[My apologies for further self-evisceration. Think of it as a coda to its immediate predecessor.]
‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!’
Mario Savio speech on The Sproul Hall Steps, Berkeley 2 December 1964
I have spent over 75 years (call it the near-entirety of my life) in thrall to words. Words that were read to me, words that, first falteringly, soon greedily and still insatiably, I read myself, and in time that I set down solo, again at first somewhat less than focused (‘rebel’ magazines at school, the ‘underground press’ of the Sixties, hackery of all sorts including a brief sojourn on the ‘top shelf’, dictionaries of quotations, oral histories including one of ‘Sex since the Sixties’ hur hur hur…) and finally (can that which starts at barely 30 be ‘finally’?) the once and future work which for decades now has drawn no discernible border between itself and the life of he who daily does it.
Words are my endorphins1. However low, however despairing, once working I feel their soothing flow and float within. Work? Breathing, rather. However much in these dark days I have come to rejoice (I know, quite selfishly) that whatever else develops beneath the malign aegis of the vilest human filth the world has to offer, I shall soon be no more, gone instead to meet my maker, become a stiff and display all others of the twenty-one images with which the Pythons enshrouded their parrot2, and until that happy release, I have consolation amidst my imperishably seditious clusters of vowels and consonants.
Not just words, nor even books but places they dwell. I need only look around the shelves that have been a constant for so long, starting with that tiny one, weighed only by my minuscule ‘library’ of pre-school favourites, that tumbled one night from my father’s ill-screwed brackets and (let’s have a bit of symbolism) garlanded my infant brows.3 There are two rooms of books now, (yet to be sorted, the plan for that, nurtured when I had packed them up, being…up-ended by the first encounter with reality4) and what slang tells me is a fuck-ton of horizontals upon which they rest.5 They have also been affixed by professionals. This is profoundly depressing since I have put up many a shelf as time has passed, but the only screws I can deal with now are the eight within my back (needle-borne morphine to mute the aftermath of scalpel and drill, fun, but not enough to volunteer again for two back ops in a fortnight) and it would seem - snobbery of some sort? - that they will not countenance my involving myself with their lowly, if equally supportive cousins.
OK, I get it: I love words. But this is not a love story. Or not one with a happy ending. Are there really any such beyond fictions in which the ‘ending’ is in fact a beginning and spelt ‘happily ever after’? We are living in those ‘interesting’ times that underpin a gloomy injunction, increasingly horror-struck participants in a live-action version of Yeats’ too-often quoted poem ‘The Second Coming’ (you know the one: unhearing falcons and unheld centres, conviction-free best, passionately intense worst, beasts en route to Bethlehem). Books are burned once more. The cry, on such media that have yet to fall to billionaire techbros (naïve old fool asks: do they ever wonder whether their unbounded, unboundable wealth might do something other than sponsor so much gloating, masturbatory cruelty?)6 is resist, fight back, struggle! (I fear these are not terms which trouble GDoS, cynicism’s cynosure.)
At university I read history. Not assiduously - I had absorbed Brideshead too early and wanted life to stage a modern-dress revival - but one thing was clear: power does not volunteer its own abdication. Hitler and Mussolini were the obvious, still recent candidates, while Stalin too may well have been helped to leave, and the deeper past threw up its cast of involuntary resignees. Now we have the Felon and his enablers and the rule remains: armed with power, surrounded by dependent sycophancy, they don’t fuck off unless they’re pushed. (The Felon is already spluttering darkly, Amendment XXII of the Constitution - two presidencies only per individual - notwithstanding, about his being ‘unsure’ of whether he can play big boss for a third act). And for ‘pushed’ read assassinated, executed with or without due process, torn to shreds by horses…take your pick. But my beloved words played a minor role. They may have provided inspiration, set light to movements that might in time and turn kindle the fire that finally saw off the baddie, but the variations on Big Brother or Sister were unconvinced. Half the gig, after all, is absorbing one’s own misinformation first. In ‘true belief’ the accent is always on word two. Truth, as we have come to know as never before, is infinitely malleable. Quite literally now, what you make it. The jester may once have whispered reality into the processing ruler’s ear, but no-one has said to what, if any extent such revelations were acted upon.
Attention spans are not what they were. Reading and listening demand too great a level of concentration, let alone analysis. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to that knuckle-draggers’ prideful auto-circumcision: TL:DR. An aptly four-letter representation of what the writer Deborah Eisenberg noted in a recent NY Review of Books: ‘The intensifying enthusiasm for philistinism, anti-intellectualism, ignorance, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, vengefulness, antisemitism, misogyny, violence, and outright triumphal sadism that is casting its chilling shadow over our days.’ And I, less elegantly, term ‘the morons’ charter.’7 It is they who provide the ‘people’s choice’ and hand over thought to disinformation and propaganda. They have their quockerwodger Felon and his live-in handler the ersatz Fuhrer, which pairing of madness and megalomania is presumably what they want and without doubt what they deserve. But the rest of us do not tick those boxes. The shit they stir, unfortunately, still splashes.8
As of 20 January Mario Savio’s ‘machine’ is out of control. Maybe, and thus its minders wish us to believe, beyond it. ‘Move fast and break things,’ another nihilistic slogan. But perhaps it is time for some of us to return like for like.
I’m no Mario Savio. Too cowardly, too enwrapped in my work and its comfort (ironical given its prevailing obsessions), a human colonoscopy, lost in the depths of my own arse. The only machine I for which I qualify offers MRI scans and I can’t even do those because (was it thirty years back?) my only attempt unleashed a tsunami of claustrophobia and uncontrollable, tearful terror that means I cannot, ever again, allow myself to be fed into that horrific tube. No surprises that I lack the sangfroid (better perhaps than ‘cold blood’) to do what, surely, has to be done.
Yet.
This is tempting fate (naming, we are adjured, summons), but I wonder, sometimes, if a terminal illness might not be in order. (I know that one should be thinking of partner, sons and grandchild and other such self-denying virtuosity, but I am as narcissistic as an entire Johnson family)9. Incurable but not yet bringing one to bed or hospice. Simply inevitable. Not so reduced either that the belt and its potent ball bearings would slip from one’s finally lissom waist. Perhaps I imbibed too much Buchan or Sapper at an impressionable age. Not to mention those hit-man fantasies, all empty room, sniper rifle, bottle of vodka and guttering off-stage neon. Just as Judaism ensured which side one might take in the last great effloresence of the right, a solid dose of something terminal would obviate any procrastination this time around.
Stage-door johnnying post Question Time. ‘I’m your greatest fan, Mr Facho. May I take a selfie at your side…’ Flash! Bang! Wallop! What a picture!
Not the felon, perhaps, nor the megalomaniac, but it’s a start. Décourager les autres?
And after that? Let us hope that Francis Grose, not to mention Thomas Harman, Robert Greene, Pierce Egan, John Hotten, John Farmer, old Eric Partridge and all could find a seat for me in their celestial tavern. My shout, gentlemen. Bumpers all round, boniface, and no heel-taps! We have much to discuss.
Not for nothing does ‘the body’s own painkiller’ take its name from an artificial one: ‘endogenous morphine’. Though I have yet to find, in the list of alleged pleasures that stimulate these neurotransmitters to leave their hypothalamic base and soothe the fevered brow, the idea that work might be among them. The usual suspects - sex, exercise (if you say so), laughter, meditation - but no sign of a pleasant hour or so eviscerating the likes of this for its juicer syllables.
GDoS, showing off as ever, currently offers 742 terms for die, dead and death plus 478 for kill and murder, and (setting aside the judicial slaughter of gallows, chair, gas, injections and the rest) rounds things off with 60 for suicide.
Truth is, and I do very, very vaguely remember the incident, that there was definitely no garlanding, but almost certainly tears, since I was what the immortal Nigel Molesworth, a hero still seven or eight years in my future, would term a weed and a wet (and remain so). I also recall that the shelf didn’t wholly fall, but one end tipped and I stood on my pillow to hold it up until my parents arrived. Or something.
Laziness, of course. But there are 6.5K of the things and if we are to find, then we must sort. OK, the slang stuff is easy enough, and they break down by geography, but wait, should it better be chronology, or specifics, i.e. cant (crime), mainstream (slang that is) or occupations when acknowledged (prize-fighting, gambling, short-order menus). Or by slang’s own taxonomy: sex, death, madness, stimulants, violence (judicial and unauthorized). And on it goes. Then, slang shelved, there’s World War I and II and split off the Holocaust and the Middle East and on and on. As for fiction, there’s all the noir for starters. Did I mention (auto)biographies? Then do it all again for the French. You get the picture? We do (falsetto).
My own aside, my favourite shelves adorn the great London Library. Among much else they provide a wonderful memento mori for words, once lauded, latterly lost to sight. Researching the dictionary I wandered into the tiny but once hugely popular world of horse-racing novels. These erstwhile bestsellers, covers laden with gold-blocked tack, plots wherein a son rescues his foolish pater from my usorious people, wins the Derby and marries Miss Whipcrackaway and her money - may have glistened once. No longer. All was deepest dust and the Library had a special brush at the issues desk which cleaned off choices left unread for a century and more.
Had we only known: surely enough of us could have clubbed together to pay for a few kindly working girls or boys to give the poor teenage incels a little relief? Get them away from their fantasies of super-villainy and their real-life reliance on Mrs Palmer and her five obliging daughters.
My apologies if you recoil from the descriptor attached to Jilted John’s punk anti-hero ‘Gordon.’ The power of cheap music, I fear. GDoS, vainglorious still, offers 971 synonyms. Be my guest.
The default expression on these self-satisfied, vacuous faces is invariably the smirk. The felon, the megalomaniac, the ever-amused little mediocrity who sucks up to them in the UK, the whole galère of shit in barely human form, their default is the sneering, self-adoring smirk. It needs to be slapped off. Hard and irreversibly.
I mean, as UK readers will appreciate, ‘Boris’ J., his father and sibs, but it is one of slang’s pleasing co-incidences that Johnson family or the Johnsons once meant ‘the world of professional criminals; thus in sing., a criminal’. Johnson solus also means the penis and a female breast, a pimp, a dildo and the buttocks. But this yet another aspect of slang, its role to discombobulate, to overthrow, to turn inside out and upside down. Or, deliberate or not, to reveal an inner truth. Long before our contemporary travails, slang made it clear that no word, whether failing us or seemingly supportive, is to be trusted.