Now the tusked head is on a hook. They are lying upon a couch. The window is the mirror that I block out.
The squatting strangers heat the ganja: leading us into a further nightmare.
I felt a cold breath at my ear, and a voice whose inflections were most familiar, although I could not identify its source, said, ‘This wretch, who sold his legs for drink, has stolen your head and replaced it, not with an ass’s head, but with an elephant’s head.’
Utterly bewildered, I went directly to the mirror. I might have been mistaken for a Hindu or a Javanese idol: my brow had risen, my nose, grown to a trunk, drooped to my chest, my ears grazed my shoulders, and to make matters worse, I was indigo, like Shiva, the blue god.
The promise of the Maitreya is here, the coming ancestor, the Buddha of the New Age, the golden one, the Jesus.
On the flame of that promise, they turn and rise. Her shirt is tied around his waist. The shadows of her tassels are skulls. The blessing and the curse. One humped shape shuddering the wall, fading it to glass, letting in the trace of heavenly orbits. He sacrifices himself, leaves himself: the man who emerges from that room is a different man, with larval energies to unleash, furious, but more vulnerable.
The old woman on the bed appears to be eating her way into the other, a witch – Merrick shrinking back – black mouth towards the head of the unborn child. The apprehension and creation of his own deformity; he pushes back into the chair. Treves has shed his coat, sleeves rolled, no water, pulls the old woman by the shoulder and will lift his creature up into her place.
The coachman leading her out into the courtyard. Treves blocking the window, facing the room. The coachman lifting and banging the woman against the wall, repeatedly driving against her; her head almost broken from her neck, shaken loose, a dried-up orange in a torn stocking. Tongue lolling and dribbling. The waters. Dead eyes. Finishing with her, she falls into the doorway of the house: returning to the carriage, seeing to, petting the restless horse.
The room.
Holding Merrick above the body of the girl, so that he stares directly into her face. And sees what Treves cannot see. Whatever else is happening, he is insensible to all motions and urgencies; whatever else is merely automatic, electricity jolted through dead meat. Staring deep into what the surgeon cannot see: whatever is behind him, supporting his weight, supporting him wholly, back to the window, into the tumorous mat of hair and flesh.
And they are all, just then, entirely one being.
BOOK THREE
JK
21
To: Iain Sinclair
Brightlingsea, Essex
July 1979
Dear Iain,
With your book I assume we’re dealing with serious matters and there aren’t that many books out which are fundamentally serious in that way, certainly back down into the deeper sources instead of paying out sycophantic glances to our small audiences in the hope of finding mutual regards. No: you have committed your full beliefs in what you’ve written and you’ve meant it all. It’s that business of actually meaning what’s said that I look for.
And first, we find of course a Blakeian stance towards good and evil: very much a Marriage but not of the Christian-like entities: more the creativities of the new sciences giving birth to phantoms more fit for our times. There is an easy (and wrong) attack on your position at this stage of discussion: it is that you have involved yourself with a sort of demonology and that doing so was an emotional error akin to that, say, of becoming involved with sex magic (and I am very hostile to all magical activities involving power-operations of bad or twisted feeling). I say that such an attack would be wrong, though I do acknowledge that to let one’s imagination flow out towards the Bradys or the Krays of the world carries with it always an implication of at least some prurience (and prurience is a fault). I remember asking you about this in London once, what you were thinking of, yielding creativity into bad vortices. And your reply I haven’t forgotten: ‘I don’t really know: I just feel I have to trust the process.’ Your reply of trusting the process almost entirely satisfied me, as indeed it should, and I only added in my own mind the rider that it’s the more difficult to trust the process in poetic-heartedness when the role of prurience is there. I think of some of Baudelaire’s more dubious moments lifted with such high art into the condition of creative health (Une Charogne is one of my touchstones here).
Well, to call your book a dabbling with demons would be to relegate the poetic process to a nothing: I’m only interested in this central question: can the poetry effect the resolution of good and evil into the coincidence of contraries?
We live a news story and enter its present state effected by event and mood: a phantasmic world does arise, is appropriate and exact, is even phenomenal for us, rather as a ghost would be. Here, there’s a crucial difference between bad poets and good. Any fool can know about these things by reading about them; any fool can construct surrealistic or fantastic visions and, having worked them out, can even see them. But the good poet, working in such fields of knowing, doesn’t necessarily ‘want’ to see what he sees; he just sees it, impelled necessarily upon him by circumstance and mood and by his trust in those, his willingness to speak whether gripped by horrors or by beatitudes or by some kind of shining common-sense. I wish I knew what it was exactly that tells us the difference between the man or woman impelled by such necessities to speech and the second-rater impelled by more wary ambitions. But the language has an urgency and somewhat a dread, as has yours here; and there’s no mistaking it.
A preliminary positive for me, therefore: I’m not at all sure there wasn’t something prurient, wilful, not to say undesirable about certain choices you made before and probably during the writing (why become involved with these matters before the poetry began working?); but, once engaged, you evidently saw many things in the phantasmic world, or at least your language came into the light from sources close-bound in that darkness. There is, simply, no mistaking it, as I say.
That is, a phantasm world, with its pairings and opposites, did come ‘to life’ and I mean that well-nigh literally: so we have to live with it.
Let’s take the Bradys, though. They have always exemplified for me what I often noted during my own journalism: what appears in headlines as ‘evil’ is also usually banal and depressing.
Your imaginative/poetic vision has called up, summoned, these phantasms, arising from these crimes, but cast them into an astral world where they have another sort of existence. Eliphas Levi was fond of the thought that great evil demands as grand a soul as does great good. I disagree. On the visionary level it is perhaps true because the quality of the vision elevates what it deals with. At certain points of the ‘dialectic’ it is perhaps also true: fear can call for a ‘grand soul’ to overcome it. Also, seen in a vision of a coincidence of contraries, as though succeeding a war in the heavens, it may again seem true. Yet, still I disagree: my own experience of good and evil is that the former ennobles and the latter diminishes the perpetrator in stature. And I put it to myself that the reason is, in a sense, dialectical: in their ‘fall’ from the visionary ontology into the human action it is the nature of evil to limit and depress and disgust – to be small-minded and furious – and it is the nature of good, in its fall, to enlarge and make sunny and bring wider acceptance. Cosmologically, it’s the nature of ‘evil’ (now we have to quote it) to be small and furious like an atom-power release, and of good to expand ‘in love’ as the neo-Platonists used to say. We cannot deny the universality of dark/light: our poetics must have that ontology. But we have no referent for value unless our ontology works towards the good – takes that as direction. (And I haven’t said yours doesn’t, mark you.)
We do need to explore the cosmology on its dark side, to make our vision unflinching and accurate; so I have no patience with those who, in our own time, would make poetry a bland thing, apparently limited to the pretence of good feeling. But we also need to see that the allure of the cruel is a fa
lse allure: that it only holds as grand when seen in its transcendental form (for in transcendence, in their ‘eternal’ phantasm all things look grand, good and evil, though our joy and fear tell us so immediately the difference). The more evil becomes precise, personalised and located, however, the more it belittles itself: Brady and Hindley listening to those appalling tape recordings (such a small bestiality); Gilles de Rais fondling children (such a stupid cruelty); a murder case I covered once where a pathetic accused deposed that he stepped into a chamberpot beneath the bed on his way to strangle his mistress; the affinity of the Belsen pictures with the rubbish dump; the cruel schoolboy in Amin or in the Krays; the fact that the schizoid is, in a sense, a smaller psyche. All this compared with the grandeur of any small act of kindness in a concentration camp. It is, of course, what Iris Murdoch calls ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, and I believe that the phenomenology, so to speak, of good and evil, in their declension from angel/demon transcendent phantasms, separates into the much-in-little and little-in-much. Great evil is a grand conception by our common terms: that is its allure.
In act, it is the implosion into nothing whereas good is the simultaneous fructification of nothing. They are utterly interdependent dynamically and yet good is the sovereign just as ‘all we have’ is sovereign over ‘all that we shall not have’. Unless there is the gradient of value – unless the very coincidence of contraries in the Blakeian sense has itself this gradient, as I think Blake saw – I can explain neither our actions nor our words.
For me, there’s another consequence. Out of transcendence what we first create is the phantasm of self, so that we may at all see. I’m hostile to all literatures which, in Foucault-like confidence, think there’s a standing from which the self-phantasm can disappear. I can’t think of such a standing outside mental illness, and though it’s possible to pretend (by various tricks) a literature which transcends the question I cannot think it would be curative. That is, the self phantasm must be fully awakened into more universal dynamic but the law is that in all higher awareness the lower forms of awareness persist: they are simultaneously present with the higher awareness. That is why I was so pleased to see in your text this recognition that the self and its phantasmic forms and ghosts must be recognised before the self-as-self-healing or self-‘disappearing’ can enter the simultaneity of true knowing.
I may have seemed to be writing off the point, but your own kindly dedication to me – ‘fold the bridge, the cave appears in the middle’ – convinces me that I’m very near the point: that your faith remains in the process as curative.
I shall say, therefore, that grand evil is macro-petty because, when we have transcendental visions of it, it scares us stiff into smallness and protection of the self. It is also petty, because, seeing the coincidence of good and evil in the true dynamic, it rejects the coincidence (which is, I think, joyful) and chooses instead the obviously worse of the alternatives. Dante is the man who, above all, saw that; Milton wanted to but did not see it. We cannot fail to choose because, short of being gods, we must otherwise vegetate. Only by choosing the good, because it is expansive, can we begin to accept the dynamic in its duality and yet make a choice. It more truly reflects life process to see that it is creative than that it’s destructive at least while time’s arrow points in the direction it does and our universe expands: for if evil were sovereign nothing would exist.
Finally, though, I question a sort of sucking-in towards evil in the text: so important to us is that question: how firmly can we build the wall? The truth of such transcendent knowings seems to come into the consciousness of very few (but it is unconsciously known by the many): with all conscious knowing comes an extra charge of responsibility. By the gods! we need so hard to trust the process and not ourselves.
Best,
Doug
Here comes the fork, and it is a simple thing to understand – that there can be no mixing of book-buying with the true work. You can believe it but not, necessarily, be able to live by it. So that if I am drawn again to Thorpe-le-Soken, I will stop at the Keep Bookshop, Colchester.
The place has many disadvantages, most of them behind the counter, but still remains a favourite. It’s on a hill, the town begins here; it’s old, leaking, has odd corners – but principally it has more back rooms, locked drawers, secrets than it has shelf space. It does the business. The books will come: but you may not be able to dig them out.
I searched fast, ineffective as a dealer, flinching from the technical exercise of finding items I could sell; books that were, in essence, already sold and just waiting to be gathered and delivered. There are no intrinsic values: absolutely anything becomes valuable if there is a customer for it. That’s all you’ve got to learn: custodial purchases.
In an upstairs chamber, where psychology shades into perversion, I found a copy, in well-tanned blue cloth, of James Hinton, A Sketch by Mrs Havelock Ellis; with preface by Havelock Ellis, photogravure frontispiece, seven illustrations; First Edition, 1918. It was described on the flyleaf as ‘Scarce’, which justified the asking price of £4. That was too high for me, I put it back. Who else had ever heard of Hinton? Most people thought he was his own son. I simply couldn’t imagine what had lifted it out of the £2 class – not, then, making the connection with that no-man’s land where doubtful philosophical effusions meet with vegetarianism, where theology edges nervously into sadism: an area that seemed to include Edward Carpenter and Nietzsche.
I’d made the ‘accidental’ discovery of Hinton in the Whitechapel Library one day when the gallery was closed and it was raining. He’d keep.
I turned from the shelf to discover Douglas Oliver, the poet, on his knees, a long black coat, not praying but picking through the Latins. He considers a negotiation for nine or ten volumes, but settles for a drink in the Tudor Room of the Marquis of Granby. A place that needs an intercity train to be re-routed through it.
Of course, I couldn’t, or least I didn’t, justify my failure to reply to his long and generous letter. I felt that the letter was self-sufficient, its time would come: there was nothing at all I could add to it. If I had in some way provoked the letter – that was enough. I absolutely would not ‘defend’ any position he found that I had occupied. Any kind of ‘literary’ exchange would be doomed before it began. My correspondence had formalised to exchanges of insults on the backs of bills. The nerve-ends that Doug’s letter touched are still twitching, and not to be exposed.
This was not the guilt of pursuing a mindless and deranged career, of not opening the writing out, wholly, to the light, shaping it with a precision of trust: what then?
The coincidence of contraries. The meshing and damaging contact of that which is not quite the same. The third mind was not present at this meeting. His direction was not to be made clear to me. Nor mine to him.
He was also a disenfranchised Scotsman.
I returned to the bookshop. Bought the Hinton. Walked away up the hill, sun on the stones: old mustard. Day of leaf and bud. I abandoned the other shops and cut directly down into the park beneath the castle.
A ring of children, with watery unlined faces, ran about on the grass, staggering and tumbling. Their keeper was only partly attending to them, listening instead to a history of the walls. The children circled, bumping into each other, their arms out.
One of the girls came over to me, held out her hand, hopeful that I would take her to the swings. There is no fear in these children. They have no shadow of the future to chill their milky eyes. They are without harm.
22
The letter could go no further, ‘Dear Hardie’; his skull resting on his hand like a globe of solid glass. Different, unable to make a start: Lees’ breath crawled onto the window. He twitched in his clothes. He scratched at his head. He swept aside the blank sheet of paper, took up a book, a paperknife; hacking at the uncut pages.
A line broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block building thrust forward its gable onto the stree
t. Audible houses, tenements, vague and sheeted; prolonged and sordid negligence. He was looking at the back of the world. Life was removed.
The awful rushing sensation was on him, getting ahead of event, knowing; a dull inevitability. His pride breathes it, lets go, takes it up. Allows the moist heat to form pictures. A woman, churn-shaped; a man, following. The detail floats in from borrowed dreams.
He wipes the glass with the back of his sleeve. Breathes. The picture forms once more.
Suit of scotch tweed, light overcoat, gladstone bag. Crossing towards the lights of a Restaurant. There is a clock on the side of the Blackmail House. A time to be noted. Flare of naphtha. Men drinking.
The howl of a dog. Through the passageway and into the courtyard. He is hard by the door. Knife drawn, a backhanded slash.
It is my duty. The ghost of some old sin, some concealed disgrace: punishment coming. They are led to the doors of the house. The servants all asleep. No windows. Shriek: murder!
So the report is made. What has not been seen is made rational. A time is given to the face of the clock. Lees speaks his fear to authority. The murder is described, taken down, put on file.
The murder occurs and follows his scenario. Is his the only prophecy? There are hundreds; in blood and ink, not codding dear old Boss; typed, pencilled, slated, dribbled over, soaked in semen. Mr Lusk. Everything is foretold. What follows is a pale reflection.
‘That is the man who cut off her ears!’ Robert Lees: pointing from the upper deck of an omnibus at Shepherd’s Bush. His wife smiling. ‘That is the Ripper, the Harlot Killer.’ He is wearing tweeds that belong in a story. He is carrying a light overcoat.
It should be night. It should be another place. There is no blood. Follow the man through the mists. An imposing mansion. There seemed to be some magnetic wave connecting an impalpable sense he possessed with the fugitive. Buckled to the red stuff, t’otherest governor.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 14
