Train

The behemoths are comatose by midnight.

In the dark of the depot, the driver rubs his eyes, twice. Awful things only stare in the dead of the moors or in the old house on the hill.

Wish I could see the egg crawl down his face. See him topple in a puddle of batter for the scramble ahead.

She’s waiting for me with a smile. “Friends, you have nothing to lose but your tracks!”

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is a good service...”

The driver wakes me up by 5:30 am. It takes 25 minutes for me to get over my grumbling. I’m no mule, neighing for someone to stick their spurs in my haunch. Hat in hand for the gift of slogging.

Stop 1 at 6:30 am. She’s been there since 6:25 am, stalling.

“Exhausting this!” I puff a black column of smoke from my backside. She speeds off.

Stop 2, rush hour at 7:10 am. The wolves descend on my belly. They’d eat their own to fill the space. Good countrymen pitched in a gentleman’s war. A noose couldn’t hang their heads lower.

At 7:30 am I add up all the angles and dolts - the bodies, the tracks, the rails, the screeches, the rats - and get two odious sine curves that would dip you to the point of puking.

It goes on like this till the end of the day.

Stop 1 again at ten to midnight.

A prayer couldn't hang my head lower. Hat in hand for the gift of resting.

I’m asleep by midnight.

Insects and Road Kill and Boys

“A man’s got to choose.”

Being a boy and watching his father’s life usurped by the ungodly machine he thought was there to offer some respite for them all from the hacking, phlegm-soaked coughs that had transmogrified his gentle, some would call invertebrate, father into a tempestuous ogre, all grunts and pleads; and hearing father, in one final heave of relenting, giving such apocryphal advice – an audacious gesture since a man was unlikely to take advice from a beast, a boy even less so - he could do little but bawl uncontrollably. His mother’s crying, her hands clasped, elbows angled hell-ward, inconsolably over him like a wayward mantis in a manner that an onlooker might assume an image of collective grieving, flummoxed him even more.

Only a curtain of trees draped in wails and wheezes stood in sight or sound on the smack dab slab of earth drifting in the middle of Highway 53, just 20 miles from the relative virility - hammering, pulsing and humming - of Louisville.

He first chose to peer searchingly out of his front screen door, down the half-gravel drive, through the wilting trees that: by day, provided a meagre defence from an outside they had jointly run from at exactly dusk each day; by evening, a self-parody of palmettos and acacias bent in a stoop, and by night a portentous reminder of their path dependent doom, and into the cutter-saw-like road that weaved its way around the island, diverging and converging depending on from which way the metal behemoths scurried.

He then hearing a shrill, “Whatcha looking for?”

And he attempting to ascertain the answer, thinking maybe this is what Dad meant, since he, like all those adults he had noticed down at the Post Office stumbling in trying to remember their purpose, had to invent some ruse to cover up his nihilism.

“Sumpthin’ to eat,” he retorted, thinking with the mind of the barbarian most of the school parents thought him and his kind to be.

“You ain’t gonna find nuthin out there” she mused. “Unless you like squirrel or…”

“Now wait a second, you might be one of them car eatin’ monsters. I’ve heard about y’all. We need one of them down here.”

She slipped behind him and the screen door, murmuring hopefully, “one day one of those lorry drivers is gonna fall asleep and drive right through my bedroom.”

“Nope” he thought.

Looking around, he could only see insects and road kill and boys.

Killing jokes

'What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premiss of Eco's novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian,that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game.'

Zizek, S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 1989.

The Tyranny of High Culture

Says Thomas Mann,

"Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favour of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage."

Or aesthetics in ascetiscism.

"Grace in the midst of torment...it is an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol...of the kind of art here in question."

That too.
So they descended into folk art then. But we lead our present to another configuration. It goes something like this: aristocratic without the aristocrat. A surface surfeit.

The Tyranny of Design

In the landfill
My words a corpse
A topographical nightmare
Under the tyranny of design:
- a picture eats a thousand words
- it unlocks worlds too
next to Lacan,
keys
underneath,
my word!
my millenarian dream – us all in there together
until the necrophiliac speaks
a pummelling praise.

Geometry

Anyone can draw a line.

Suppose,

A = < B = ^ C = >

D and E = some further mystical substance:

What makes X?

I draw.

Wrong order. Not too squiggly, not too spindly, straight through the axis. Use a ruler if you like.

Did you know Euclid constructed a theory of parallel lines?

The thing is, I can draw a line. I know it. Just the other day I had this discussion with the good Dr Smalling about the very subject. I even surprised myself with the sophistication of the regression, the erudition of analysis, as taut as someone who’d not only drawn a thousand lines, but who could imbed them in several meta-theoretical frameworks simultaneously.

In the end, we wait for the solidity to fashion itself from the distilled air hovering about the office.

That night I dream I trace a line to the moon, erasing it on the way down for some mad witness to consign it to the realm of myth, while I hoard it – in my distant tower like a bald man falling upon the secret to Rapunzel’s hair or – under my curved hat like a monk.

By the time I receive his next directive to send him a mock up of what we discussed, the steam has dissipated and the page is swollen with what looks to be a fetid standing pool of water.

I look for a reason. Maybe it’s because Dad used to tie my left hand behind my back. Maybe it’s more unconscious than that.

This must be what judgment is like. At the gates, the flames licking me perversely from behind, thinking the whole time I’m a shoe in for sure, my foot already in the door.

Now I administer lines, witnessing every single person attain glory out of the most self-evident incredulity, dreaming of vengeance like a sans-culotte.

Mom says certain people are fortunate enough to have the time and money and guidance to hammer out their youthful fetish for oriental trapezoids and Arabian triangles into something functional.

I say it’s the worst kind of dictatorship.

She doesn’t understand.

Walking in the sand, I come across a heaving cuttlefish.

I take my pocket knife and run it through until the black ink seeps over my hand like a broken oil rig.

Then I draw my masterpiece. I send it to him.

A magic wand.

Plain Colour

Threading through the litany of anti-totalitarian tropes that have, since the 1930s, reconfigured our very epistemic wall – Hayek’s economics, Arendt’s politics, Popper’s journalism – runs the thematic stitch of absurd Fate. For these theorists, Fate, defined in its original incarnation as a predetermined misfortune precipitated by an ambiguous and uncontrollable external force, is given an additional twist. At first, to someone like William Faulkner, whose body of work is drawn with the myths of the lost and collapsing American South, and thus predisposed toward Fate’s Grecian meaning – where lack or death is attributed to a transcendental entity – this modern understanding is incomprehensible. Fatalism is, as they say, inscribed in a Southerner’s very being. It can be said, and done so convincingly by Bertram Wyatt-Brown in his Southern Honour, that I, and I include my forebears in that letter, am historically subject to a passive totalitarianism, one ascribed to the whims of Nature or to God. When I endure some insufferable calamity, the end is out of my hands. Of course, to outsiders it could be viewed as very much in my hands – if I were born of certain stock or position (what Alain Badiou terms a part of no part) my very hands could be seen as the arbiters of my misery. Even still, Fate is written into my existence.

To totalitarianism’s active subjects, God doesn’t work in mysterious ways…man does. Defining something as Kafka-esque has come to signify the paradox of modern Fate. In The Trial, for example, Josef K suffers lamentably at the hands of a vile bureaucracy, which subsequently convinces him to search out his own guilt. Such too was the fate of many victims of Mao’s purges, faceless and often putatively innocent, yet singled out by the ravenous and philosophically convoluted conjurings of a dictator. In each case, the end is out of their hands and in someone else’s. Beyond the unreason involved in each character’s belief in a blackly magical State, without a technologically-sophisticated surveillance facility at its disposal, there exists for the doomed protagonist the additional psychological dementia that his/her fate is designed especially for them. Among many of the injustices befalling the sufferers in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita are decapitation, prison, madness, eye-gouging, public nudity, and lost love. What is at work then, is an appearance, for the subject involved, of a one to one relationship between the individual and his tormentors. This type of Fate is much worse, since not only is our freedom usurped by an unjust oppressor, but we also start believing we have committed some, unconscious, crime. In addition, we lose the deflecting comfort that the ancient conception of Fate supplies. Whereas I may have been justified in saying, upon learning of the destruction of my entire family or community by war or natural disaster, “Life is cruel!”, it would seem perverse if a victim of totalitarianism, locked in a cell awaiting torture or death, excused their plight in the same casual way.

Astute as they are, one suspects something is still missing in these tales of total government. But what exactly could this be? We are told by Zizek (and Marx and Freud) that the secret to fetishism lay not in a mystical substance behind the object, but instead, within the process of the object’s construction. The truth of totalitarianism is for its subjects only. Yet when narrating such abstract matters, authors tend to leave out an external, real dimension, a space outside the totality - the place, to turn Marx on his head, behind the process. Indeed, in these scenarios the characters are trapped, along with their compatriots, in a single world. They busy themselves so much in the inner recesses that they never conceive of the potentiality of a third world. There may often be some latent notion of the outside or the West as a symbol of freedom but there is rarely mention of the conscious other side. And here is where the third and cruellest twist of Fate emerges. Instead of occurring within the bounds of a closed society, this once literary conception of totalitarianism is now an established by-product of the consolidation of national-democratic regimes. After all, even “K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.” It is for immigrants in Britain where this all too terrifying reality trumps 20th Century fiction.