Purgatory College – Chapter One

Purgatory College

1.

She knew how it was supposed to be. She would arrive at the college with a suede hold-all packed neatly and held by the handle with her left hand, leaving her right hand unencumbered to accomplish whatever hand-shaking were required. The black patent leather of her round toed shoes like those of a 1940s evacuee would be freshly polished and when she met the porter at the gate she would smile sweetly and not refuse to answer to her full name of Matilda like she so often did at the Grammar School she attended. From here she would allow herself to be led through the gardens of the college, without stopping in the inquisitive way she was wont, to inquire from the guide the name and origin of the flowers whose heads peeked above the grass and gatherings of autumnal leaves or to copy and past images of Gargoyles from the college’s stone walls that she could plagiarize herself in later short stories. When she was ultimately taken to the dean’s office, to answer for herself in the form of an interview, she would do so courteously and effortlessly, breezing through topics from Romanticism to the Restoration (in which her father had taken it upon himself to school her at the dinner table) and every answer she gave would be primped with Proust or quotes from Lear, and made witty with sideways nods to nonsense poetry or John Carey’s “What good is the arts?” to create a gauze of generic self-deprecation through which sleights of hand would be concealed that otherwise might betray the gaps of knowledge in her head about the texts. Every answer would be a triple knot of references – a quote to answer, a quote to make the answer witty and personal, a quote to contextualize the relevance of the answer and locate the debate of which the question formed a part on the relevant island in the sea of cultural history. Such a knot, Mattie had been told, was nigh on indefatigable.

In case this all seems a little abstract, let me give you an example of how textual reference would work in practice. On arriving at the Dean’s office, it is customary (according to the books her mother had helpfully ordered following reviews in the University section of the Sunday Times) to be asked why you chosen the particularly college where you were attending interviews. Mattie would put it down to “a morbid longing for the picturesque.” This was a quote from one of her recently favored novels, The Secret History, and one of the few recently published books she had read. She would then make a sly tongue in cheek comment that of course, she hoped her longing would follow a different line to the narrator of that novel, whose morbid longing leads him into a cul-de-sac of conspiracy and eventual muder.

Despite her cocksure readiness, despite her knowledge of the three loop cast iron knot and the lunch time pep talks that would mean she would forever link food and learning in some kind of unholy bulimic ritualistic marriage, where a paradox or philosophical equation made it easier for her to swallow, and where the inability to follow through to the solution made her liable to vomit, something about the process seemed wrong to her, not least the apparent necessity of tarting up her knowledge, who she’d always viewed as a small breasted, porcelain skinned heroine, whom she must free from the shackles of her cluttered mind in order to let her pursue whatever romantic or political adventures she was inclined to engage in, as some dime-store street-corner prostitute, blinged up and over burdened with cosmetic eclecticism, a reckless navel show that represented two fingers to the canon and fake blonde hair to demonstrate that she was easy.
It was important to have read widely. Specific interests, especially those as small and trivial as Mattie’s: in mystery stories, myths and fairytales were inadequate although fair game (her mother’s book, which had taken up somewhat biblical status in the Brown household, explained) when used to link several genres or track certain movements or cultural developments. It was important to have the knowledge (the book also stated) like some rehearsed bride, some Geisha girl, at your fingertips. There was no space in the interview for exploration, only smart answers, in-jokes, eyes that twinkle with the smooth delivery of Shakespeare or summarizing of Joyce.
Mattie knew it would be like this because this was how it had been described to her from youth. The description of her christening, which took place when she was seven years old, evoked the feasts of fairytales, and even though several of the details of it were hazy, the key attitude, of Matilda herself being some kind of big news, some shining light destined for great things, destined to ensure the immortalization of the Brown name in a manner that had often been attempted in past generations but never achieved, were burnt so brightly on the insides of her eyelids that every-time she had gone to sleep in the past month or so she’d woken up in a cold sweat, and all her dreams branded by the college’s name so she would wake up shivering and spluttering: Purgatory.

Her three godmothers had given her gifts designed to ensure she accomplished these goals. The first, Aunty Ruth, a family friend and no blood relation, had given her a gold leaf copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies that was over a hundred years old and had been passed down throughout the generations. The front cover was loose, constantly threatening to fall off, and Mattie’s mother had persuaded her to bring it along today even though the worry that today might be the day the cover finally falls off made the book in her bag seem heavier than it was, she had agreed: this was how it was supposed to have been. The second godmother, another Aunt, (named May) and also no relation, was much older and richer than Ruth and had put as her gift a tab of a hundred English Pounds a year behind a family run book store in town, which Mattie had spent consecutively on illustrated copies of fairytales, then on tomes of Greek Myths and Legends, then on Shakespeare, and finally in the last year before Aunt May died and in an unconnected event the shop closed, on an entire library of Agatha Christie novels. Unfortunately for Mattie on this day in November, the rate of her reading dwindled after this point, when at age thirteen, she could no longer own her own books for free, but had to be more scrupulous in what she read, and the wide if very specific ocean of her literary consumption dwindled into the narrow river named in Latin National Curriculum. Mattie smiled silently at this joke, inadequate in her mind on almost all accounts – the case was wrong, in made no linguistic sense, but still, she thought, still, it was funny.

The third Godmother, a real Aunt, Alison, who was a blood relation and perhaps for this reason her favorite of them all, had given her a beautiful pen of real silver bought from a glass cabinet in a department store and placed in this oak lined box with blue satin lining. The shape of the pen was feminine, with a wide curvy base and devastatingly sleek nib, and a gold plate trim round the shirt hook and round the base and could be filled with ink from a pot or with cartridges of either black or blue.

For several years Mattie had not been allowed to use this pen for fear of her breaking or losing it. Finally a month ago she had worn it in her left hand jeans’ pocket, a good luck charm to her mock interview, and had lost it. Her immediate reaction of guilt was swiftly replaced by anger when she saw it, next English class, being dangled between the fingers of a classmate, an unconventional who always replied “present” instead of “yes” or “here” at role call which Mattie saw as an unquestionable mark of an inferior intellect attempting to differentiate themselves the only way they can, through eccentricity. The anger came from a place very deep inside herself, and was kindled by the fact that just six weeks before the said event Aunt Alison had finally succumbed to a ravenous breast cancer that had proceeded, after chewing out her mammary muscles to gnaw on her lower back, and finally her brain and eye. And it was perhaps for this reason that when Mattie saw said classmate, sitting parallel and opposite her on the train into Oxford that morning, cradling the devastatingly beautiful curvature, and chewing on the gold plated base, Mattie could not remain in her seat and concentrate on the summary notes for Virginia Wolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”, and “The Great Gatsby”, but, rather feeling her face grow hotter and hotter she made her way to the toilet cubicle and locking the door stared at her pupils as they slowly pulsed, as though diluting with black fluid, like two tiny wells, of ink…
The pressure of the impending interviews had over the past few months made Mattie uncharacteristically superstitious, and right now she saw all of her hopes of success, a thing she prized almost as much as the pen itself, and which her parents, particularly her father prized much more than she did in the hands of a fellow, far inferior academically, classmate.

Had she been more primed in balls and physical strength and less so in logic, Mattie would have been able to walk across the carriage to the thief, and looking her in the eye, requested the return of the pen but since her prime schooling was in paradox and riddle she instead spent the 45 minute remainder of the journey getting more and more frustrated at the inadequacy of her mind to help her retrieve the pen. Equating herself more with Odysseus than Achilles, and supporting her stance with the moral logic of the superstitious, Mattie wanted this battle to be fair. However when on arriving at Oxford station, having found herself no closer to attaining the pen and losing the other girl quickly in a crowd of passengers, her arrival at Purgatory college was not as her godmothers had predicted.

Instead of arriving at the gate and smiling sweetly at porter, Mattie turned up flushed and sallow with the pallid self resentment of failure; she answered not to Matilda, not recognizing herself in the alien name, she held the bag in her right hand and made an unconvincing show of offering her left hand for shaking in an attempt to disguise this mistake, and although her patent shoes remained polished throughout her trip through the gardens led by a spotty-faced second year, they began to look to her more and more like the overly particular attempt of a try hard who will require her shoes to shine when her intellect can not.

The day of the interview had begun to resemble much less the coming of age of the Brown Family, so minutely detailed in predictions by each of her three godmothers as well as her own dad, whose bringing about was supposed to have been secured by gold lined instruments of academia and a bribe of a hundred pounds per annum, and much more the breathless curse of the fourth Godmother, who had approached the seven year old Matilda in the corner of her own Christening, and with words each one accompanied by a waft of red wine, told the little girl leafing through the tragedies of Shakespeare exactly how she would fail.

This fourth Godmother I have not mentioned previously, because to even call her this is misleading. Lorna Green was a sometime friend of Mattie’s father, and not even close enough to the family to be granted the title of Aunt. There had, during Mattie’s childhood, been muted whisperings that this was due to her rejecting the monikers of both Aunt and god-Mother, since at the age of 32, they were inappropriate and unflattering, but Mattie, unwilling to accept she’d have been offered such a designation, believed this to be only a myth perpetrated to spread the anti-Lorna vibe. Matilda had never liked Lorna much, perhaps sensing a general distaste directed at her from the rest of the family, but the disliking swelled into a full-blown abhorrence at the moment of her Christening when Lorna, dressed in a low cut emerald blouse and pencil skirt leaned over little Mattie, and with red manicured fingers, like the talons of a dominatrix, told the girl in no-uncertain terms that her failure was guaranteed by her genetics – was written in the astronomy of her mother’s milky humility and her father’s flabby inability to succeed.

So different was this prediction to everything else that young Mattie had been told: and yet it stayed with her all these years, remaining brighter and more vivid than all the soft-spoken coos of praise and prophecies of advancement. Every time in the eleven years to follow that Mattie scored a B in a math’s or French test, or didn’t complete her homework and was humiliated for it in front of the class, the tawdry vision of taloned Lorna swelled out of her subconscious, cackling and breathing claret in her face as she wobbled on eighties stiletto heels.

And now, moving through the gardens of Purgatory College, navigating rose bushes in embarrassingly shiny shoes the face appeared again, swelling until all thoughts of the three knot reference admitted defeat and retreated back into her mind somewhere behind the last cortex, and Mattie stayed focused on her feet, and didn’t even notice the black and white pebbles of the path on which she trod until reaching her room for the night, and placing her suede hold-all in her right hand down on the covers, she was left alone by the acne-plagued guide and could sit at the window sill, re-gathering her thoughts and letting her anger subside.

The room would have previously been a monk’s cell, and was sparse enough to reflect this, built of cold stone and cut in the shape of a cartoon ruby, the way jewels are portrayed in Disney movies. From the window sill Mattie could look out across the gardens through which she had just walked, and saw in full perspective the black and white path that ran from the dorm room block down to an apple tree at the far reaches of the College’s rose garden. That was when her memory was tweaked, and- alas too late- a riddle resurfaced that could possibly have helped her on the train.

Pulling her legs up to her chest she recalled how – her father had told- in a far away land a palace existed inhabited by a princess and a king. The princess, who resembled in almost all particulars the small breasted heroine of her knowledge, was offered by her father, the king – who somehow had become the mirror image of Mattie’s own Dad- to a suitor from a heathen country.

The suitor, as is usual in stories of this kind, wasn’t her type (a subjective conclusion but whose objective unsuitability was to be proved later in the story.) Therefore, in order to pay lip service to the universally endorsed value of free will, the princess’s father and her suitor came up with what they considered a fair way of (if it was a pagan society) introducing an element of chance, or (in a religious one) leaving the ultimate decision up to the Gods.

Outside the palace walls was a garden, and in the garden was a path, much like the one that now lay beyond the glass in front of Mattie, composed entirely of black and white pebbles. The suitor, as agreed with the princess and her father, would lead the object of his affection out to the path, and there he would place in a cloth bag two pebbles from the path, one black and one white, from which the princess would pick. A black pebble would seal her fate, and she would be married to the suitor; a white pebble, on the other hand, would secure her freedom. Of course, because people do not make up fairy stories about acts of chance, but only acts of craft or wit or virtue, the suitor was not to allow the princess the free will required by this game – a bad sign as to the degree of free will he would have allowed her once they were married, and thus proof of his objective unsuitability – by placing only black pebbles in the cloth bag. Luckily, a stable boy, who with the embellishments of Mattie’s eighteen-year-old heart smoothly becomes the princess’ true object of love, overhears the suitor bragging of his plan, and reports the hopeless situation back to the princess. The riddle of this particular story is how, with this new information at hand, the princess manages to escape the fate ascribed by two black pebbles, in an era before it was possible to knee a cheat in the balls on the garden path, causing him to drop the cloth bag and yelling “You twat!” whilst exposing him as the fraud he is.
The predicament, thought Mattie now, was not dissimilar to her own on the train, whereby her aim was to secure her pen without having to accuse the other girl of being a cheat. She would have thought further on it, but the turning over of this riddle in her mind was making her hungry, and checking her watch she realized that time had passed a lot quicker than she had assumed it would and it was time for dinner. This food, which was complimentary, was to take place in the college’s ancient Dining Hall. Making her way across the garden, which with the sun’s descent, had begun to pool the mist, she saw a figure approaching her from across the quad coming out of an arch that led into perhaps a courtyard. As he moved into focus she saw him to be a boy who she thought she recognized but could not work out from where, or when.

“Hello”. The boy’s voice was light and timeless. His hair was feathery and blond.
“Hi,” Mattie replied, trying to scuff her shoes up surreptitiously whilst maintaining eye contact.
“Have you had yours yet?” Mattie was not sure what this question meant, but tried to look authoritative as she shook, then nodded her head.
“Your interview?”
“Oh, no” answered Mattie, relieved and grateful for the clarification, adding “tomorrow” so as not to sound like a two-word simpleton.
“What are you here for?” The boy laughed, a public school laugh, only freer, and less greedy. “Makes it sound like a prison sentence, doesn’t it?”
“English.” Mattie laughed, nervously.
“Me, philosophy,” the boy stooped slightly as he spoke, which gave a jovial and humble effect, and occasionally shook his short, airy hair out of his bright blue eyes. Mattie wondered why she found this stranger so devastatingly attractive, and thought perhaps his emergence from the courtyard and meeting on the black and white path associated him in her mind with the stable boy in the riddle she had just been turning over. “Just had mine.”
“Yeah” Mattie asked, trying (and failing) to look both coy, and mischievous, “how’d it go? Any tough ones?”
“Well, just one. They asked me – you’ll never guess – they asked me to evaluate- Which is harder to get into, heaven or Oxford?”
For some reason the boy had momentarily stopped smiling, and stared, dead serious, off into the mist. Mattie herself became distracted by this change in expression, so much so she didn’t even think about this question till later, when she repeated it at dinner to three girls, also attending the college for Interview.

: 01 Mar 2007 21:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Livin' is Easy

I went out into the garden through a side gate and flung my arms into the air, swinging round and round, feeling the sunshine on my face and the breeze that tickled the trees. I remembered fully then: The taste of icing on square vanilla sponge at the summer fair; the look of bunting flying freely in the wind. Overwhelming starlight. Good songs with slow strummed bass line intros. Fields and fields of bluebells. I remembered Smurf blood, some blue paint on the road, spilling out of its shell-like can. I remembered laughing and laughing with my friends, laughing so hard my stomach hurt. And crying one time, only once, and because I was happy. I was happy.
Somehow, I had pulled myself up off the ground and gone into the garden. I looked at my hands, they were coated in grit and dust: in imperfection. I put one to my head to see if I was bleeding. I wasn’t, but then I moved my hand across my head and was relieved to find a stickiness caught up in my hair. There was an incredible pain in my leg, by my hip. I felt like one of those antelopes whose leg has been yanked at by a hunting lioness, yanked at but not pulled off, and that it was now dragging behind me. I enjoyed, relished the pain. It was somehow cleansing.
And I found the garden. I stood amid the terribly clichéd corpses, the crumbling stones and the rubble. Amidst the dust of Cotswold stone, the splinters of glass, that had showered down when the windows shattered and closed my eyes, and remembered. I thought of Fox’s mints then. I really wanted some. I could remember the taste of peppermint, the cloying sweetness, and the way it split in the mouth, the way it splintered into little cuboids. The way it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and in between my teeth. Little shards of minty see-through sugar. I remember the feeling of four in my mouth at one time, the intense, clarifying mintyness: strong, sweet and cold. The way it numbed my tongue and focused my mind. The way it filled my mouth and ordered my breath. The way the mintyness infiltrated, infected my breath and turned all the molecules of air and vapour minty. The way my mind goes clear and blue. The way little blue and white papers rustled in my pockets, left there like gifts, or secrets, or kisses, used and scrunched up or folded away for later. I remembered going shopping in town with my parents when I was eight or nine and buying sweets that I would then hide in the lining of my coat. I remember going back to my room after dates in cars and shoving several in my mouth at once, quickly and excessively. Trying to undo the immorality. I wanted mint then; I wanted it so badly; more than I’ve ever wanted it in my life.
I opened my eyes and saw some mints in front of me. On the ground. Four or five shards of Fox’s mints. They were a little bit grubby, with earth sticking to them, but they were there, just like they’d been put there for me to find. I picked them up carefully and brushed them off, blew off some earth, and placed them into my mouth, all at once; all at the same time. I began to crunch, but I couldn’t taste the mint.
I wondered if the shock had muted my sense of taste or if something had disconnected in my head in the fall and my tongue was numb. And then I started to feel acute pain all over my mouth, in my gums, in the roof of my mouth. That’s when I opened it, and blood started pouring out. I put my hands in front of me to catch it, and found my hands just catching blood, a flood of blood, like water flowing over the precipice of my lower jaw, bringing with it the debris; bits of my cheek fabric, splinters and shards of glass and the bright blood of my tongue.
I was chewing glass.
I screamed.

It was the skaters who picked my body up from the wreckage. Those renegade Comprehensive kids who descended on the mass of rubble and set about recovering the broken shards of people.
I was lucky: I was largely unscathed. My whole mouth stung as though it was filled with a hundred bee stings or paper cuts. I could feel it swelling up with blood. My cheeks were getting bigger and bigger, like a hamster’s. I spat some blood onto the floor. A pool of red hair dye. I had to be careful not to swallow. I just let my mouth hang open.
I did black out but not for long. The devastated St Joan’s looked undeniably post apocalyptic. I love saying post apocalyptic, then I think how pretentious? What do I even mean by that? I guess it was the way the building sort of resembled a broken church; the stage, a fallen altar. It was sort of sad, the way it had been revealed as the sham it was. Now everyone could see it was useless, broken; not just me; little, lonely me. The piles of wood and ashes smoking helped to emphasise the effect. A sacrifice. Sort of like a sacrifice.
The dead people faded into the carnage; the live ones distinguishable only by their flailing. Some of these people had been my friends – faces, memories, glimpses in corridors, laughing, registration, field trips. The skater had me in his arms now, and as I looked up the sky was illuminating his hair kind of like an angel.
I shifted my head to face towards his chest. He smelt of sweat and fabric softener. He had on a black cotton T-shirt, bearing the logo of a band called “King Legend’s Eleven.” It emblazoned his chest like a crest on a night’s armour. He wore short trousers and had hairy knees. The light caught his eyebrow piercing. It twinkled, like he’d got a star caught on his brow whilst taking of a piece of clothing.
It wasn’t romantic collapsed in his arms. But, even then, I’d assessed him as a potential date. That’s another skill they teach us – taught us – at St Joan’s. Look for boyfriends, husbands even during a trauma or a crisis. Some men will always show themselves at their best in situations where they can act heroic. Additionally, it gives you an opportunity to tempt them with your feminine side. Let them see your vulnerability…
Looking around I saw other vulture heroes, their boards and stereos discarded, descending from their watchful posts, calmly collecting up the livelier bodies. One by one they chose it, flailing, and carried it outside, onto the lawn by Queen Mary Cottage. Their calmness was somewhat horrifying.
There was no screaming. Screaming would have been better. If I could run that scene again, there would be screaming.

A couple of months after the fuss had died down I returned from the Italian holiday where I was supposed to recover and found myself at a concert with Nick the skater, the one who had taken me out of the St Joan’s wreckage.
It was the most amazing night of my life. For someone not used to physical contact with anyone, someone from a family where physical contact was discouraged – even frowned upon, the “mosh-pit” experience was life-affirming. To have six bodies of people I’d never met pressed up against me, to be soaked in other people’s sweat, each bead with its whole life story imprinted on it, soaking my clothes; to feel my lungs and chest and pelvis crushed together, so hard and with such totality that I wondered how I was even breathing was the most liberating experience of my adolescent life. The first time I’d actually felt alive.
I fell in love with the lead singer. He had a piano and jumped all over it. I met him after by giving oral sex to the club bouncer. The singer seemed very pleasant and genuine and smelled of freshness and soap. He was very gracious, very much the busy prince meeting the loyal subject. He signed a five-pound note I gave him. He seemed gloriously middle-class and proud of it.
This was the second revelation of the evening. I’d never before met someone proud of, or even OK with, being middle-class. Everyone at St Joan’s seemed so repulsed by her riches, and this repulsion only made it more disgusting. The way they dressed themselves up as gangsters, the way they dropped their pants and slept around fuelled by an unquenchable eager to please, to prove they weren’t the ‘typical snob.’
The problem was, the school offered only weak cardboard cutouts of businesswomen who ‘had it all’: first class degrees, two hundred thousand plus per annum, little freckly, healthy kids and, you know, trouser suits. The 1980’s archetype of female success. But all the people we wanted to be had been born poor. They’d struggled and strived for their success, and as we grew older and learnt about capitalism in History, and slavery in English, and Marx’s theory of religion in Philosophy and Ethics, we had all these middle-class white guilt issues confound us – we were the worst kind of people: oppressive, greedy, cruel, money-hungry, manipulative, selfish, soulless, corrupted, and a stranger only had to ask one question in order to learn this about us: “So… Which school do you go to?” The shame and self hate and guilt was enshrined in our very identity, carved on our characters like the swear words on the old school desks.
The love of money is evil. Everyone knows that. It makes your hands green. And to be rich implies that your parents love money.
People don’t give rights to rich kids. Rich kids don’t deserve luck or opportunities. This is the attitude that became largely popular in the 1990’s and can be seen as demonstrated by the adverse discrimination displayed by the Top Universities against public school kids in recent years. It meant that all our money, our ‘one-hundred-and-twenty-four’ grand actually counted against us now. Everybody made a huge fuss, of course it seemed unfair, but it was only a symbol of a larger issue.
Dreams belong to the poor.
That’s what we were being told, over and over and over again. That’s what we learn from movies, songs, heroes, magazines, even from some of the rogue fairytales, those that slipped through our fingers, and those whose authors were probably poor themselves or communists. Commonly, fairytales were written by Crown appointed scribes, little stories for the little princesses, written for people like Amanda perhaps, stories personalised for whoever was paying. I’m sure that the parents of some Amanda-like child commissioned Goldilocks in the 18th Century, a child who had beautiful hair and thought she owned other people’s breakfast cereals. Occasionally, though, some slipped through the net. Some renegade freelance artist would pin together the plot of a life where the poor man triumphs, where the hero wears rags and later glass slippers.
I’m thinking mainly of Cinderella of course. The traitor! A genre that had previously been so unanimously on our side comes up with this… this! About a poor girl who makes good. Although thankfully even here it is really a triumph for middle-classes; for good over bad, not poor over rich. Cinders had been part of a nice middle class family, and then her mother had died, and it had been her (also middle-class) stepmother that had condemned her to a life of domestic servitude in the cellar. She was still middle class at heart, or higher, like all the other fairy tale heroines, it wouldn’t have been romantic if she’d been grotty and smelly with crooked teeth and bad breath – if she’d been really poor, and ended up with Prince Charming, the epitome of upper class.
But still her plight demonstrates the point: dreams are now the exclusive preserve of the poor.

They are their sole possessors. Only they exist in depths significant enough to qualify to ‘work their way up.’ It was like Labour Government criteria on an ethereal level, you’re parents had to declare bankruptcy before you were issued out your share of ‘chance.’ Poor people made good make good tabloid stories; they make good heroes, good role models. Even when the tabloids covered the Pubic School/University scandal they focused on the stories of poor kids who had got into private school via bursaries or scholarships, to make their Oxford rejection letters even more poignant, even more WRONG.
I’m not whining. I’m not trying to make out like upper class is the new underclass, or anything like that, but its not all picnics or pillow fights.
Nothing about the lead singer of “King Legend’s Eleven” marked him out as particularly middle class. Their music was alternative American rock pop with poignant ballads, soaring chords, lilting melodies and varying beats all perfectly executed on drums, two guitars and a Yamaha upright piano.
I’d read it in a magazine. His name was Jordan Christianson and he was a nice boy from an educated middle class family from Southern California. He’d had piano lessons when he was nine and had started writing songs a few years later when a family member died. For so long now I’d seen poverty as synonymous with star quality and success that standing here, watching the band play out, blue lights in his hair, I was amazed that something so great could come from someone so clean and comfortable. Ice white smoke snaked around the piano legs like Narnia peeping through the wardrobe – and such reckless abandon on that piano – I guess it is a very middle-class kind of instrument after all, and I realised that you didn’t have to be defined by your parent’s bank accounts. And I saw a route to freedom.
But it was too late. Much too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late.

They laid the unmoving bodies out on Mary Sweet’s garden lawn: pretty maids all in a row. That’s how they looked. Like dolls. Puppets. Their strings all been cut.
I saw this only briefly upside down as Nick carried me from the rubble. I saw it again, a few weeks later, on the news, the footage.
I don’t know if you’re wondering who died. It didn’t matter to me then, and it hasn’t mattered to me since. I suppose Aria died, Chimney certainly died, and Sheridan of course and Nat. As far as I know Violet, Inga and the other Charlotte survived.
I’m not sure if Mary Sweet died, but I remember a rather distressing image of her under a pile of rubble groaning, with a lot of her hair and several teeth missing. It was like something from a ghost train. A couple of other teachers were paralysed or brain damaged by falling bricks. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. Gosh, no! I’m not sure what it was supposed to be like. That’s the closest you’ll get from me to remorse.
I guess you might say, how was it supposed to be? That’s what you’d all be thinking, huh? Come on Kit, how else could it have turned out? And I can hear the bitterness. And I would reply simply, wistfully with these words:
Glorious. Poetic. Necessary. Not violent. Not bloody, violent.

The band assembled on stage. Jordan took up his place at the piano. There were two bottles of water placed on top.
Sheridan stumbled on to the stage, holding the end of the rope soaked in petrol. Mr Hampton struck up a chord on the organ, next to the fire extinguisher.
Blue spotlights found his head. He turned slightly, smiled at the audience. The smile spread radiance where there was darkness, implored the vast nothingness bored by pain, expanded to fill the abyss with light.
I wasn’t there so I don’t know how Sheridan looked. I can imagine Mrs Sweet stood up at this point, more annoyed than anything else. And then she saw the fuse in Sheri’s hand, dripping liquid (what was it now? liquor, nail polish remover? So long ago…) Mary’s expression changed, she was frightened, but couldn’t find the right words in her pre-programmed head. There was no precedent to draw from, she was speechless.
Jordan opened his mouth and began to sing. His voice was like honey flowing upwards, up a washboard. Every time the song lifted it took with it our souls. I wanted to live up there: up there where the high notes lived: Everything seemed good there. It seemed like a peaceful, magical childhood place, right up there among the blue lights and the high notes. I felt other peoples sweat soaked flesh press against my skin and I realised I was already there.
The school choir were still involved in their rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime”. It was one of the school’s favourites: A classic. Especially now, in the Summer term, the last day of the Summer term. They were doing harmonies or something; their faces grotesquely contorted with the effort of apparent serenity, their mouths open in wide ‘O’s like the mouths of inflatable sex dolls.
Jordan reached the chorus, and everyone knew the words. They were singing their lungs out, seemingly regardless of breathing; they didn’t stop to take a breath.
As the song continued, some of the more observant crowd members (probably lawyers, not aristocrats – nouveau – less lazy) began to stand, looking at Sheri; an anxious murmur ran through the crowd like wind through a field of corn.
Sheridan turned to Mary Sweet.
Jordan turned his head to the crowd.
He was smiling, Sheridan was not;
Both illuminated the room.
What’s that line in a song, any song, which makes the song? What’s it called? You know – the one that rings all the bells. The line that if they don’t know all the lines of the song, they know that one. The one that triggers the adrenaline. Jordan was on top of the piano now. On the key line his voice was inaudible, drowned out by the crowd’s singing. He threw himself into the crowd.
There was a two second delay after Sheridan Steeler lit the fuse. Then the floor boards erupted. Imagine a piece of felt with a thousand drawing pins placed side by side on top so that no felt is visible. Then imagine lighting a bottle of whiskey beneath it. The chairs in the main hall, complete with the people on them, were propelled upwards and outwards: they hurled through space fixing themselves at right angles in the balconies or in window pains that promptly shattered. Then the balconies themselves collapsed. The walls were being pulled inwards.
I felt a blow to the head. It was a crowd surfer wearing oversized boots. He kicked me again as he was being pulled off. Someone swore at him. They just wanted to hear the music.
I prefer not to think of the actual details of who died next, when and how. The fact is, to me, they’re all dead now. They’re lucky. They are the lucky ones. I have to keep on living.

: 01 Mar 2007 21:26 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Earth

On March 31st 2010, a Physicist named Joshua Alexander disproved the existence of God. The announcement was made to the Houses of Parliament, and broadcast on a national television network, at exactly 2pm. Alexander, an ashen-faced man with glasses, read weakly from a piece of paper, whilst the formula was projected onto a plasma screen behind him.

At 3pm it was on every TV channel and radio station. Well known personalities had been recruited to ease the message into the public: sports heroes were smiling at the autocue; kid’s presenters were explaining the formula slowly, in layman’s terms; there were subtitles for those whose first language was not English, and signers in the corner of the screen for the deaf.

At 6pm, I left the capital to see my parents. They lived in a small village, which had so far escaped the pillaging, raping, and cannibalism that had sprung up in all major cities across Europe. On the bus there I watched a small child get up to offer her seat to an old lady. The girl’s mother laughed.

“Cathy,” She said “Sit down. You don’t have to do that anymore” She rubbed the girl’s head and glanced round, embarrassed, as though her daughter’s inclination had been foolish but adorable: “Old habits die hard!”

At 9pm Alexander was interviewed by Paxman on a special edition of Newsnight.
“What did you think you were doing?”
“What we mainly had in mind” The physician looked even paler than before “Was the Middle-East Peace Crisis. The problems in Ireland, Al Qaeda, Iraqis. I really didn’t think it would make that much difference. I mean the Humanists, the Buddhists; they’d managed to live morally for years without the existence of a God-”
“Didn’t it ever cross your mind that some people need theistic beliefs? That that’s why they believe… believed the things they did..? Did you not know the disease you would unleash?”
“You call truth a disease?” Paxman didn’t answer.

At 10pm, they imposed the New Order. At night time people would be required to record a vocal diary entry into a microphone, which would be transmitted to the local headquarters, held in ex-churches. Morality level would be calculated and henceforth, December 25th would be known as judgement day, on which people are assigned their punishments or rewards. One incentive was a sedative/heroin hybrid, nicknamed “Paradise”. If you’d been really moral they’d cart you off to this white room, and you’d spend the whole day lying in a recliner with a gas mask over your face; it made you feel happy and peaceful they said.

At 10:30 pm they showed an advert for it on the BBC: the one I saw was with Nelson Mandela. He was stood in a white room, next to a white recliner, giving his thumbs up.

At 11 pm President Clinton offered a formal apology to the Former Soviet Union, who had, as it turned out, been right all along. Quarter of an hour later, Mandela shot himself.

: 01 Mar 2007 21:23 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Unfortunate Noses

She was thirteen when she first had sex. The man was thirty-two and wore a straw hat, and they had gone to the yellow field behind the farm house, with a plough-man’s dinner of smiles of apple, cheese chunks and husks of bread and after it was finished, she couldn’t remember his name, or the colour of his hair, or anything except for the sky. Quite why she thought of this now, sitting opposite a man whose face she knew better than anyone’s in the world, she wasn’t sure. The age gap was similar but the situation couldn’t be more different. Instead of hopping a fence and getting straight to it on the spread-out crumble of a muddy field, this was their seventh date, of sorts, with no more physical contact than a cheek kiss, the stroking of her palm with his index finger, the grazing of the fine down on her knee with his grown-up trousers. The menu which she held between two shaking fingers showed a three course meal a good deal more complex than the Cox and cheddar selection of that earlier occasion.

His sexual history read like a catalogue, and like buying from a catalogue he regretted most of the choices he had made, done so on image-basis alone. He always imagined that the appearance of a thing bore some steady correlation to its substance – that the way a girl dressed, or gazed with big eyes across the room told something about their character, but each time this proved untrue. His favourite type were those with slightly unfortunate noses – too big, or crooked, or hooked: he saw a beauty that he imagined other men missed, and this made him feel that his attraction was personal, and that they would be grateful for it.

She had a perfect nose, in his eyes – meaning it was grossly disproportionate to her face. It reminded him of his own. With her the problem of unwrapping was irrelevant; he had seen her from every angle and knew not to expect surprises. She felt a sudden urgency to order, but what she wanted was not on the menu – a happily ever after, with this man, the white picket fence – all the things which would seem cliché to every other couple in the restaurant, but which in this situation seemed burningly original, eccentric.

His love for her was genuine. Last night when he pulled the little linen blankets up to the chins of his children he felt a deep regret seep into every inch of his skin: if only they were hers. If only, and he could love them better. He had to scold himself under his breath for such a stupid wish, children as beautiful as that could never equate with this love of theirs. For one, they’d probably have six fingers, or learning difficulties, isn’t that what were always told is the end product of a love like this? Still, it’d be a pretty safe bet they’d have unfortunate noses.

: 01 Mar 2007 21:20 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Epicurean thought–bud

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;
remember that what you now have was once among the things
you only hoped for.

-Epicurus

: 24 Sep 2006 17:53 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Reality Principle Essay –Draft

‘Today… sexual freedom has unquestionably increased… [At the same time,] sexual liberty is harmonized with profitable conformity’ (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization). Comment, expanding on Marcuse’s assertion regarding the alignment of freedom with conformity.

When Herbert Marcuse writes of the profitable conformity with which our current sexual freedom is harmonized, he doesn’t specify the ideological frameworks that constitute this conformity. Instead, at the end of chapter 5 of his essays on Eros and Civilization that analyse Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he writes that “the history of the transformation of Eros in Agape” has “still to be written” (107). It is the purpose of this essay to draw a correlation between these statements, and claim that the relationship between Eros, and a higher, monogamous (though not necessarily religious) form of love lays waste to the declaration that our generation is more truly free than previous ones; rather, the “profitable conformity” taking the form of a “true-love” myth compromises our freedom whilst we are distracted by token allowances of sexual “perversion”. The process works rather like an act of sleight of hand, with man focusing on the card tricks of polygamy through consecutive monogamy or casual promiscuity, whilst unbeknown to him, a magician nicks his actual liberty.

To argue that man is freer sexually than before, one would have to posit that he has ceased to give up “momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but ‘assured’ pleasure” (30), but this is not the case. For whilst engaging in the sort of “momentary” and “destructive” pleasure that appear to constitute sexual freedom, he is never free from the ideology that posits a monogamous love as the goal of sexual activity, and ultimate insurer of happiness. He is still acting under the logic of conformity since his libido remains diverted “from [his] own body toward an alien body of the opposite sex”(48), and even if his pleasure is truly self-centered, he is likely to be aware of the limits of such a state of pleasure, and its inability to fulfill his “emotional needs”.

How did such a state develop, and how has it slipped under the ideological radar? Through the creation of a cultural concept of “true-love”, sex has become aim-inhibited in a whole new way. Is their anymore telling proof of this transition than the renovation of the old phrase “making love” in the 1960s to represent not simply “courting” but actually the sex act itself? Progresses in contraception and the legalization of abortion at this time meant that people were no longer expected to have sex for procreative reasons. Something had to be done to ensure that “energies [were] directed way from… sexual activities on to… work.”(33) The confabulation of the idea of “true-love” with intercourse is powerful enough as an idea to bring the logic of capitalism, of conformity and of a utilitarian work ethic back into the bedroom.

“True-love” is defined for the purpose of this essay as a monogamous attachment to another, which may involve sex but is considered morally superior to an attachment based on sex alone. As an ideological vehicle of repression it is transmitted in the old and obvious ways, first by “parental influence”(42), in this sense an inherited belief like any moral code, and then by the “societal and cultural influences”(42) that concern themselves with “what people call the “higher” things in human life.”(42) This explains why people continue to experience sexual guilt despite the virtual disproving of a God, or absolute Good, as the “true-love” belief is still “introjected” into the ego, as the ultimate “aim” of sexual practice and experience; in this way sexual freedom is still limited by the yoke of guilt.

The “true love” myth is also strengthened by the “fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot)”(44) which originally necessitates the reality principle. Such a fact sustains the love myth in two ways: firstly, it is because of Ananke that a civilized people is inclined to accept a form of pleasure that is delayed and secure over an instant, shimmering form because they believe “existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay.” Such an unspoken agreement underpins all classic wedding vows, in promises to “forsake all others” and care for the other “in sickness or in health.” Marcuse’s words would not seem out of place in the office of a marriage counsellor, when he explains that “whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the procurement of the means for satisfying needs… for the duration of the work… pleasure is ‘suspended’ and pain prevails.”(44-5) Beliefs like this sustain, daily, marriages built on a faith in love.

Secondly, the ideology of love itself depends on the fact scarcity, the idea that an individual is lacking by himself. Never is this made clearer than in the relationship between the concept of “true love” and advertising, or as Marcuse might call it, the “hierarchical distribution of scarcity.”(47) The ideology of love and the advertising industry are conspirators, existing in a symbiotic relationship: with advertising reminding the public of their lack and love offering itself up as the solution. It is in this way that sexually “free” acts, those enacted outside of monogamous relationships or which are not inhibited by the aim of procreation still seem empty, because they are not helpful in combating scarcity. Scientific studies continue to show that people find themselves attracted to those who have qualities they would like for themselves. Through attraction to another person, and then affiliation to them through the love bond, one is seeking to diminish the sense of lacking.

Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth talks of beauty in similar terms, positing that a myth claiming an objective standard of female attractiveness is perpetuated by our patriarchal society to make women feel constantly inadequate, so men can retain power, and also links this myth to capitalism, since it upholds billion dollar beauty industries. While her argument is sound, Wolf’s analysis is only skin deep. The “beauty myth” is only one manifestation of the larger myth of “true love” that Wolf, and others, too firmly entrenched in this ideology, do not interrogate. The “true love” myth not only encapsulates these industries, “the $33 billion a year diet industry, the $20 billion a year cosmetics industry, the $300 million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry”(Wolf, 1991), (since most women do not use them for “beauty’s sake” but, as Wolf admits, to reach a “true-love” goal, and “get a man”,) but also all dating industries, much of the self-help book market, much of the greeting card industry and, arguably, all of the pop music industry. Rather than just being the result of a patriarchal hierarchy however, the “true-love” myth, which exists in most cultures, derives from the universal experience of the reality principle as Freud describes it, the acknowledgement that full satisfaction of desires is neither possible nor advisable.

Beauty, sex and love become conflated in the act of repression. This process occurs because, as Marcuse notes, “the pleasure of smell and taste is ‘much more of a bodily, physical one, hence also more akin to sexual pleasure’”(47). Through the medium of repression these senses become associated with the baser elements of “perverted” sex, whilst love, the “transcendent” version, becomes focused on “the more sublime pleasures”(47) experienced from appearances (“The sight of something beautiful”(47)).

The “true-love” ideology is a formation of conformity that rivals claims we are any freer sexually than previous generations; at the same time it is profitable in the sense that it tends to the aims of the reality principle. But it is also profitable in the more general, economic sense, underpinning capitalism by transferring the worth ethic to the bedroom, by stimulating advertising, and spreading scarcity, and also in this second sense profitable to the reality principle, since capitalism itself represents for the average man, a deferral of pleasure in favour of security. There are several obvious parallels between capitalism and love: both operate on a series of exchanges, depends on needs, on scarcity. And, to use Marx’ terms, perhaps love represents the ultimate fetishism, the abstraction of social relations from physical ones, derived as it is to be an aesthetic alternative to sex.

This perhaps explains the rise of the “true-love” myth in the later 19th and 20th centuries, and how in the reality principle relay it was appropriately timed to take over the rod of sexual repression from the field of religion. In fact, in many ways the “true-love” myth has much in common with that other core myth of modern society: Christianity, and on closer analysis one can see exactly how the concept of “true-love” gathered ground as belief in religion trailed off.

The “true-love” form, one that combines attachment, sex and monogamy in a 3-way ideological marriage, first appeared in the 16th Century, just prior to the Reformation, when the church was undergoing a crisis as Henry VIII adopted Protestantism to advance his own love connection to Anne Boleyn. It was quickly accepted by the literary establishment as a convenient way to deliver security to a fractured generation.

Perhaps the best example of how easily this new, trendy love could be bolstered, like a crutch, onto the wounded religion, is found in the 17th Century poetry of father of metaphysics John Donne. Beginning his life as a dedicated catholic, most of Donne’s earlier poems are devoted to sex and seduction, but also the transcendent, religious love of a man for a woman, found in poems such as “The Canonization”, which uses doctrinal terminology to elevate the speaker’s romantic relations above the level of mortal, bodily pleasure. Later, on conversion to Protestantism, Donne inverts this tactic, now using the language of “true-love” to represent his devotion to God.
The love between Adam and Eve presented by Milton in Paradise Lost has all the components of “true-love”: monogamy (somewhat compulsory), attachment, and sex; furthermore Milton shows this love as the only thing that can compromise Adam’s love for God, thus subliminally advancing love as an appropriate substitute for religion.
In Romeo and Juliet, practically the set-text for “true-love”, Shakespeare, born 17 years after Henry VIII’s death, has Romeo stressing the transcendence of love by using the imagery of pilgrimage to seduce his desired:

ROMEO
[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Even from the beginning then, the “true-love” concept was linked to religion, in order to provide it with its mythical status, and inject it with a transcendence, an otherworldly power, which would come to prove vital when the time came for it to inherit, on God’s death, the throne of religion.

In an essay by Terry Eagleton on “The Rise of English Studies”, the author details how Literature seized the “hearts and minds of the masses” (Eagleton, 22) as the grip of Christianity weakened. He writes that “If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English Studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: “the failure of religion”.”(22) The same case can be made for the “true-love” myth, since much of the evidence Eagleton uses can be applied as convincingly to this ideological formation.
Eagleton states that the decline in religious conviction was “particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control. Like all successful ideologies, it works much less by explicit concepts or formulated doctrines than by image, symbol, habit, ritual and mythology.”(23) As far as symbols go, it would not be an overstatement to say that the heart is the new cross. On love merchandise everywhere, it is joined by cupids, and doves, noticeably images not marked by particular secularity themselves. Habit and ritual must be two of the most obvious symptoms of a “true-love” relationship, although these probably take the form less of weekly attendance to mass, than regular phone calls, repetitive sex acts and mutual past-times. As for the mythology of love, this is candidly perpetuated by the media, and by literature, that present “true-love” as though it has existed forever- T.V. dramatisations set during Ancient Greek or Roman Times or in the Dark Ages continue to show characters embroiled in the same sort of relationships that didn’t exist until hundreds or even thousands of years later. Furthermore, this love is unfailingly glamorised, and represented as the aim of life, source of happiness, and only hope of salvation in a fallen world.

Like Eagleton’s conception of literature, “true-love” is “experiential, entwining itself with the deepest unconscious roots of the human subjects.”(23) Its power is universal, no-one is immune from the strength of this ideology, and in this “it provides an excellent social ‘cement’, encompassing pious peasant, enlightened middle-class liberal and theological intellectual in a single organization.”(23) In this way it can be seen, like literature, as a prime subconscious deterrent of revolution, since as Eagleton notes, if you “deny to the working-class children any common share in the immaterial, and presently they will grow into men who demand with menaces a communism of the material.”(25) True, romantic love is a perfect way of rationing out harmless immateriality, and, like literature, can “serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people… and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.”(25)

Eagleton states that literature is the perfect solution to preventing political action because “reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative activity [that will curb in the working classes] any disruptive tendency to collective political action”(25) but whilst this is true, solitary time is thinking time, and as Marcuse points out, one of the maxims of the media in its role as status quo defender, is that “the individual is not to be left alone.”(Marcuse, 52) In terms of maintaining the status quo, even better than being alone with a book that could provoke stimulus for independent thought, is to be left alone with an individual as firmly entrenched in ideology as you, and for your time to be spent in aim-inhibited activity, that kills energy and exists under the guise of an act of purchase on your share of immateriality, an activity that promises to “convey timeless truths, thus distracting the masses from their immediate commitments.”(26) Through love, the sex-act is transformed into most fervent activist for the causes of the reality principle, inhibited by the aim of emotion production and augmentation, supporting capitalism and oppression. Its acceptance was also alleviated by the “deep trauma of the war”(30) of 1914-18 which left the public with a “spiritual hungering”(30), and every war in the 20th Century since then has only strengthened the value of love in a “love-less” world.

None of this is to say the feelings of love do not exist, just as the feelings of faith genuinely exist, but these feeling can, with the progresses in science, be explained away at a chemical level. We are a point in history where belief in a transcendent, un-provable God actually makes more sense than belief in the “true-love” myth, since an omnipotent God could exist in a reality outside of rationality, but a concept of transcendent “true-love” would depend on a Godly authority or at least absolute good to validate its power.
These speculations have strong philosophical foundations. Marcuse mentions how “Nietzsche exposes the gigantic fallacy on which Western philosophy and morality were built- namely, the transformation of facts into essences, of historical into metaphysical conditions”(103), a fallacy responsible for the deification of love from a chemical fact, into a transcendent and eternal essence. In Phenomenology of the Spirit Hegel writes of how “When mere consciousness reaches the stage of self-consciousness, it finds itself an ego, and the ego is first desire: it can become conscious of itself only through satisfying itself in and by an ‘other’” (99) and it is easy to see how this yearning becomes channelled into monogamy, in order that this satisfaction is secured. As for the circle that “comprises the whole: all alienation is justified and at the same time cancelled in the universal ring of reason which is the world”(98) it is no large stretch to see in this the wedding ring used to cement “true-love” bonds and envelop them in completeness and satisfaction.

So what is the problem with the conformity found in a myth of “true-love” that seems both profitable and necessary? The problem is the same as with all current forms of repression arising from the reality principle; they depend on an excuse of a state of scarcity that no longer exists. Just as how with the progress in medicine and the economy, third-world starvation is no longer a given but the result of political choice, so too, is long-term monogamy no longer required. It seems viable that the idea of monogamy arose out of the female’s need to be protected and fed by the male whilst pregnant and therefore unable to find food or defend herself. Now, however, with the invention of reliable contraception, pregnancy is no longer a necessary consequence of sex. Additionally, the arrangement of the current economic system and modes of human behaviour mean women don’t need men to protect or feed them as in cave times and this independence will only increase with further technological and political advances.

As Marcuse puts it, “a theory of civilization which derives the need for repression from [the fact of scarcity] has become irrational.”(84) When stating that “the morbid romanticism” of the “Tristan myth” is “in a strict sense ‘realistic’” (86) Marcuse means that it conforms to the reality principle, but since the reality principle is no longer rational, the idea of “unhappy love” which permeates “the great literature of Western Civilization” is no longer rational or necessary either. Marcuse notes the relationship between monogamy and sexual conformity but does not go as far as to see love itself as part of the problem. It is not just “unhappy love” that relies on the faltering reality principle, but all “true-love”, since all depends on the fact of scarcity.

Why does the myth of “true-love” prevail despite the growing irrationality of the reality principle? One could argue that a desire for scarcity itself, for lack, for something to want, is included in the destruction drive “Thanatos”, whilst the Eros drive is preoccupied with the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction. The reality principle therefore will always be required, designed not to apologise for the unavoidable fact of scarcity, but to reconcile the conflicting drives: one that desires freedom from “want”, the other wanting “want” itself. As Richard Schoch, author of The Secrets of Happiness puts it, “one secret of happiness is to moderate pleasure.”(The Independent, Apr. 06) This is not a new idea but its continued perpetuation provides good reason for the continued perpetuation of the reality principle, and by extension, the true-love myth.

In Freud’s anthropological speculation he writes of a situation in which “the king is slain by the people, not in order that they may be free, but that they may take upon themselves a heavier yoke, one that will protect them more surely from the mother.”(Marcuse, 67) The “unquestionabl[e]” increase of sexual freedom in the 20th Century mirrors this symbolic history. Sexual repression, in the form of the King, is lessened, but only so the sons of this repression can take on the heavier burden of “true-love” – a covert and less easily defeatable form of protection from pleasure and satisfaction, represented by the mother. This is the harmony of profitable conformity with freedom, a balancing act where liberty is mediated through love.
The last word must go to Marcuse for noting that just because something previously presented as truth can now be recognised as ideology, does not mean it has ceased to be useful, profitable even, to our civilized society, since an “ideological character does not change the fact that [the] benefits are real.”(89)

Works Cited.

Eagleton, Terry. The Rise of English. Literary Theory. Oxford: Bail Blackwood, 1983. p. 17-53.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1950.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1955. p.29-107.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Oxford: Heinemann Publishing, 1993.

Wolf, Naomi. “The Beauty Myth” (extract). 3 Apr. 2006.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:50 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Manual

Don’t like the form much, think it’s a bit of a gimmick. still the point stands – something about alienation, and what distance from ourselves techonogy designed to bridge literal distance brings

Manual

B4 thy invntd txtn
I wndr wot ppl did
Wit thr fngrs
2mke thr lovrs
Hot n wet n cnfsd?
The 1st tme u touchd me
On the nsde, my
Fone vibratd.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:37 |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sea Bass – a sestina

Sea Bass

On the way home, you thought it would be nice for us
to stop at Sainsbury’s. We could – you had the idea
– make sea bass, “like we used to”, although we only did it twice.
We went around the garden maze of aisles
all brightly lit as though they were the line spaces
on a sheet being Xeroxed, picking out things

to buy with glee as though with things
we could put substance back into the lucid hypothetic of “us”.
Pushing that surrogate pram through the spaces
in conversation, newly formed during our break (your idea)
and round cans of tinned fruit stacked in isles
we found ourselves visiting the same spots twice

twice
as we gradually remembered the required things
ticking them off as we picked them from the aisles.
We needed parsley so we got parsley (this ease of this wish-granting mocked us),
a light bulb of garlic containing the idea
of a gleeful lemon, a puckered up exemplar of Space’s

first child that full smiling lights all spaces.
And then the fish itself, I made you wink twice
at the assistant to catch her eye (after all, this idea
was yours) and looked at all the icy things
in their dry aquarium – how like us
the bass inert on chilly beds, with frozen smiles

like the cast of a forced marriage grinning in the aisles.
We checked out, and hopscotch-ed through the parking spaces.
Back home, I stood over the counter and you made a fuss
as I grated garlic into butter and lemon rind, twice
asking me to be careful. With the fish it was different, you knew how dead things
have to be prodded, and slashed deeply on both sides. The idea

being the butter can seep in and infuse, like the idea
that through the slits of Jesus faith can permeate the aisles.
In bed you asked me if I felt things
between us at the supermarket, then we went about filling the spaces
that could not be filled with shopping, by fucking, twice-
for a week after my fingers smelt of lemon and garlic and us.

Twice together, now twice apart, I knew then, when you asked
I could never choose the idea of us over crafting a self out of the spaces
choosing things daily from the aisles of the heart.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:33 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The first time my boyfriend slept with someone else

The first time my boyfriend slept with someone else

he said I came to mind
in odd ways. how I would
have laughed to see him a

jester, a nine AM
fool, stumbling home, motley
dressed in half yesterday’s

tux and half tomorrow’s
skate-wear, a girl’s backwards
cap, shirt tail poking out

over his waist band, tie
a make-shift belt after
the button lost in a

battle-field of passion.
how I would have been proud
to see his confidence

talking to said girl and
others, how his thought of
me smiling shepherded

him back to her hotel.
he said I didn’t come
to mind when she was on

top, and he didn’t tell
me how they slept, whether
they held each others bodies

like sobbing refugees
or if he lay like a
pencil, drafting that night

through graphite impotence
into a love-letter
of apology for me

or like the bent Crosier
of a bishop, his hands
folded respectfully

in prayer to beg amends
from our final false god:
Love.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Our love is nothing like Leamington in spring

This is an older poem about the natural versus the constructed (artificial)

Our love is nothing like Leamington in spring

so I shall not go for a walk in the park with you today

what do you want us to do?

stand there like imposters
clipped onto each other like
lifers, like the accused
when we are accused
of nothing?

or the dogs, threaded to
their owners, that pull on the choke chain
until their snouts tint slightly
with forget-me-not?

a dark ink blot on
their watercolor landscape
we would be holding hands
and not feel

the life-force wind flapping
wildly round us, tearing at our hair
the skirt of your coat jacket

would not see

the squirrel who alone
can pick and choose
which kernels are worth keeping

the solipsism of the water in the lake
that draws from itself into pleated fountains
gives back to itself
and needs no other

so lets not go for a walk
lets closet ourselves in my bedroom room
and shut each other’s sense
of bluebells and daffodils
with kisses to the eyelids

we’ll busy ourselves
in the cloistered dark and pray to god
without light, the seeds of love
we planted
can still bloom

: 24 Sep 2006 17:28 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem