330 AD. I did make this point at the inquiry but no one did much with it. There is no hard evidence either that the
printed book was considered fashionably inferior to the manuscript and scorned. Florentine bibliophiles were sending to Rome for printed books as early as 1470. So there. I see from the report that this argument at the inquiry went on for over three days. More important is to establish the point when printers stopped trying to mimic the appearance of the manuscript and had confidence in the aesthetic of print. There is evidence that scribes began to copy the look of the printed book, which confuses the division between the age of the script and the age of printing. I objected strenuously to the idea raised by one of the inquiry that reading was historically a practice of sedentary occupations and that those who like to ride and to hunt would not have been readers. The whole tradition of the reader–hunter has been suppressed by the conservationists. I see in the transcript that I am also accused of bricolage. But in refutation, I argued that the art of making it up as you went was very important in the oral tradition. This is not ‘improvisation’ or ‘verbal alchemy’, as one person said. I speak in hexameters at times because I find that these approximate my thought forms. I cannot help it if some times my answers did not ‘show the degree of internal organisation we commonly associate with thought’. Like any theorist, my intention is to reduce existential horror by relating discrete pieces of information so that they no longer exist in tension. This was the basis of my ‘defence’ – that I should even need to use the word defence in respect to the organisation of a simple panel discussion is indeed a ‘melancholy measure’. Wounded muses told me what to say. Race Memory Theatre is perhaps what my panel discussions are about (how ever, I am not oblivious to the arguments at UNESCO about how much should be remembered culturally and how much forgotten – I accept that we need ratios strictly enforced within each culture and the Cabaret Voltaire welcomes the move in that direction). Testimony was brought before the inquiry about the argument which is raging among poets about whether two-thirds of Australia and the other sparsely uninhabited nations should be ‘pre served for poetry’ rather than mineral exploration. I was asked what the Cabaret Voltaire felt about this. I don’t know if it was a trick question planted by the Council psychologist but as an old bushman I can tell them that the ‘three-quarters of Australia’ they talk of as ‘the outback’ is no longer there. It does not exist. If the aim of poetry is to describe accurately that which does not exist, as Oscar Wilde tells us, then it is right that poets should write about the outback. I saw the outback before it disappeared. I worked as a muleteer with the great Australian bushman R.M. Williams. Not much of that part of my life is known. I was glad that the inquiry took it into consideration. Many a long night R.M. and I spent around the campfire discussing the secrets of the pyramids. Greek scholarship alone could not unlock the secrets of the pyramids. We do not believe that the deciphering of the Rosetta stone has dispelled all mysteries. Granted, also, that there is much to be learned about ourselves by the way each culture has ‘read’ Egyptian picture-writing at different times. I personally still think that much writing, while appearing to be straightforward prose (news reports, for example) carries disguised meanings and messages. I don’t mean only masonic messages. On the other hand, and I want to make this clear, R.M. and I do not believe that Egyptian picture-writing carries ageless wisdom which would continue to exist if language disappeared. Unfortunately we need words to understand the picture-language. There’s no way around it. I was there with R.M. the night the outback disappeared. R.M. knocked out his pipe on his boot and I threw the tea leaves from the Cecil and Co. billy on to the campfire, and when we looked up, the outback had gone. There is not much to be said about it. It just went. Twas no more. As for young poets, when was the last time they had mule flesh between their thighs? To ride, to hunt, to speak the truth.
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