The New Uncanny (23 page)

Codes. We English love them. Even ‘The Dream of the Rood’ was influenced by the Anglo-Saxon ‘Enigma’ traditions. I read somewhere that the most requested poem at the Poetry Library in London was Leo Marks’ WWII code-poem from ‘Carve Her Name With Pride’, ‘The life that I have...’ If it’s not really a poem, it’s OK for Brits to like it. I and love, where love stands for nothing, like in tennis: l’oeuf, egg. I’d even loved Dad sometimes, sometimes showed it in that man-code, hedged-around, bushido-ritualised way - i.e. totally wordless, a punch on the shoulder for a hug, walking together like chimpanzee males patrolling their territory. Secret, non-verbal communication. Circles and lines. Dots and dashes. Morse. If Inspector Morse is so anti-Mason, why is he father-figure to someone called Lewis, a Mason’s name for his uninitiated son, like me? Was his author playing a double game? Was Colin Dexter really Colin Sinister?

00111001

The time passed for me in lengthening rhythms as I lost those of home and school. I could pursue an idea for days, nights, weeks, without another one coming along to displace it. My controller encouraged me to think in these ways now, take the long view. He hinted the security situation was changing, and I enjoyed the magisterial overlooking of history. Were the results of the Battle of Hastings bad? Too early to say. Horizons and timescales rolled back, disappeared. But the less I slept, the more I understood Joyce’s line about history being nightmare and our struggle to wake from it. It applied even more to English history than Irish history. I felt terrible, but comforted by how deep I was becoming.

The time passed for other students as it does for students: tick = apathy/tock = hysteria, with no intervening period of normal organised behaviour; ping – this essay is due at some distant point in the future/pong – yesterdayomigod. Seminars were a waste of time attended by a waste of skin. The pooled stupidity of people who’re here precisely because we don’t know what we’re doing. But even so, their egos! All oeuf and no oeuvre. One dumb bint announced, I don’t like to read other authors in case it influences my style or makes me self-conscious about how I write. I asked her if she’d go to a doctor after s/he told her s/he didn’t like to read medical textbooks in case it made him/her self-conscious about their bedside manner. I’d rather spend a whole winter bog-snorkelling around Vladivostok than another hour with my ‘fellow writers’ agonizing about the anxiety of influence. Ugh! I’m even getting the quotation marks habit, those snottily-raised eyebrows of punctuation. It’s like saying, this is crap but because I’m being ironic it’s alchemically transformed into the pure gold of kitsch, or satire, or something good that you just aren’t cool enough to see. Silence is also golden, but nobody believes that. I obviously don’t, do I?

It also became obvious that for nearly everybody there Englit was really Amlit. While I was getting higher and higher on the time-honoured historical concoctions of these islands, everybody around me was swapping intellectual Buckfast Abbey fortified wine for Duff Lite. Easy to see why, especially in poetry, which in the U.S.A. is predominantly college-boy stuff, campus poetry, I came to understand, as nobody else publishes the stuff. What would novels be like if they were only written by university lecturers, I wondered? Tilll now, I’d always thought Dad’s anti-Americanism was well OTT – he’d characterised American military strategy in the last World War as waiting till it was nearly over, then moving in to bayonet the wounded and loot their corpses. Now, children of the corpses ape the bayoneters, dress like them, read their books, use their slang. Uncle Sam grinds his organ and English corpse-children dance. I remember the line from the Sisters of Mercy in ‘Vision Thing’: ‘It’s a small world and it smells bad.’ It certainly does. And the smell was getting worse. I began avoiding people rather than risk being diminished by them.

I’m not a misanthrope, I told Tyr, I’m an apanthrope. I prefer solitude. Eagles don’t flock. The writer should be a little apart always, the splinter of ice in the old heart, tip of the iceberg and all that. Your splinter could have sunk the Titanic, he replied. I pretended to look hurt, but I rather liked that. I’d use the line when I got the chance. Mature writers steal. Like then.

11001101

My tutor was crap too. We discussed the portfolio I’d submitted in early sessions, although I could hardly keep awake; the exquisite torture of the situation heightened by the fact that I knew I would only truly be able to sleep in Bradford while listening to him. He conceded that I was obviously well-read (he made that sound like something verging on the reprehensible, like putting weapons in the hands of children), but that my writing lacked heart and insight into human beings. I know, I smiled: the splinter of ice in my heart I’ve been told could have sunk the Titanic. He didn’t laugh. Maybe he’d never heard of Graham Greene. ‘The Third Man’, greatest English film ever. Cuckoo clocks, Viennese sewers, jangly music. Here’s lime in your eye.

Remember Klee, my tutor had interrupted: One eye sees, the other feels. I liked that, but he went on. And on. My writing seemed strangely reluctant to give physical descriptions of people. Hello? Who cares what the robots look like? I should explore my childhood: As a writer, your childhood is your capital. What did he know about capital, dressed like he hadn’t two pennies to put over his eyes, bits of tofu in his tobacco-y beard. And insight’s something he could do with. Agenbite of inwit. He’d recommended I read Raymond Carver!

I raged about this to myself all night. I should read Carver? Why? To develop some sub-American, mid-Atlantic style? A cracked lookingglass of a Brit servant to yanks. Yankers. I like the way Joyce writes ‘lookingglass’ as one word; it seems to goggle back at you, reflecting itself and on itself. Light takes time to travel, reflected de Selby (his name has something to do with the German ‘selbst’, meaning ‘self’), so when you look at a mirror, you’re actually seeing yourself ever-so-slightly younger. In a pleasingly painless unNewtonian experiment, he then set two big mirrors opposite each other, to get that old infinity ping-pong going, and using a powerful magnifying glass, claimed to be able to see himself in his childhood. With modern magnifying technology, I’d see right through myself, Dad, back up the family line to, who? Adam?

I read this in an old local litmag, a piece called ‘The Apple of My Eye/I’ : ‘I understand the impossibility of saying ‘I’, using the term only from a position of Irigarayan mimicry, which resists even as it seems to accept p(h)allo(go)centric norms. That’s why I/eye can wryte ‘I’ now and you/ewe/u will know exactly what I mean, Ryght?’ Sub-Joycean, joyless theorrhoeia. I wanted to tell the author a joke: What do you call a fish with no eye? A fsh. I needed this like a fsh needs a bicycle, if this was the sort of stuff tutors wanted to see, so it was agreed I’d just email stuff in rather than going to every single seminar, after I told them I had this masterwork I really wanted to get on with, shamelessly comparing myself with Joyce, whose ‘Ulysses’ started life as a short story, then just growed like Topsy – i.e. hinting that was what might be happening with me. I struggled to represent myself as a figure of monastic dedication, a hermetic hermit guarding the Arcanum of my art, a Sebastian Melmoth with nothing to declare but, in time, my genius. Nobody noticed. Wankers.

00111001

You need to get out more, said Tyr one day, scratching a crescent of light in the dirt on my window with his fingernail. I’m into De Maistrean room-travel, I replied. De Selbian you mean, he quibbled, accurately. When do you next meet your controller? When I’ve something to report, I hissed back. Till then, I’m a sleeper. If I could sleep, bloody kids. What kids? he asked.

So we went to a Geoffrey Hill reading in Leeds, where he was Professor once before he took up arms to fight the invading sea of theorrhoeia from the incontinent Continent at Cambridge. He’s the most goth poet I know. The great man said in an American annotated edition of his poems, they glossed ‘Overlord of the M5’ as ‘Head of the British Secret Service’. Donnish sniggers from the university audience, which sounded as if they had all simultaneously inhaled their glasses cloths. But talking about it all later, Tyr seemed to think that Hill had sold out by going to America - ‘the Belly of the Beast’, he called it. He had been getting more anti-American as the term wore on. I noticed him referring to the American War of Independence as the ‘American Mutiny’, and our ‘American Yoke’, like the ‘Saxon Yoke’ to Fenians, or the ‘Norman Yoke’ to Levellers.

Round here they call the Beast Dajjal, said Tyr on the way back. Google it, he challenged. And I did, for hour after hour, I Googled and goggled, goggled and Googled - I couldn’t sleep, anyway. Don’t brats go to school in Bratford? Dajjal is an Antichrist, not exactly a mirror-image of the Christian version but with key features in common, such as seductive eloquence. The Christian version would also be distinguished by this eloquence, which would enable him to bring peace to the Middle East. I suddenly thought: maybe Bush isn’t as stupid as he looks. Maybe it’s all an act so he can’t be accused of being the Antichrist: he’s the opposite of eloquent and brought more war to the Middle East. Maybe he took fright after some elements of the US Christian right identified Ronald Reagan as Antichrist, because of the six letters in each of the three parts of his name, and decided to convince them that Antichrist was to be found in the United Nations rather than the White House. One World Government – or, in the USA, ZOG: Zionist-Owned Government. Even Islamists could agree with that.

Hadiths suggest the End of Days will be marked by, among other signs, the end of the use of horses in war. The US Cavalry nowadays rode almost anything except horses – think about ‘Apocalypse Now’. Music everywhere is another sign, and I only had to think about the pervasiveness of American music to see how that fitted. Most interesting was the Lodge connection to Dajjal, his one eye and the Masons’ symbol of an eye on top of a pyramid, as seen on the US dollar, an inversion of my Dad’s optical test (maybe he was passing secret messages to his customers while he did this). I also hadn’t appreciated the historical change from Operative to Speculative Masonry, the former being actual workers in stone, the latter taking over their lodges and turning them into secret societies. Speculative Masons... ‘The forerunners to the Dajjal are none other than the Freemasons,’ he read on another site, which went on to describe just how widespread references to their influence were in American culture: ‘the Freemasonic eye has also been featured on the video for one of Madonna’s songs where Madonna actually appears with the One Eye coming out from her forehead,’ I’d read there. I couldn’t remember which of Madge’s songs that referred to, but it might have something to do with Kabbalah. It went on to describe the Simpsons’ Stonecutters’ episode, the Stonecutters obviously being the Masons, then traces a vast conspiracy back to the Templars, who infiltrated the Masons on their own suppression (these still use Templar names and terminology), and how they dominated the USA through its Presidents from Brother George Washington onwards. One section listed famous Masons like Lewis Carroll (though I wasn’t sure that was true), dwelling particularly on the royal arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling, and the role of the Brotherhood in his ‘The Man Who Would be King’, made into a Hollywood film starring Harry Palmer and James Bond. My head spun on. The man who would be king in the land of the blind should put out the eye that offends him.

Then Tyr told me that on the Bradford University website there was mountains of Masonic material which Humanities staff claimed to know nothing about. And he was right! A local solicitor called Wilmhurst had amassed it (I could imagine solicitors and opticians doing this sort of weird shit together), and the archive was put online by a famous Masonic author who had worked in Business Studies. Surfing the web and the energy from insomnia, I dug out just how deep the Masonic conspiracy went: left trouserlegs around Buckingham Palace/the Pentagon/Kremlin/Vatican roll up on their own constantly. Nobody will admit it, of course. The Mason’s Word. Wankers.

10101011

Some memories I was not so desperate to suppress. On one of my pilgrimages of ill grace with Dad on the Stray, when he was laying down the moral law like Polonius, I’d decided to take him on and his homespun philosophy. I’d said, Hypothetically, aren’t secret societies pledged to privilege their members’ interests over other people’s manifestly unfair? He twitched as if I’d suggested he was a paid-up member of Spearmint Rhino. I mean, I went on, Doesn’t that sort of, you know, ghettoize the comfortable just at the time our Government is calling on everybody to be more integrated?

As he wriggled on my line, I moved in: I’m sure everybody would like to integrate more with the well-off, but that isn’t made too easy for them, especially when you think about organisations like, O, I don’t know, the Masons. Isn’t that a bit like those American country clubs barring Jews or Blacks? Now he was spluttering like an old tap. I knew the implied slighting of his sense of English fair play, that scandalous comparison with American practices, not to mention to equation with Romish or Muslim religious intolerance would have him on his back foot. In truth, as usual I didn’t listen closely to what he was saying because I knew what that would be; I had driven him onto the killing-ground of the argument he would advance. In ‘Sun and Steel’, Mishima describes the blow, how you manoeuvre your foe into your chosen space for him in the air, the space you want him to occupy because that is where you have prepared yourself to strike. While Dad wittered on, I was oiling my blade, son and steel, eyeing up the hole he had no choice but to get himself into, and as I tuned in again to his hackneyed, predictable defence at the point where he was indignantly declaring that Masonic ‘Volume of the Sacred Law’ could equally be a Qur’an or Torah or an Adi Granth as a Bible, and how Masons could believe in their individual ideas of a God, and how all were welcome on this basis blah blah. I paused, a little theatrically. It was the first time my silence silenced him, wasn’t just talked over by him. Then I asked gently, And atheists? Can they become Masons though they don’t believe in any God?