marginal gloss

no earthly way of knowing

‘What is the password?’ says I.

‘Willy Wonka,’ says he.

I try willywonka.

Then I try WillyWonka.

Then I try Willywonka.

Then I try Willy Wonka.

Then I try WILLYWONKA.

Then I try willywonker and it works.

The new house is a very peculiar place. It has potential, but was apparently designed by a madman. There is a free-standing shower cubicle in one of the bedrooms. The microwave is in a little cupboard on top of the oven. My mother has forbidden use of the shower. There are these strange little cell-like rooms at the top of the house. More doors than I know what to do with. Everything is quite filthy. I don’t work particularly long hours, but the short days have meant I’ve still yet to see it in the daytime. But here we are, camped out with our beds in a sea of boxes. So far it feels like the worst holiday you’ve ever been on; the one in your Uncle George’s holiday home in France, the one he never visits anymore, and this is the part just before you all get food poisoning.

The animals are nervous. The dogs are fine, as long as somebody is home for them to follow around, but the cats, shut indoors all day, are getting twitchy. We take great care to try and contain them in certain rooms, to prevent messy badnesses and to try and get them accustomed to the place. Venturing downstairs at 6am this morning, when everything was still dark, Lucifer was crying and scratching most pitifully at the kitchen door, pleading with me to let him out. He is never normally a very vocal cat. But of course it was all a ploy and as soon as I opened the door a crack, he scurried out between my legs and hurtled up the stairs before burying himself well beneath the covers of my parents’ bed. Pandora is more relaxed; she ambles about the upper floors but mostly prefers a favourite old armchair, also in the master bedroom. The comfort of old smells. Neither particularly like the kitchen, perhaps because they have picked up the traces of an ex-cat.

‘The animals are anxious,’ we say, and ‘the animals are finding it hard to adjust,’ when we really mean ‘I am anxious,’ and ‘I am finding it hard to adjust.’ So often pets become the means to express that which we wouldn’t normally say to one another, for whatever reason.

house of breathings

‘Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind…All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at…’

I am very busy at the moment, dear reader, what with the houses in motion and all, but I had to find the time to write something about a story called The Insanity of Jones by Algernon Blackwood. Regular readers will hopefully be aware that ghost stories/novels are perhaps my favourites of all genre fiction, and Blackwood is one of those neglected but once-significant figures of the late Victorian/Edwardian era whose works seem to have fallen both out of critical favor and out of print. This post will contain serious spoilers, so if it sounds like the kind of thing you’d like, you can read the whole story here.

The Insanity of Jones tells the story of a man who works in a dull office job at an insurance company. He is deeply lonely, and convinced that his boss is out to get him, but he has a rich, intense and imaginative inner life. Jones imagines, or rather he knows that he is: ‘…the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one…’ Now, the story is subtitled ‘A Study in Reincarnation’, and the critic who has edited my edition of the text has taken this rather literally, claiming that Jones’ beliefs cover much the same ground as Blackwood’s — like a great many other proto-modernists the author was interested in the Theosophy of Mme Blavatsky, and was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. I don’t doubt that that had much to do with it, but to me the story becomes much more interesting when we dispense with the autobiographical readings. After all, don’t we all live deeper private lives outside the confines of the office? Don’t we all believe that we are to some extent the sum of our experiences?

Jones begins to have bad dreams:

‘The key made a harsh noise as it turned in the lock, and when the door swung open into a lofty hall they heard a confused sound of rustling and whispering, as of a great throng of people pressing forward to meet them. The air seemed full of swaying movement, and Jones was certain he saw hands held aloft and dim faces claiming recognition, while in his heart, already oppressed by the approaching burden of vast accumulated memories, he was aware of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages…He heard the wind singing round the walls and over the roof, and its wailing voice mingled with the sound of deep, collective breathing that filled the house like the murmur of a sea; and as they walked up the broad staircase and through the vaulted rooms, where pillars rose like the stems of trees, he knew that the building was crowded, row upon row, with the thronging memories of his own long past.’

This place is the ‘house of memory’, a version of the old renaissance concept of the ‘memory theatre’. This complicates things. It has not come out of nowhere; it’s an imaginative creation encasing the protagonist’s own past, and so it becomes unclear whether or not Jones’ belief in his own reincarnation (and the accompanying theory that his boss tortured him in another lifetime) can be in any sense true. The story seems to suggest that he’s a visionary rather than a madman (see the introductory paragraph) but isn’t this just a kind of parlor trick, an authorial flourish? I thought of Derren Brown throughout; as with his most recent work, what appears to be the disinterested voice of an omnipotent narrator is actually a careful construct intended to explain something obliquely through misdirection, if not exactly obfuscation.

I’m inclined to think that the ‘house’ and all its contents — which includes the story itself — is the work of Jones’ imagination. His delusions seem impossible, yet somehow not altogether implausible; Blackwood’s writing here has a chilling, claustrophobic internal logic all its own, a deviant sensibility sympathetic to the plight of a man who concludes the story by bringing a gun to work. He murders his boss in a scene that makes for incredibly unpleasant reading, despite having been written over a hundred years ago. Somehow the story feels as though it hasn’t aged at all. Theosophy may no longer be of any popular interest, and though the story may work as a portrait of a paranoid schizophrenic, I’m more interested in its imaginative consequences than its psychology. I suspect that the drive to relive and rework ‘history’ through the lens of our own personal idealism is still as strong today as it ever was.

ffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

You may have noticed that I do not swear very much on this blog. It is here as it is in life. My parents were for the most part very liberal with me when I was littler, but any use of bad language from me or my sisters would be enough to derail a whole conversation and bring on some pretty serious punishment. And it wasn’t hypocrisy because they never seemed to swear either, though now we’re all grown up, their tempers seem to have relaxed and they probably curse more in front of us than we do before them.

It’s not that I have any objection to it. On the contrary, few things can be more effective than a well-placed F-bomb*. I just can’t seem to swear very convincingly. My reaction to anyone using it as a kind of emotional grammar is one of curiosity and faint wonder; I sometimes feel like I’ve missed out on this whole world of language. I even try and avoid effing and blinding when writing fiction, but I’m against profanity for the sake of any supposed measure of authenticity anyway. I admire James Kelman but I’m happy not to write anything like him — indeed, being a nice middle-class white boy from a leafy West London suburb, how could I? Why would I? Why should I?

At work I’ve been enjoying the free (as in beer) Librivox edition of Right Ho, Jeeves, which is very pleasant, even though the American reading it will insist on pronouncing Wooster as ‘woooo-sterrrr’ rather than ‘WUSS-ter’. Somehow I’d never read any Wodehouse prior to this, and as a result I’ve been thinking about my own idiom over the last few days — Bertie’s first-person narration being, of course, a classic blend of idiom and idiocy. I tend to think that I don’t ‘have’ any such parlance because what I speak/write is (hopefully) Proper English, and as such is devoid of any kind of personal ‘fingerprint’ of formal style. But this is nonsense, and is just as silly and unhelpful as saying I don’t speak with an accent. My grammar is far from perfect, and if you were a particularly smart linguist, I’m sure you could trace out my background from the way I speak and write. Apparently, the late Stanley Ellis could not only tell where a person was born and raised from their accents, but also name towns and sometimes even get the names of their streets.

Writing in English appears to offer such a wealth of possibilities, but we shouldn’t mistake these for choices. Any well-read writer who believes they can make language do whatever they wan’t, can’t, or at least not convincingly — to some extent they’ll always be crippled by their own style while their ideal form hangs just out of reach.

* — See also arguably the greatest profantisers of all time, Derek and Clive. This clip is audio-only, and really REALLY NSFW.

Until relatively recently, I had never seen an episode of Seinfeld. I’d never even heard of it. Apparently it was for a while the most-watched sitcom in America, and even though my parents always used to watch the likes of Friends and Frasier, I don’t remember it being on in the house as a kid. I can only assume it wasn’t syndicated widely enough on terrestrial TV over here — anyway, my girlfriend has since introduced me to it in the form of episodes taken more or less at random from the whole run, an arrangement which is much more fun than I thought it would be. I realise all my observations will be rendered less pithy by most likely having been made before in a thousand different/better ways by other people who’ve seen every episode 83 times, but I’m going to write about it anyway.

It’s very funny, of course, and quite different to most other sitcoms: unlike Friends there’s little in the way of big, long plots which span whole seasons. There may be relationships which last a few episodes, but for the most part it’s less soapy, more episodic. All that lingers is the occasional running joke, and there’s certainly nothing like the more ‘serious’ romantic moments of Friends. It makes it neither more or less genuine, but more endearingly subjective, I suppose — what’s remarkable is that the worldview of each episode is so formulaic that it could only be the product of a single disturbed consciousness. (I haven’t seen any Curb Your Enthusiasm yet but if it’s anything like as funny as Adam Buxton’s impression of Larry David, my hopes are high.)

The whole thing is oddly disaffected. The characters seem to exist in a Kafka-esque world on the edge of hysteria, a reality where their self-serving aspirations are first flanked and later defeated by bad luck and petty bureaucracy. Personal relationships come second to inanimate, totemic objects, symbols which can can switch back and forth between meaningful and meaningless without a moment’s notice. Some of the product placement almost reaches the level of the (modern masterpiece) Josie and the Pussycats.

It makes me sad to think of all the things the show was so closely involved with for the space of an episode, only to then forget about them immediately afterwards — all those beloved jackets, childhood bicycles, old cars — all of which I imagine were consigned to a metaphysical closet in Seinfield’s apartment of presumably infinite proportions. The props may have been later bought for absurd prices and treasured by fans, but the ideal forms of those objects will lie forever in a kind of TV limbo, out there in the airwaves still radiating out into the universe.

I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

— P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

'kate moss: an icon of willpower and strength' →

Here witness Giles Coren battling against ‘the disastrous collapse of journalistic standards…bloggorrhoea, the web generally, and the Cowellisation of our culture’ by producing truly revelatory statements like ‘“Fat and happy” is a myth, a monstrous lie.’

Actually, he’s right to criticise the hypocrisy of a media which hysterically condemned Kate Moss’ comment (‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’) while banging on and on about weight loss all the time. But with an astounding lack of self-consciousness, what Coren’s completely failed to realise is that this ugly, meretricious thing he’s written is part of the very culture he claims to so despise. It’s worse even than his ‘instant-gratification, bling-bling, X Factor, fizzy pop, white-bread world’ because — well, call me old-fashioned, but I would have thought that getting a half-page in a national newspaper means you have a duty to do better than that shit rather than leaping into it and rolling around like an over-eager labrador.

Also, nobody likes you as much as Victoria Coren.

Moving house is regularly ranked amongst births, marriages and deaths as one of the most stressful experiences in life. Oddly, I had expected it to be more affecting than it’s been for me. I don’t feel wholly unmoved, but already part removed.

A little context: my family recently sold the house we’ve lived in for over twenty years (i.e. ever since I was born) in order to move into a smaller one not far away in Chiswick. The old place is just too big for our needs — it has five floors, including a loft conversion and a basement flat. For a long time now we’ve been trying slowly to give or throw away two decades’ worth of accumulated junk, but the house still feels full of stuff, even though the rooms are once again growing larger without bookshelves and pictures on the walls. This weekend, the removal men are coming to take away all the bulkiest non-essential furniture and put it in storage, leaving us with just the basics before the actual day of exchange next monday.

All this seems like a distant, impossible prospect to me, perhaps because I’ve never lived anywhere else for a substantial period of time — nowhere for more than a month or two, and never in any arrangement that was anything other than temporary. There was always here, the room from which I write this, waiting for me. But I realised just the other day that I’d be at work next monday, when the last of the furniture is carted out and the keys handed over, and that I won’t get to walk around the empty rooms, won’t get to say goodbye to the place. Despite the fact that I’ve been packing and preparing for weeks, that was the first moment where I really understood that I could never, never come back here again.

‘One can never go home,’ said somebody whose name I forget. Variations on that saying are common, the meaning roughly equivalent to the notion that you can never step in the same river twice: Kierkegaard’s frustration with the impossibility of true repetition. ‘Home’ as more of a idealistic construct than an actuality. And I agree — in a sense, I left the ‘home’ of my childhood many, many years ago. The house has never felt quite the same since I returned from university, and indeed its features and furnishings have migrated from room to room so many times that it seems to have existed in countless different variants over the years.

But the fact is that there is and must be such a thing as home; certain places impress themselves so strongly on our minds that we can never forget them. They will always be the hallways we feel our way through in the dark, the stairs our feet find by instinct, the rooms we visit in our dreams. It might even be more correct to say that ‘one can never leave home’.

My own favourite work of literature on this subject is a short story by Henry James called The Jolly Corner. The lightness of the title is misleading; next to The Turn of the Screw it’s arguably his finest and most disturbing ghost story. In it, a wealthy, successful middle-aged man visits his childhood home first out of curiosity, then as a matter of obsession, frequently wandering its empty rooms at night. He is hunting something — or is that something hunting him? What he seeks is himself, or rather his alternate self, not quite his id but a vision of what might have been, of youthful possibilities long since departed. The implication is not only that the most haunting of all ghosts are those which come from within the mind, but that the most frightening thing we might encounter on a dark night of the soul is ourselves:

‘He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style.  This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it.  On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge.  The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities.  What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy.  They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them—before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.’

Some names I have for my dog that are not my dog’s name:

• Piggle
• Pigdog
• Woo Woo
• Mr Woo
• Boggins
• Centrifugal grumble-pup (after Aldous Huxley)

inside the dignitas house →

‘Finally, this summer, the two-storey house in Pfäffikon was bought for around €1m (£880,000) – much of it raised by donations from members. A newsletter sent out this month to members has pictures of the site, holiday-brochure style, with alluring captions: “Beside lies a tiny lake; a little waterfall dabbles.” After the Heidi-esque scenery we have driven through, the location of the modern, blue-metal construction is rather a surprise. The house is in an industrial zone, in the shadows of a vast grey machine-components factory; to the left there are factories, to the right there are factories, in front there is a football pitch. It’s not that the place is exactly charmless, it is just a bit peculiar. To enter, guests make their way across wooden decking over a large goldfish pond (which does have a tinkling water feature), and then they arrive in a light, open-plan room, with a hospital bed (which reclines electronically) in one corner, and a large white sofa in another. There is another room with a second bed to die in across the hallway. By the bed there is a CD player and a few CDs – Offenbach’s Gaîté Parisienne and Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza – left by former clients. There are open boxes of tissues ready on the tables. The former owner had the constellation of Orion picked out in halogen lights in the ceiling. On the shelves there is a kitsch stone statue of a cherub, and a few slightly wilting orchids. There is nothing funereal about the place; instead the space is sunny, clean and neutral, not unlike a holiday rental apartment.’

A fascinating glimpse inside the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Blackly comic (’“We have had good weather for the last few weeks, so people don’t call us so much,”’) and thought-provoking, apart from this unsettling comment from the founder:

‘“In the second world war they closed the borders to Jews and those Jews who wanted to come here were repelled, and were murdered in concentration camps. And now we have people looking to end their lives in Switzerland and they are sent back and forced to live on. What is the difference? What is more cruel?”’

I call Godwin’s Law.