Messiaen And Surrealism

Olivier Messiaen in the Surrealist Context - Trans-Ideological Affinities

Surrealism is a term that has been used in connection with Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) more than any other composer. While the term is often used in a lax way, simply allowing hack critics to denote a certain perceived ‘weirdness’ of tone, the relationship between the composer and the surrealist aesthetic is worthy, perhaps, of a brief exploration.
It must be said at the outset that, as a musician and composer, Messiaen did not participate in the Surrealist movement. During the inter-war era the leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton (1896-1966), was – unlike the Zurich Dadaists – actually opposed to music in principle, excoriating composer-cliques such as Les Six as promoted in Paris high society by ‘fake poet’ Jean Cocteau. Furthermore, as ultra-humanist subversives and revolutionaries, the Surrealists’ militant, materialist, anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, anti-religious position would have rendered Messiaen persona non grata in their eyes. In the post war era the relationship between Surrealism and music changed, but primarily as a result of the rise of Bebop and the recognition of a fellow feeling with Afro-American black culture as enshrined in The Blues – the relationship between Surrealism and Western ‘classical’ art-music remains difficult and, in the main, uncharted territory.
The evolution of Messiaen’s development can be described as passing through three distinct periods and two distinct phases. Chronologically the Periods are (1) 1917-1936 (2) 1937-1949 and (3) 1949 to date. The first period is, naturally, a formative, early, ‘pioneering’ period. The second period a middle consolidation period, and the later third period, an era of ‘transmutation’, giving rise to works which extend the potentialities of the earlier periods to such a degree as to define a completely new phase of achievement without sacrificing continuity. In some respects, it seems that these three eras can be broadly divided into two distinct Phases of inner evolution. The first two, the ‘pioneering’ era and the ‘consolidation’ era, comprise works that may be defined as microcosmic and subjectivist, the last period comprises works of a more impersonal, macrocosmic mode.
To explain this analysis it is helpful to identify some salient works which also, by comparison with other works in other media, by different artists, may illustrate some overlaps between Messiaen’s music and Surrealism and the Surrealist ethos.

Early Period: 1917-1936
From the beginning Messiaen’s music derived from two modes of thought: a personal, subjectivist mode exemplified by the Preludes (1929) for solo piano, “etiolate mood-pictures still sunk in the prison of the self” to quote Malcolm Troop, and an hieratic, theological mode epitomised by the organ work Le Banquet Celeste (1926) or, even more starkly, by L’Apparition de l’Eglise Eternelle (1932). The Preludes recall and extend several works by Messiaen’s predecessor Claude Debussy (piano preludes like Voiles and La Cathedrale Engloutie (1910) or orchestral works such as Danse Sacree et Danse Profane from 1903). The label Impressionist has served to obscure the fact that Debussy was closely associated with the proto-Surrealist ethos of the fin de siecle French Symbolists, showing deep affinities with poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarme, themselves recognised as precursors of the Surrealist spirit. The piano Preludes of both composers seem like musical renditions of Redon’s lithographs. Messiaen’s 'Les Sons Impalpable du Reve' inhabits the same oneiric sphere as Redon’s pictures like the painting 'Yeux Clos' (1890) or the two lithograph series entitled Dans le Reve (1879) and Songes (1891)
The iconoclastic, Absurdism of late ultra-Symbolist Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry) and the abrasive nihilism of Dada have worked to obscure the roots of French Surrealism in the world of nineteenth century Symbolism. The Surrealists themselves always tended to emphasise their preference for the Symbolist tradition of poetic anarchism and revolt (Lautreamont, Rimbaud), rather than that of subjective, interior exploration. Despite clear parallels, the work of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was not seen as proto-Surrealist. Nevertheless from the present historic vantage point it is obvious that there is a line of continuity from the pre-Freudian world of Symbolist painting to the post-Freudian spirit of Surrealist endeavour. This is despite the fact that the neo-conservative religiosity espoused by many Symbolists would be seen as hopelessly retrograde from the Surrealist perspective. In fact both Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and, later, Olivier Messiaen inhabited the same pre-Surrealist cultural landscape of the Symbolist fin de siecle.
Another artist of the fin de siecle whose works seem to emanate from a similar domain to that traversed by Messiaen in his first pioneering period is the Belgian Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921). Pictures such as 'I Lock My Door Upon Myself' (1891) which project an atmosphere of spiritual isolation and psychic dissociation, or the remarkable 'Geste d’Offrande' (an image of an immobile figure frozen in ritual pose) encapsulate the muted mysticism of Messiaen’s theological mode. Messiaen’s title Les Offrandes Oubliees (1930) may not be a deliberate allusion to Khnopff - but it looks as if it should be.
Other works of Messiaen in similar vein include Diptyque (1929), Nativite du Seigneur (1935), L’Ascension (1933) and the impressive, archetypal L’Apparation de L’Eglise Eternelle. The monumentality of the latter work looks forward to the glacial peaks of Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964) and, no doubt unintentionally, demonstrates non-rational elective affinities with Gaudi’s unfinished Templo de la Sagrada Familia begun in 1883. The parabolic spires and delirious, sensual detail of Gaudi’s idiosyncratic Art Nouveau Barcelona cathedral could be an architectural premonition of Messiaen’s musical style; like Messiaen, Antoni Gaudi y Cornet (1852-1926) demonstrated, in his creative work, a phenomenological affinity with Surrealism without being, in the formal sense, Surrealist. Like his Catalan compatriot Dali, Gaudi represented an aesthetic phenomenon resistant to the apparent constraints of subsequent Surrealist ideology. Also, like Messiaen, Gaudi produced works of extreme, heretical individuality at variance, in a way, with the professed orthodoxy of belief both artists attributed to themselves. It was as though Religion provided an incitement for the imagination – an operative fiction.
Le Banquet Celeste was Messiaen’s first public work, an organ piece of unresolved dissonance and subversive stasis first performed in 1928 (the year of Breton’s Nadja, Bunuel and Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou and Aragon’s Traite du Style) four years after the publication of the Premier Manifeste (1924). Had any of the Surrealist avant garde, immersed in experiments with collage, automatism, word-scrambling and the Ducassian Encounter, attended the Paris performance of this piece they might have detected, despite the wilfully archaic façade, some signs of a sensibility attuned to the auditory equivalent of Convulsive Beauty, explosive-fixed and erotic-veiled. However the differences would also have been obvious. Messiaen was clearly establishing a traditional theological basis for his work; the Surrealists were fixated upon the chance incursions of the quotidian marvellous. These were ideologically irreconcilable positions, even though Messiaen was drawn to a ‘surrealist’ use of language. In his case this stemmed from rejection of the arid neo-classical formulations practised by middle-of-the road artists of the day, rather than the Dada experiments of Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Schwitters or, in France, of Breton and Soupault (Les Champs Magnetiques, 1920).
Messiaen’s formative, pioneering period corresponds to the proto-Surrealist movements of the previous fin de siecle generation. The reason for this is the bipolar modality of Messiaen’s creative thought, the complementary desires to penetrate the inner recesses of experience and the ‘mystical’ or theological imperative. Both tropisms tended to unleash unpredictable and powerful forces, finding expression in Messiaen’s unique, violent and monumental musical sound-forms. This musical language cannot be constrained by the Catholic theological framework espoused by the composer and can, therefore, be categorised as a manifestation of sur-reality in music, despite problematic personal, historical and cultural complications.

Middle Period: 1937-1949
The evolutionary difference between the works of Messiaen’s second period and his first is a difference in ‘depth’, not in a qualitative sense, but in a progressive sense: Messiaen’s musical explorations took him ‘deeper’, as it were, into the hinterland of his chosen terrain. In some the respects the works of his second period are more extreme, or appear so. The delicate, subjective mode of the piano preludes is overtaken by a series of works that are the most overtly surrealistic of the composer’s output.
Firstly there are the Poemes Pour Mi (1936) and secondly, Chants de Terre et de Ciel (1938), two song-cycles influenced by the translucent verse of Pierre Reverdy (hailed by Andre Breton as a precursor), set to piano music which complements rather than accompanies the words. This music echoes and cascades amid the metallic membranes on an inner cosmos where landscapes metamorphose into female bodies, like Pavel Tchelitchews’ painting 'Fata Morgana' (1940). Harawi, Chant d’Amour et de Mort (the title of a third song-cycle) marks a further, distinctive evolution of sensibility. It is the first part of a trilogy, the other two parts being the Turangalila-Symphonie (1948) and Cinq Rechants (1948). In Harawi (1945) the fluidity of the imagery and the unearthly pianism of the music combine to produce one of the most sensational and ‘surreal’ works of our age. The protagonist Piroutcha, a Peruvian incarnation of Wagner’s Isolde, participates with her lover in an extraordinary ritual dance amid atoms, rainbows, giant staircases, sacred birds and exploding galaxies of onomatopoeic utterances. The whole scenario is set in a vertiginous abyss where the moment of love-death is prolonged into an infinite star-less night:

Dans le noir, colombe vert,
Dans le noir, perle limpide
Dans le noir, mon fruit de ciel…

In Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiaen (1961) by Antoine Golea the composer says that a picture by the English Surrealist Roland Penrose called 'The Invisible Isle' (1936), also known as 'Seeing is Believing', inspired the section of Harawi entitled Amour Oiseau d’Etoile. The picture depicts the blond head of a beautiful young woman suspended upside down over an island city; her neck penetrates the low-lying cloud entering into planetary space above. From the bottom of the picture, extending upwards, are two hands in a gesture of yearning. Messiaen has said that this picture encapsulates the whole of Harawi.
The incantatory language of Harawi and Cinq Rechants is perhaps the most remarkable element in Messiaen’s ‘surrealism’. On the one hand it links him with a pre-surrealist tradition of linguistic experimentation, stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe. On the other hand it shows how close he was, coincidentally or otherwise, to contemporaneous Surrealist poetics – particularly the work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who was to die the year of Cinq Rechants. Although utterly apart philosophically, there is a trans-ideological affinity between Artaud and Messiaen, particularly the Messiaen of Harawi with its pre-Columbian mise en scene and cosmic-mythical scenario. There is an extremism in the work of both Artaud and Messiaen which discloses a universe of ritualistic ‘cruelty’ and depends, in part, on the creation of personalised hermetic languages based on dextrous collages of Eastern and Western elements. Artaud, in his dramaturgic researches, helped push Surrealist thought away from Western models, towards non-European themes and obsessions. This was, in some ways, an extension of the exoticism that attracted Debussy to the Balinese gamelan. Artaud saw in the stylised formalism of Balinese dance a way of rejuvenating the staid formalisms of Western theatre.
Messiaen’s linguistic usage evolved into a hybrid of French, Hindi and personal images encapsulated in names like Viviane, Ysault, Meduse and Orphee, all protagonists of Symbolist inner dramas, immortalised in paintings by, for example, Jean Delville and Gustave Moreau. Messiaen wrote glossolalia utterances such as

Ahi! O Mapa nama mapa nama lila, tchil…

or

Mayoma kalimolimo mayoma kalimolimo
t k tk t k t k…

These chants bear a strong generic resemblance to the archetypal poetic idiolect of Artaud’s semi-legendary ‘lost’ book Letura d’Eprahi Talli Tetr Fendi Photia O Fotre Indi (1934):

Calipa

Ke loc tispera

Kalispera

Enoctimi…

born in part, as was Harawi, out of a fascination for the myths and codices of Pre-Columbian America.
The trilogy is the high point of Messiaen’s para-surrealist output. It also highlights those aspects that set him apart from the Paris Surrealist Group of the inter-war period. His dissociation from politico-revolutionary concerns, the orthodox religious basis for his mysticism, his naïve association of earthly and heavenly love that is apparently at the opposite pole to Breton’s ‘mad love’ or amour fou. Messiaen’s explanations of his sublimated eroticism are most unconvincing when decked out in regressive, saccharine Catholic rhetoric.
Second period works comprise some of Messiaen’s best known pieces such as Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps (1941), Les Corps Glorieux (1939), Visions de l’Amen (1943) and Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus (1944). In all cases the convulsive beauty of the works themselves it at odds with the manifest orthodox religious ideological ground-base underpinning the composer’s speculative thinking. It might appear that, like Gerard de Nerval and J-K. Huysmans before him, Messiaen pushed beyond the limits of conventional theology into the borderlands of the heretical and occult; the only parallel for his synaesthesia colour-theory, for instance, is to be found in the works of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), an overt Theosophist. The numerological method he incorporated into his compositional technique can only be regarded as an example of occultism in music, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. Again, there are precedents in the pre-surrealist world of the Symbolists: Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s Alchimie du Verbe. With these works Messiaen attempted to resolve the underlying dualism implicit in his creative thought. He was at the limits of charted experience, and the music, particularly the piano music, reflected this, gaining in intensity and violence on every level from the cataclysmic to the insidious.

Later Period: 1949 to date
The works that followed these during the third Period from 1949 onwards are generally monumental, concerned with the outer gulfs and vastness of space or the vertiginous escarpments of glaciers. There are few works dealing with the inner life of the subjective individual. Like Mallarme with his revolutionary poem Un Coup de Des, Messiaen ventured into The Abyss. In this phase there is, however, one key figure with who Messiaen can be compared: arch-Dadaist and Surrealist Max Ernst (1891-1976). It is intriguing that between these two crucial figures there are a number of points of rapport.
During the late 1930s Max Ernst developed a distinctive form of visionary painting using the ‘decalcomania’ technique. Ernst continued this style into the 1940s with paintings like 'Europe After The Rain '(1942) and 'The Eye of Silence' (1944). Decalcomania is strongly identified with Ernst, although its discovery is usually attributed to Oscar Dominguez. Similar colouristic effects can be found, in prototype form, in some canvases by Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau and the technique was also used extensively by Leonor Fini (1918-1996). Many of her paintings from the 1960s seem to emanate from the same creative universe as the music Messiaen was composing during the immediate post-war period. For example works such as 'The Dormant Water' (1962), 'A Breathing Shadow' (1962), 'Sleep In a Garden '(1962), 'The Trough of Night' (1963) and 'The Long Sleep of Flowers' (1964) are almost exactly comparable to the soundscapes of Harawi and Turangalila. Decalcomania involves the use of colour figurations embedded in wet paint applied according to the laws of Objective Chance. The result is an eroded surface where decoration assumes an autonomous role, just as Messiaen exploited the effects of apoggiaturas and added notes. Ernst’s painting 'The Stolen Mirror' (1941) featured a ziggurat-dotted landscape strongly reminiscent of the mythical Peruvian setting of Harawi.
It is true that the works of Max Ernst are imbued with a corrosive black humour, blasphemy and cosmic irony quite alien to Messiaen’s conscious intentions. A typical example would be 'The AntiPope' (1942) which expresses an almost Satanic sensibility completely at odds with Messiaen’s joyful ecstasies. Yet nevertheless the static highly textured effect of the music finds a correlation here, as does the collage-like juxtaposition of ‘soundblocks’ in works like Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, which are intrinsically apocalyptic rather than Surrealist. Furthermore, in a series of Ernst pictures entitled, among others, 'The Nymph Echo' (1937), 'Nature at Dawn' (1938) and 'Joie de Vivre' (1936) the viewer is confronted with strangely Messiaen-esque visions: giant bird-headed creatures lurking amid luscious, fantastic blossoms and grotesque vegetation comprised of huge, leathery leaves. The vast dimensions of these alien worlds somehow prefigure the cosmic landscapes of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958); crystalline evocations of magical, hyper-real bird-life; bizarre avian deities, monuments to the birds. Messiaen’s later works such as Et Exspecto, Livre d’Orgue (1951) and La Transfiguration (1969) conjure up towering auditory edifices and vast canyons of sound. Mexican step-pyramids, echoing glaciers, vaults of stained glass, forests like giant cathedrals, bird-familiars – these are all the auditory counterparts of Ernst’s ‘great forests’ and ‘entire cities’. They are the auditory equivalents of the awesome geological landscapes and boundless spatial gulfs depicted in paintings like 'Mundus est Fabula', (1959) 'A Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice' (1960), 'Inspired Hill' (1950), 'The Twentieth Century' (1955) and 'The Sky Marries The Earth' (1964).
A shared fascination for avian life links Max Ernst and Olivier Messiaen. Ernst created innumerable bird-monuments. His birds are stylised, linear shapes, as depicted in 'Chaste Joseph' (1928) or 'The Interior of Sight' (1929). They are counterparts, in a visual medium, to the stylisation of birdsong achieved by Olivier Messiaen in numerous musical works. For both artists these supernal birds are more than a fixation, and their simultaneous appearance in the works to two great masters of the twentieth century cannot be merely coincidental – there is a link between Messiaen and the Surrealists, but that link is non-rational. Its existence reveals a creative imperative that transcends ideological, even theological differences.

Postscript: The First Audible Diamond
After the Second World War, in 1946, Andre Breton revised his approach to the problem of music and Surrealism. Acknowledging deep connections between poetry and song he called for a ‘reunification’ of hearing to accompany the revolutionary programme of the Surrealist reunification of sight. In an article for the magazine Modern Music entitled 'Silence is Golden', reprinted in What is Surrealism? (1978), he wrote:

…for the first audible diamond to be obtained, it is evident that the fusion of the two elements - music and poetry - could only be accomplished at a very high emotional temperature. And it seems to me that it is in the expression of the passion of love that both music and poetry are most likely to reach this supreme point of incandescence.

If the most crucial feature of the Surreal marvellous is Convulsive Beauty then, even before Breton wrote these words, that unique form of beauty had already found its first, essential musical expression - in Messiaen’s Harawi of 1945 and many previous pieces composed during the heyday of the Paris Surrealist Group.

Bibliographic Addenda

The first version of this essay accompanied a Messiaen Discography compiled for a Professional Examination in October 1972. The essay was first published in the magazine BRIO (Volume 11, No 2, Autumn, 1974) with Part II of the Discography, the most comprehensive survey of Messiaen’s work then available in English. The Discography also included numerous literary references to help illuminate the provenance of Messiaen’s compositions. The following references are related exclusively to this essay and include a number of items omitted from the first version:

Artaud, Antonin. Artaud Anthology. City Lights Books. San Francisco. 1965.
Artaud, Antonin. Letter to Peter Watson. Link Magazine [Artaud Special Issue]. Spring 1969.
Breton, Andre. Manifestos of Surrealism. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor 1972.
Breton, Andre. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Pluto Press. London. 1978.
Ernst, Max. Beyond Painting. Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. New York. 1948.
Golea, Antoine. Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiaen. Julliard. Paris. 1961.
Jelinski, Constantin. Leonor Fini. La Guilde du Livre et Clairefontaine. Lausanne. 1972.
Masini, Lara Vinca. Gaudi. Hamlyn. London. 1970.
Redon, Odilon. The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon. Dover Publications. New York. 1969.
Troup, Malcolm. Messiaen and the Modern Mind [Thesis]. University of York. 1967.
Troup, Malcolm. Regard sur Olivier Messiaen. Composer 37. Autumn/Winter, 1970-71

Illustration: Angel For The End Of Time, 1972

Words From Nowhere

INTERVIEW WITH A C EVANS

Susan A. Duxbury-Hibbert

August-November 1996


You are known as both a writer and an artist. What is the starting point for a project, the drawings or writing?
This is quite a difficult question actually…ignoring external reasons for starting something (like being asked specifically for a poem, or specifically for a drawing) and concentrating purely on the creative viewpoint, one has to recognize the different ‘dynamics’ of different forms. Prose-versus-poetry, collage-versus-drawing. What is meant by a ‘starting point’? In the final analysis a starting point may not be a conscious thing - it’s an inspirational thing. Nevertheless there is sometimes a deliberate, definite, intention to work with visual rather than verbal methods/materials or vice versa, but the origins of the intention are non-rational. A starting point may be generated by idea-level interconnections between verbal and visual output, or continuous immersion in art-literature may prepare the ground for a ‘next step’.

When did you start drawing/writing?
I have childhood memories of drawing from sometime in the mid-1950s. My father had some artistic abilities and tended to encourage me - this was real juvenilia: pictures of soldiers and airplanes or whatever. Later on, about the age of 17 (in 1966) I suddenly started to get more serious about it. The trigger was finding the work of Aubrey Beardsley - the style and general tone of his work was quite an eye-opener...then I discovered Surrealism and started making collages.
Even as a kid I was quite a bibliomaniac, so any crossovers between art and literature interested me. The fact that Surrealism was not just to do with painting was very important. As the first Surrealists were poets, not artists, the whole movement plugged into, and extended, that nineteenth century avant-garde tradition of experimental writing (Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarme-Jarry). This became more and more significant to me. So I got a typewriter for my 21st birthday and started writing: initially fiction (the obligatory, abortive novel and ‘decadent’ short stories) but eventually poetry, after doing some translations of Max Ernst and Messiaen lyrics.

What inspires you to start a new project?
Perhaps inspiration is the unforeseen consequence of immersion - immersion in materials, researches, Myths, influences, precursors. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is some sort of psychosomatic urge, the result of unfocussed psychic pressure from the unconscious, a surge of neuronal energy, a perturbation of the psychic atmosphere, which finally crystallizes in words and images.
The titles of pictures are a sort of poetry. The collage process is internalized (psycho-montage/ psycho-cut-up) as well as externalized in the traditional Surrealist Ducassian Encounter of disparate material elements. Art emerges from the (al)chemistry of the creative process, through interaction with the prime materia, the massa confusa, of unrefined unconscious matter. Works feed on each other - collages and drawings can inspire poems and poems can inspire drawings. Drawings can evolve from the collage procedure. Works emerge in cycles and spates - groups of poems are somehow related to each other, sets of drawings share the same motifs and techniques.
Sometimes, of course, an external requirement will be the pretext for a project - but the non-rational, chance aleatoric factor must always be there. If a project is to ‘work’ it must be an active element in the transformation process. All art is transformation, the perpetual, unstoppable transformation of the day-to-day in which the mundane becomes the bizarre.

What part, in your opinion, does illustration play in adding to a text?
‘In The Beginning Was The Word’ someone said. Well, don’t believe it. Pictures are primal. The image in the mind’s eye precedes utterance, or, to quote Duke Ellington: ‘There’s always a mental picture’. I think there has to be a kind of synergy - a deep affinity - between any image and the words it is used with. This affinity may not be obvious or concrete. Chance encounters between poems and pictures in the editorial process can often give rise to effective associations.
In a different context one may think of texts illustrating images rather than vice versa. For example The Cascades was a set of poems written to ‘accompany’ some pictures by Rupert Loydell and, more recently, both Martin Duxbury-Hibbert and Norman Jope have collaborated by providing texts (Between Alien Worlds and Zones of Impulse) for sets of images provided in advance of literary composition. In these cases successful!
Illustration depends upon a feeling of ‘rightness’ or integration into the finished product. Equal value resides in both text and illustrations. Textual content can be derived from the images. Literal illustration is ok for factual and instructional situations but I am more interested in these more oblique relationships between words and images.

When did you start publishing your work?
I first started publishing drawings in about 1968 as greeting cards. Then I managed to get drawings
Into various occult magazines during the mid-1970s and also a few lit. crit. articles and reviews from
1980 onwards. My first poetry publication was in Stride Magazine, and Stride published the first
collection of poetry and drawings, Exosphere, in 1984

What artists have influenced you?
The earliest artistic influences I can remember were illustrators - Mervyn Peake (The Hunting of the Snark and other books), Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, Eric Fraser and Joan Kiddell-Monroe - again, this was when I was kid. I really liked fantastic things and, in the case of Frazer and Kiddell-Monroe, hard-edged linearist things. When you’re that young you don’t think about ideas like Abstraction, you react to the imagistic qualities of what you see because that’s the way the imagination is.
Another key influence was Japanese Art. We had some volumes of drawings by Hokusai, which I was always looking at. His work is very naturalistic but it can also be very macabre and grotesque and ultra-stylish. Remembering the period 1966-1970, when I was trying to find my way is very confusing - there were so many ‘influences’.
The closest I got to contemporary fine art or gallery art was Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s Bride which he did for a big Tate retrospective around July ‘66. The irony of Duchamp’s stance and the iconoclasm of Dada were very important - an antidote to the Peace ‘n’ Luv culture! But then again I was undoubtedly sympathetic to Psychedelia and Op as well.
I still like Sixties design and art movies like Performance - the influences were an intermedia hotchpotch: Art Nouveau Symbolists like Klimt, Jan Toorop and Khnopff. I like Odilon Redon, Hieronymous Bosch, Grunewald, Durer, William Blake and Goya…Aubrey Beardsley…Alfred Kubin. Also the assemblage sculptures of Louise Nevelson. There was a piece of hers in the Tate called ‘Gold Wall’ which was a stylized structure of abstract, rectilinear box-shapes and compartments encrusted with commonplace, ‘found’ objects such as old chair legs and wooden slats. The whole thing was painted a uniform all-over gold colour. There was a clash of materials in Nevelson’s work, which greatly appealed to me at the time.
It’s necessary to identify different types of influence. There are precursors who influence by style, there are those who influence content and there are those who influence by example. There are some whose influence is a combination of all these factors. This is partly why it is difficult to discuss influences. There is also the problem of ‘originality’. I think everyone is influenced by someone, although lots of artists and writers (in this country at least) think that admitting to influences is like some sort of confession of inadequacy. This is just as complicated with literary influences as it is with artistic ones.

So what about literary influences?
So far as literature is concerned I would have to mention the French tradition: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud as a major influence in various ways, also Huysmans and Andre Breton. My Pre-formative reading was Science Fiction (mainly British), Fantasy, Horror (particularly Poe and Lovecraft) and all sorts of myths and legends. This established a continuing involvement with ‘popular’ genres that continues to the present.
As I said I’m a compulsive bibliomaniac and read all the time. It all goes into the creative process. The American Beats had quite an impact. Beat style was so un-English, so un-literary, or so it seamed at the time. I remember reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Burroughs’ Nova Express and being instantly converted to a more ‘modern’ attitude to writing.
Thinking back to the same period I would name the following ‘literary’ influences: Arthur Machen, Lermontov, Thomas Pynchon (especially), De Quincey, Alfred Jarry (Faustrol), Robert Graves (The White Goddess), De Sade, Gerard de Nerval, Boris Vian, Angela Carter, J.G Ballard, Nabokov (Ada), Barth (The Sotweed Factor), Borges, and Jean Genet.
There were various non-fiction/critical works that were significant I think. For example, Jung’s writing on Alchemy, The Romantic Agony, Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study of Poe, Masters and Houston’s Psychedelic Art, Robert Greer Cohn’s book on Mallarme, Hans Bellmer’s Anatomie de L‘Image, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Althea Hayter. A later influence was Samuel Beckett. His work, particularly the short prose and the novels (the Trilogy and How It Is) is a landmark in the imagination. Absolutely no one can afford to ignore Beckett. A combination of factors (including the influence of Austin Spare) induced me to read a lot of occult literature - but that’s another story....

Do you exhibit/ sell your artwork?
I participated in an exhibition called Cross Section in Chelmsford 1968 - but that was a one-off. I’ve never seen myself as a gallery artist or involved in the art market - it just isn’t my scene really. I see ‘originals’ as ‘masters’ for reproduction rather than traditional fine art artifacts. I’m not really geared up to do commissions and things like that. As I said - not really my scene.

What is your method of working?
Steve Sneyd has observed that the poetic act is like trying to snapshot the fragmentary immediacy of the brain’s workings and compared his methodology to ‘a trapped animal’s gnawing of it’s own leg....’. In a sense he is right about this. It is difficult to cultivate the self-awareness and objectivity needed to comment on the methodology of the creative process beyond surface characteristics.
In writing I was influenced by the minimalism of Poe who criticized the viability of the long poem - I don’t write long poems in the sense that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Paradise Lost are long poems. So minimalism, even miniaturism, is intrinsic to my method in many respects. Also the Postmodernist blurring of boundaries, perhaps inspired by Borges idea of 'ficciones' - cerebral, laconic, hermetic, labyrinthine, enigmatic - these are often some of the qualities I look for in a sphere where the essential differences between poetry and prose are unclear.
The poetic methodology is most elusive, Often I find myself working with a surreal psycho-montage of wordflow, sometimes incorporating ‘found words’ or cut-ups or phrases that simply emerge from the unconscious (Words from Nowhere). I regard many of my ‘poems’ as borderland texts, neither prose nor poetry. There is a narcissistic ‘working up’ of drafts and an element of faction where quasi-autobiographical or historical research material merges with pure fantasy. I reject traditional prosody as the technique of a dead era.

What about drawing methods? How do you go about obtaining the final image? Do you have a clear idea at the outset, or do you do many variations?
Drawing methods are varied. Often I will work from a store of sketches and notes for visual ideas, which I keep. These are usually pencil sketches but can be ink drawings and doodles as well. Sometimes a drawing can be spontaneous and committed to paper right away. Sketches may be quite expressionistic and unformed to begin with but then go through a number of different of versions and stylisations.
Areas of detail in Rapidograph drawings are done directly onto the final drawing in most cases. These are usually detailed areas of stippling and fine-point decoration, a sort of amalgam of Moreau’s encrustation, Beardsley’s stipple technique, Seurat-like textures and Ernstian decalcomania-like textures. This sort of work can be very time consuming. In many cases compositions are derived from pre-existing collages. Sometimes I use ‘found images’ derived from, say, newspaper photographs or magazines. Sometimes there is a pre-existing mental image and it’s like taking a snapshot. In many drawings there is a deliberate use of ‘negative space’ in the composition - space derived from the chance lines of the pen or pencil.

How necessary is it to you that you are published & ‘known’? Would you continue to write/draw if you had no public outlet?
I am reminded of a section in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider - he was quoting T. E. Lawrence (Wilson saw Lawrence as an archetypal ‘outsider’ figure) who said that a craving for the power of self-expression was the most decisive driving force in his life. This craving is the only antidote to the nihilism of our age. Without this craving for self-expression there is nothing, literally, Nothing.
Artistic creativity is the way to achieve maximum self-expression. This is an end in itself but the craving is capable of transformation – self-expression becomes individuation, individuation becomes self-initiation. An infinite process of self-initiation, a sort of Aesthetic Gnosticism perhaps. In this context publication is irrelevant. On the other hand creative editorializing can become part of The Work. Working with Stride and Memes and other magazines has lead to unforeseen creative activity through interaction, publication itself becoming part of a wider transformation process.

Do you conceive of a contemporary context, or do you feel you are working in isolation?
Well, I do conceive of a contemporary context - I also feel I’m quite isolated in what I do as well! I’ve always been interested in what you might call cultural history - the evolution of aesthetic and religious ideas, so this sense of history helps me to try to define my own contemporary context.
On the other hand my interaction with immediate contemporaries is rather limited these days and I find a lot of SP type poetry and stuff rather alienating. It’s always difficult to name names but, if pressed, I might cite Steve Sneyd, Robert Shepherd, lain Sinclair, Norman Jope, Rupert Loydell and Martin Duxbury-Hibbert as current writers who may overlap with some of my own concerns.
My original sense of contemporary context was shaped by a sort of ‘post-everything’ feeling. It seemed to me that the transition from Surrealism to Postmodernism via Pop, Situationism, Psychedelia, Neo-Dada and Op from 1966-1971 was the beginning of some sort of end - an End with a capital ‘E’, in fact. As Hassan said about Postmodernism: it ‘dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works.’
The truth is that, in this era of ‘post-everything’ and loss of faith, one didn’t really look among one’s own generation for a contemporary context. Except, perhaps, in semi-commercial fantasy art, Psychedelia and satire (Roger Dean, Bruce Pennington, Wes Wilson, Michael English, Scarfe, Steadman), one looked to the survivors of the avant garde who were still with us. In the visual arts this meant Duchamp, Chirico, Ernst, Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Matta, Burra and Francis Bacon. I think my graphic style was very influenced by Bellmer - he must be one of the greatest draughtsmen of the twentieth century. In literature there was Andre Breton, Borges, Ballard, Angela Carter, David Gascoyne, Beckett and William Burroughs. One was conscious that they were all still around producing new works. They were the contemporary context for me.
Yet, throughout the period the sense of an ending was exacerbated by the deaths of nearly all these major figures. Breton died in 1966 around the same time as the last major International Surrealist Exhibition (‘Absolute Divergence’). He was followed by Duchamp in 1968, Bellmer in 1975, Ernst and Burra in 1976, Chirico in 1978 and, finally, J. L. Borges in 1986. By the time you got to 1976 we were into the ‘break up of Britain’, The Winter of Discontent and the New Dark Age of the ‘Enterprise Culture’…one tried to build on the previous era.


Illustration: One Gothic Night, 2000

Postmodern Breakdown

Not The New World Order II Postmodern Breakdown

Wherever the dogmas of  'radical' politics are preached in our Postmodern era, a jarring note of self-loathing and self-pity can be detected. We are confronted by a spectacular display of histrionics reminiscent of James Ensor’s monumental painting The Entry of Christ Into Brussels in 1889 (1888). In this work, which depicts a procession of masked figures escorting the Messiah beneath a red banner with the slogan ‘Vive la Sociale’, we see a horde of marchers carrying banners with absurd statements such as ‘Phalange Wagner Fracassant’ or ‘Les Vivesecteures Belges Insensibles’. The canvas is crammed with bizarre, cavorting figures carried away by the excitement of the moment. Some authorities have asserted the impossibility of assigning any positive interpretation to this frenetic scene; but look at the caricature faces, the gangling figures with their fatuous slogans, costumes and postures, the pompous officials, the mass spectacle, the anachronistic tone - surely this is all too familiar?

Welcome To Our World
Ensor’s painting is an image of semiotic excess – a vision of a world where meaning is undercut by the absurd. It is an accurately observed rendition of a particular ‘twilight zone’ of the political mind, a breakdown state where our cosy, homespun universe of social policy and ‘culture’ implodes into a bizarre hallucination, where psychic epidemics of persecution, self-promotion, bad faith, martyrdom and confusion reign supreme. This is the political experience of a hazy borderline condition of disjunction between sign and meaning, a prescient prophecy of a topsy-turvy world where the pseudo-sophisticated ‘theory’ of the Designer Decade shares the stage with futile policy initiatives, propaganda sound-bites, political special effects, atavistic fears and guilt-ridden urges. Here we see the Punch-and-Judy politics of a terminal condition, characterized by moral panic, mass hysteria, self-denigrating masochism, and petulant backbiting. It is all rather similar to the fractious dialogue in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, an unsparing exposure of the futile dynamics of power as striking, in its own way, as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Welcome to our world – welcome to the consensus.

Out Of Sight (And Out Of Mind)
An obsessive, moralistic neurosis has shaped the topography of our current political landscape. This consensus or ‘attitude configuration’, to borrow a phrase from marketing, generates a fluctuating variety of ‘concerns’ and different ways of ‘engaging’ with ‘issues’ often spilling over into epidemics of mass hysteria on the streets and moral panic in the media. Typical of a loose, apparently left wing or centre-left (‘progressive’ and/or ‘liberal’) outlook, it is a predominantly anti-modernist consensual perspective shared by most policy makers and opinion formers even if they seem to behave like political opponents. It is a worldview designed to obscure the real needs of the oppressed, the disaffected and disenfranchised, all the ‘untouchables’: all those invisible victims languishing beyond the pale in a paraxial sphere alongside, or on either side, of the dominant ideological axis.
Out of sight (and out of mind), perhaps this paraxial world of the unspeakable, of ‘the untouchables’ may be fleetingly apprehended in the mass media; it might be implied by symbols, rather like the alien Zone in Roadside Picnic or the far up-river Inner Station decorated with skulls in Heart of Darkness. These are among the favourite tropes for intrepid journalists reporting from the eye of the storm – from remote outposts of the War on Terror, from beside the Shatt-al-Arab, from rogue states in Africa, from famine-stricken refugee camps, or from disaster areas in South East Asia. In all such cases it is rare to find the population treated as anything other than local colour, cultural specimens, ‘ordinary people’ (‘just like us’), or current affairs ‘wallpaper’. Their images are endlessly recycled on twenty-four hour rolling news channels: mute symbols of desperation quickly assimilated into the pseudo-reality of the predominant ideological perspective. Somehow, they persist as agony traces; as poverty porno in post-cultural limbo; as emotional canon-fodder for producers of overblown, blockbuster fund-raising telethons, or for voracious compassion-junkies; all those who like to think they are engaged in some kind of elevated struggle.
In so-called advanced societies the same paraxial invisibility obscures a real underclass – the elderly, the mentally ill, the underprivileged; all the oppressed groups and other vulnerable sectors of an irremediably ageist, self-deluded and infantilized society. An out-to-lunch, on-the-make, corporate-managerial (‘don’t bother me with the facts’) society, obsessed with bogus ‘issues’, divided by class conflict and snobbery, crippled by a dysfunctional education system. A haven for fat cats and a playground for boy-racer whizz-kid wheeler-dealers, their anti-capitalist 'protest tribe' opponents befuddled by the pious fraud of a morbid lay piety dressed up as ‘counterculture’. A society blinded by anti-intellectualism and a smokescreen of ‘cultural sensitivity’, a society struggling with a discredited, threadbare political system of compromised democracy – a society with an electoral turnout lower than Iraq.
How can this be?
Pandering to a craving for wholesome, squeaky-clean ethical correctness, the gesture politics of this ‘consensus’ exists to absolve the intelligentsia, the media, decision takers, and the ‘chattering classes’ from ethical responsibility. Projected via the self-aggrandising posture of the crusade, we find Sartre’s Bad Faith dressed up in the emperor’s new clothes of Doing the Right Thing. This ‘ethical’ correctness may, at times appear the same as ‘political correctness’ (PC), a label denoting a confused and confusing bundle of tendencies, often used as a shorthand buzz-phrase to smear an opposing faction or ideology. This is partly because the ‘ethical’ posture applies to parties and factions of the centre-right as much as those of the orthodox liberal-left, and partly because all ‘ethical’ positions are inherently self-contradictory.
For some social conservatives, PC is Cultural Marxism, but this is a smoke-screen argument used to deny the ideological basis of conservatism itself. Cultural conservatism is, of course, entrenched in its own mode of ethical ‘correctness’ which it propagates in opposition to its ideological opponents and to make converts. However, cultural conservatism is occasionally vulnerable to some consensus thinking, especially in the area of what might be called the ‘respect agenda’ which is aimed at stifling any criticism of 'faith', tradition and related matters of ‘conscience’. At this point ‘right’ and ‘left’ join forces in an unholy alliance to protect the ideological basis of a monolithic but fractured cultural caste system which always feels threatened by any change or innovation.
Participants in the consensus like to feel they are involved with the major questions of the day in a ‘progressive’ way but only insofar as they can ignore the desires and always-inconvenient behaviour of ‘ordinary’ people, avoiding the problematic consequences of substantial change. Everywhere we find ‘activists’ engaged at a psychosocial level yet failing to achieve a position that might be described as truly ‘progressive’, or even, despite contrary spin, ‘anti-establishment’. This, sometimes, hectic activity, this grotesque carnival (so vividly depicted in Ensor’s painting), generates an ‘ethical’ form of pseudo-politics that is all pervasive. A ubiquitous form of politics that evades the pains of actual confrontation or transformation, on both an individual, personal level, and on the collective level of social groups and organisations – be they political parties, militant lobby groups, aggregations of ‘concerned citizens’, or self-legitimising ‘campaigners’

Ideological Exhaustion
The current ideological ‘concerns’ of the politically aware include a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of tendencies that emerged during the nineteen seventies, the decade that gave birth to the notion of ‘Postmodernism’ itself. These include Multiculturalism, Environmentalism, The Pro-Life Movement, Animal Rights, Ethical Consumerism, Postcolonialism, and a variety of sub-doctrines packaged-up as either New Age Politics or populist pseudo-academic anti-science. This mode of engagement with the world has all the intellectual excitement of a high-flying mission with no flight-plan – it is also the terminal end-game of ideological exhaustion.
All of these movements had antecedents in earlier periods. Multiculturalism evolved out of theories like Social Pluralism and Cultural Relativism dating back to before the First World War, just as Ethical Consumerism has historical links to the Fair Trade movement of the sixties and Environmentalism to the anti-materialist, ‘back-to-nature’ and Organic movements of the inter-war era.
Opposition to ‘big science’ including scepticism about the motives of scientists, symbolised by Rotwang of Metropolis, the megalomaniac Doctor Strangelove and other crazy ‘men in white coats’ (Doctor Watt in Carry On Screaming) is a key factor in most of these campaigns, especially Environmentalism, the Pro-Life Movement and Animal Rights. This anti-science trend finds its roots in the notion of ‘socialist science’, a concept from the inter-war years, and from earlier controversies such as those preceding the First World War. In those days philosophers of science like Ernst Mach criticised technocrats and fellow scientists for developing the technology of the battlefield, for allowing themselves to become willingly associated with that dubious and sinister institution now known as the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, a term coined by Eisenhower in a later period. For Baudrillard the shift into ‘the postmodern world’ was marked by the ‘psychotropic dream’ of the Vietnam War (1959-1973), a conflict that further increased distrust in technology while promoting a televisual experience of mass protest and political trauma. Here was a conflagration of special effects; a war ‘become film even before it was filmed’, a psychedelic war that has entered the anti-establishment subculture via movies such as La Chinoise (1967), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1989).
Despite an official ‘atoms for peace’ message, public paranoia about science and the Military Industrial Complex escalated in the Nuclear Age and throughout The Cold War. The issue has been further complicated by contemporary reactions to ‘Frankenstein technologies’ such as genetic engineering and GM (genetic modification), not to mention advances in stem cell research, embryology and fertility treatments (‘saviour siblings’, ‘designer babies’) for both heterosexual and – most alarmingly – same-sex couples. The age of the post-nuclear family arrived in 1978 with the birth of the first ‘test tube baby’ an alarming development that seemed to many disturbed observers the harbinger of a Brave New World style dystopia.
For the anti-Western ideologues of Afrocentrism, Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism science is closely identified with a catalogue of perceived evils typical of anti-WASP racist sentiment. These perceived evils include factors such as ‘criticism’, reason, atheism, ‘post-positivism’ and rationality. Correspondingly, it is claimed, modern science is the product of a ‘materialistic’, mechanistic and arrogant Eurocentric cultural system characterised by diminution of feeling, emotion and those capacities of reverence, awe, respect and admiration deemed typical of ‘other’ (i.e. non-scientific) cultures, or of previous historical periods. Consequently, the idea of ‘respect’ has gained a strong influence, usually signalling an anti-democratic tendency to shut down adverse comment and free expression lest ‘offence’ be caused to ‘others’, thereby sustaining the hegemony of the status quo.
Most of these ideologies gained critical mass as doctrines of mainstream social mobilisation in the years following the announcement of the Canadian Government’s official policy of Multiculturalism in 1971. The Australian government followed suit in 1973, the year of the OPEC oil embargo and Small Is Beautiful. This was also the year Libyan militarist Colonel Gaddafi (‘Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution’), correctly anticipating the collapse of secular Arab Nationalism, declared Islam a ‘Third International Theory’. The enervating idea of a ‘crisis of the West’ gained currency after Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech at Harvard in 1978. In typical sanctimonious style he castigated the failings of a society that, despite its moral breakdown and all-pervasive ‘decadence’ (as he saw it), was, nevertheless, prepared to recognise his ‘dissident’ status and provide him with a secure sanctuary from his enemies in the Eastern Bloc.
It was also in 1978 that Greenpeace, established in the same year as Friends of the Earth (1971) launched its campaigning ship Rainbow Warrior. In retrospect this event can be seen as a key symbolic moment in the popularisation of a style of quasi-tribal, revolutionary, Environmentalist utopianism guaranteed to appeal to a nascent army of millenarian campaigners whose preferred modus operandi lay well outside the sphere of conventional parliamentary politics. The Rainbow People are The Planet People, the doomed, ragged, post-flower power, quasi-Hippie, semi-Yippie hordes parodied by Nigel Kneale in his TV drama serial Quatermass IV, broadcast in 1978 (although written in 1972). Subsequently Post-Hippie Chic re-emerged as Protest Chic or, even Terrorist Chic, a change in the zeitgeist signalled by a move away from ‘optimistic’ images of cutie-pie Flower Power or streamlined Space Age futurology (‘the world of tomorrow’ explained Pierre Cardin) towards a more ‘edgy’ confrontational style. This was a style based on military accessories. For example, the 1970 collection for Harmon Knitwear by designer Rudi Gernreich, featured sexy, gun toting catwalk models decked out in dog-tags and dressed in ‘radical’ army fatigues. This was an accurate exemplification of the ‘new look’ of trendy issue-driven pseudo-politics. Gernreich, inventor of the topless bathing suit, was – it should be added – something an ironist, a self-conscious agent provocateur well aware of the satirical impact of his sartorial creations.
Building on the writings of, among others, Schumacher, Said, Feyerabend, Foucault and Lyotard, many of these Postmodern political movements were consolidated in the early Eighties by a professorial establishment comprising the ‘new Polyocracy’ or ‘Time Out Poly Left’. Ensconced in their post-redbrick Plate Glass Towers, dispensing with the principle of evidence, the New Polyocracy set about developing new model scholasticism; the Newspeak of Airstrip One was born. The vocabulary and lexicon of ‘theory’ with its ‘nuanced’ (convoluted) sophistry became the lingua franca of ‘advanced’ (reactionary) discourse and ‘difficult’ (confused) cultural analysis based on theories such as Social Constructionism (‘truth is constructed not discovered’). At the very moment when feminism started to fracture and the mainstream post-war Butskellist centrist consensus finally collapsed and the New Right seized power, Postmodernism arrived in the UK as a new form of that old problem la trahison des clercs. Its priesthood were always on the wrong side of every argument and easily recognised by their distinctive sartorial signature; the open-necked shirt – a ‘casual’ mode of dress pioneered by language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the late nineteen forties.
It was now all a question of style-as-statement against a backdrop of sub-cultural fragmentation. The ‘Post Modern’ designer avant-garde posture, Ballard’s Perrier avant-garde for weekend consumers, could mean anything from Post-Punk, to Fascinating Fascism; from Ironic Retro, to the Red Wedge or the Monkey Wrench Gang and beyond. For style critic Peter York, the direction of travel was epitomised by Brian Ferry singing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ from his solo album with the apposite title Another Time, Another Place (1974). For the serious players, the really arty types, it was all about boundary 2 poetics (1972), the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, or novels like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1976) by Manuel Puig. Bofill’s Palacio d’Abraxas (1978-1982), represented a new eclectic hyper-classical architecture, a mode of Postmodern construction developed in opposition to the corporate orthodoxy of International Modernism. But that is a different story.

Terminal Modernity
Meanwhile, various populist culture warriors and ‘social commentators’ correlated the convenient idea of Western Decadence with a ‘collapse of Modernism’. These anti-permissive elements viewed the previous decade, the sixties, as a watershed in a downward spiral of national moral decline: all those taboo-busting avant-garde plays, all those mini-skirts, that dreadful ‘satire boom’, all those frightful, orgiastic Love-Ins promoted by an irresponsible media riddled with gays and ‘Pinkos’.
So, although the relativistic element in Postmodern thinking was anathema to many of these mainly right wing voices and their apologists in the usual red top newspapers, through a strange trick of chronology certain aspects of the ‘alternative’ crusading ethos acquired, nevertheless, an odour of sanctity. The Green Agenda, for example, may indeed appeal to the nostalgia of a puritanical, respectable right who, horrified by the contemporary realities of our ‘broken’ society yearn for a return to an idealised, less ‘materialistic’ feudal order. A return to a misty, medieval heritage symbolised by that long-gone age of great cathedrals evoked by Kenneth Clark in his far-reaching, landmark ‘blue-chip’ television series Civilisation (1969). How anachronistic this viewpoint really is can be seen by comparison with other conservative social critics throughout the ages. For instance the ancient Greek poet-philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon was forthright in his condemnation of Homer and other poets for their ‘immoral’ tales of gods and goddesses: tales ‘full of every impiety’. He also denounced the ‘effete vanities’ of his fellow citizens, condemning their synthetic perfumes, purple robes and elegant hairstyles. Xenophanes sounds just like the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘speaking out’ against Footballer’s Wives.
Despite their anti-PC stance, right-wing cultural conservatives have much in common with politically correct anti-Western anti-imperialists. They also share the same world view as Maoist cultural revolutionaries and hard-line Stalinists whose ideal society would be a militarised synthesis of monastery and boot camp. Both Cultural Marxists and right wing commentators alike anathematise contemporary popular culture (particularly music) which they accuse of surrendering to an ‘escapist’, self-destructive, hedonistic lifestyle of drugs, sex and rampant ‘individualism’. In this discourse all desire is thought-crime and the individual is erased and replaced by the concept of ‘identity’. Not personal identity but collective identity – the identity of the group – the party, the race, the nation, the crusade, the markets, the general public, the family, the community, the congregation, the gang – the herd and the hunting pack or The Big Society. Why? Nothing unnerves the cultural elite caste more than the singularity of the individual. As Orwell observed in 1946, attacks on ‘individualism’ and moralising cant about ‘escapism’ are often part of a strategy aimed at not just identity theft, but also at the falsification of history itself. After all, there never was a golden age of moral rectitude and it was the most decadent Romans who longed for a return to Republican virtues.
But then it is always appealing to think that the current era is more immoral than the past, that contemporary society is seriously ‘broken’ and in dire need of strong medicine, of draconian measures to eliminate hanky-panky, to restore decency, healthy living, ‘values’ and, of course, ‘respect’. Perhaps the most emblematic film of the era was Roma (1971) directed by Federico Fellini, which shows benign Hippies in the Trastevere district bludgeoned by police in a brutal, anti-permissive crackdown. If the autobiographical factor is left to one side, this movie depicting the ‘entry’ of a film crew into the Eternal City is a cinematic equivalent to Ensor’s Entry of Christ Into Brussels. More an ‘internal city’ of the collective psyche, this Rome is depicted as a many layered phantasmagoria of terminal modernity haunted by fascism – sentiments articulated by Gore Vidal, who, in the closing sequences, delivers a soliloquy on the End of Days. Why Rome? What better place to observe the end of everything opines Suetonius Americanus: we can sit here in hedonistic luxury and watch the planet succumb to pollution and overpopulation – how very diverting.
Of course, these attitudinal viewpoints are ideological constructs of one kind or another: their main purpose being the promotion a particular ‘issue-based’ perception of society; a view serving the interests of demagogues, commentators, followers, devotees and fellow travellers. Such ideological systems depend upon the false assumption that reality can be grasped in totality – coherent and integrated. This is the case for all belief systems including those promoting anarchy, mystical transcendence, salvation or radical idealism. However, as ‘ultimate reality’ is chaotic, incoherent, incalculable and indescribable without obfuscation, what any belief system tries to do is negate the inherently distorting effects of real-world situations by providing an idealised perspective. By representing reality in such an idealised way ideology moves to repress the destabilising fact that the ideal itself is, in fact, a delusion. The purpose of any doctrine is reinforcement of the comfort zone, making it feel, well, somehow ‘right’ to bury one’s head in the sand. How easy it is to translate a ‘right’ feeling into a feeling of righteousness and to energise the crusading spirit.

Fault-Line Clashes
The normative consensual mix may contain a diversity of apparently contradictory viewpoints in competition for ideological dominance. In certain cases (e.g. Environmentalism) a particular tendency may, over time, percolate across the traditional left/right spectrum. A classic example of this ideological transmigration is the rise of Eco-Toryism in the UK around 2005 – a political initiative that helped to revitalise a moribund party and launch the Big Society agenda. Furthermore, all positions, however contradictory, will be found to share a basic horror of reality, conniving in the erasure of inconvenient or ‘impossible’ facts. Such ‘impossible facts’ might include inescapable ethical breakdown (there is no morally acceptable interpretation of circumstances on the ground) or complicity in the very social evils apparently opposed.
For example, Multiculturalists and anti-racists may seek to promote social justice, but only at the expense of meaningful egalitarianism. By focusing on social relations between groups, between the margins and the mainstream and between the included and the excluded, problems within groups whose interests they claim to be protecting are always overlooked. Dissenting voices are consigned to oblivion in the name of a spurious ‘social cohesion’ while ‘communities’ are characterised as ideal integrated totalities – as unitary ‘cultural’ formations that, in fact, do not exist.
For multiculturalists non-intervention in ‘other cultures’ is essential. This is because intervention would reveal the irrationality of their position, the unspoken right-wing drift of their ideology and the essentially haphazard, dysfunctional nature of social relations within ‘communities’. Indeed, many individuals in these communities may not conform to, or event assent to, the ‘identity’ ascribed them by a self-serving, conservative, elite caste of ‘community leaders’ – or by disconnected political mandarins and well-meaning outsiders. One irony of this approach is the creation of a political vacuum now filled by parties and activists from the far right of the spectrum. Thus, fair comment has been suffocated because criticism directed at multicultural dogma is denigrated as, in itself, ‘right wing’. The notion that religion is a surrogate for race has created a situation in which fear of the accusation of ‘racism’, has effectively crippled the ability of disinterested observers to challenge social policies devised by cliques of politicians soft on theocracy to promote the interests of phantasmagorical ‘communities’ defined by religious labels.
Similar ethical incongruities are commonplace and far too widespread to enumerate comprehensively. By way of further illustration one might mention the failure of Environmentalists to recognise that, excluding inconvenient astronomical factors, the root cause of ‘man-made’ global warming is escalating population growth, not runaway technology. Just as the same groups fail to grasp that problems of energy security and the energy gap will never be solved by ‘renewable’ sources of power, low-energy light bulbs, or tacky ‘Eco-town’ developments plonked down on hastily categorised ‘brown-field’ sites’. There is a refusal to face the fact that climate change cannot be reversed, and a consequent rejection of the high-powered techno-industrial development required to safeguard the existing order. In the main this is because many Greens are actually opposed to the existing order on ‘ethical’ grounds and further opposed to the very notion of development per se – especially in the Third World.
Dispassionate observers might also draw attention to the irreconcilable differences between ascetic/patriarchal religious morality and the anti-sexist campaigns of feminists and gay rights movements, including such movements lead by religious insiders.
Pro-Lifers regard the Pro-Choice position as ‘mere political correctness’ (connotations of ‘loony left’ and ‘red menace’), while Pro-Choice activists will never ‘respect’ the views of their opponents simply because such opinions are defined as articles of faith. On the other hand, faced with the right-wing bogey of pro-natalism (‘family values’), the social reformers of the Postmodern intelligentsia dive for cover at the earliest opportunity. They remain oblivious of the ‘impossible’ fact that youth crime, like antisocial behaviour, is caused by bad parenting and the irresponsibility of a parasitic disconnected middle class of so-called professionals. Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, remain blind to the implications of such exotic trends as the post-nuclear family. There can be little doubt that the issues most likely to inspire moral panic among ‘concerned’ citizens from both ends of the political spectrum are those arising from matters to do with child protection, ‘family’ and the increasingly futile ‘war on drugs’ (a phrase coined by Richard M. Nixon). Cultural conservatives and ‘radical’ Leftist thinkers alike drift closer to the mentality of the witch-hunt at the mere hint of scandal while policies that ‘send the wrong signal’ to ‘our’ young people always cause frenzied outbursts of hysteria, synthetic ‘fury’ and moral panic among the usual suspects. The mindset of the vigilante always demands ‘respect’ for ‘values’ as a devious way of asserting moral authority over dissident or anarchic elements. So-called liberals never contradict, expose or criticise the ideological basis of such ‘values’.
Again, however hard they try, Animal rights campaigners cannot refute the scientific claim that experiments on animals, like breeding pigs with cystic fibrosis, help combat disease and save human lives. Ethical Consumers, who love cheap goods, routinely overlook the corrupt and tyrannical behaviour of predatory Third World governments. The desires of local populations who may aspire to mass consumerism are duly disregarded by ‘activists’ ego-tripping on a self-aggrandising ‘ethical’ mission to boycott garment ‘sweatshops’ thereby driving the victims of child labour into the sex trade.
Obviously it is quite impossible to reconcile the problematic factors inherent in such ‘issues’ as these. Fault-line clashes between race and gender, population and the environment; industrialisation and conservation, faith and sexual diversity, science and religion and so forth are utterly intractable. The radical chic ‘politically correct’ policies of the liberal-left – policies that may also be expedient for the ‘progressive’ centre-right – always implode when dealing with such incalculable dilemmas. The consensus remains paralysed – neutralised and inactive – frozen at the event horizon of the next ethical singularity, terrified by the threat of de-sublimation while creeping ever further to the right. Furthermore one is left in no doubt that, in this context, ‘liberal’ never means libertarian, and ‘liberalism’ is poor substitute for liberation – most ‘progressive’ policies in the era of the breakdown state and the hyper-culture are in fact right wing policies.

A Horror Of Impurity
The consensus is very likely to project its own negative motives and its complicity in the erosion of freedom onto some eternal agency or reified Other, usually a soft-target or a scapegoat, preferably a Western politician or agency easily stigmatised as ‘neo-colonialist’ and tainted with stigma of Orientalism. The Iraq Situation is a geo-political entanglement that has consumed a vast amount of energy from ‘activists’ in recent years. In this case the liberal-left projects its own negativity at a stereotyped, ideological construct like ‘Western Imperialism’ or at a major protagonist, such as the USA, personified by the archetypal hate figure of George ‘Dubya’ Bush. (The New World has been the target of European prejudice for several centuries, so there is nothing new in this. As for ‘imperialism’ one has only to look at the political history of the East to confirm the all-pervasive colonialist expansionism of local cultures from the earliest times. For the ‘radical’ left liberal, however, the only form of imperialism that matters is ‘Western Imperialism’ which is, of course, code for Anti-Americanism).
Here, the quasi-Pacifist position (a form of Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ as reformulated by the movers and shakers of Respect and the Socialist Workers Party) is found opposing the same hate-factors as local ‘insurgents’ – and idealising terrorists as heroic resistance fighters in the process. This kind of ethico-political sleight-of-hand absolves ‘us’ from the responsibility of facing the results of any deeper, more penetrating analysis of ‘the situation’ while promoting the seductive allure of terrorist chic. By effectively directing aggression against a convenient ‘them’, like the dreaded Dubya and his Poodle, opponents of the war can idealise the actions and objectives of illiberal local factions (a ragbag of brigands, militarists and puritanical religious fanatics) obscuring the real cause(s) of the chaos ‘on the ground’. So it absolves itself of any ethical responsibility for the sufferings of a civilian population used as a ‘human shield’ by ‘insurgents’ who, in pursuit of sectarian objectives, victimise minority groups such as the Yezidi and the Assyrians, terrorise Baghdad hairdressers or use women with mental disabilities as suicide bombers.
The need for positive transformation in the lives of toiling masses with no interest in ‘issues’ like the Dodgy Dossier or WMD is erased from the list of options. Such a possibility is relegated to an unseen realm by obfuscation or by formulaic platitudes from the ‘concerned’ chattering classes and a media rife with ‘commentators’ and ‘campaigning’ investigative journalists schooled in the traditions of the old Time Out Leftist Polyocracy.
Clearly the activities of the anti-war lobby (born during the Kosovo Crisis of 1999) and their quasi-pacifist fellow travellers are a form of diversionary distraction activity design to obscure the ‘impossible fact’ that the Iraq situation is an extension of the Middle East Conflict. This indefinite conflict, like the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ is a religious war, a war which cannot be properly discussed because many vested interests, indisposed to any form of criticism whatsoever, will take ‘offence’ if inherently schismatic religiosity is exposed as socially divisive at both national and international level. This is the reason why so many peace initiatives have failed, and it is also the reason why there can be no ‘two state solution’ to the Palestine Problem – another ‘impossible’ fact.
It is difficult to recognise that anti-imperialist action usually works against the general good, because for the liberal-left, ‘anti-imperialism’ is a compulsive, dogmatic fixation backed up by hyper-intellectualised pseudo-sophisticated Postcolonial ‘theory’. This is why the consensus will align itself with any agency articulating views conforming to its expectations. If such agencies are regimes or forms of social order in contradiction with other idealisations it still becomes impossible to directly question their actions because the anti-imperialist stance is more important to the soggy punditocracy of ‘liberal’ believers than factual reality.
Thus, the year 1992 found many on the hard left in denial over the Serb concentration camps located at Omarska and elsewhere because the Serb forces, hell bent on the creation of a racially pure, ethnically cleansed Republika Srpska, were anti-American. The purveyors of relativism find such a stance quite easy to justify. After all, in the hall of distorting mirrors, bad faith and doublethink that is the world of contemporary ‘theory’ one body of political ‘discourse’ (propaganda) is as valid as the next. The notion of ‘incommensurability’ plays into that old ‘noble savage’ doctrine of an organic ‘culture’ of cutesy, happy, poor people, sustaining the consensus in its futile attempts to negotiate the hazy borderland between a ‘progressive’ on-message ‘anti-establishment’ position and its complimentary ‘reactionary’ antithesis. All ‘culture’ is hegemony and all culture is tyrannical just as all faith is slavery and siege mentality. Culture is a caste system that keeps everyone in his or her place. Culture crushes those at the bottom of the heap; the subaltern classes; all those anonymous ‘untouchables’; all those ‘unclean’ masses, all those women that embody our abject and inarticulate purgatorial horror of impurity – the horror that is the dynamic force driving the logic of extremism.
The present regime in Zimbabwe presents another such conundrum. Here we have a classic case of a brutal government projecting a smokescreen of ‘anti-colonialism’ to wrong-foot its pro-democracy opponents. This regime uses the same anti-Western lexicon as the leftist bloc in this country. Nevertheless members of the UK consensus can be heard (ironically no doubt) espousing the idea of military intervention. (‘If we can do it in Iraq why can’t we do it in Zimbabwe?’ The standard rhetorical answer: ‘Because there’s no oil in Zimbabwe!’). However, any serious action against the ruling elite in Zimbabwe has been effectively neutralised by the UN and the frontline states of Southern Africa that at a diplomatic level cannot confront or dissent from the anti-colonial posture. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the so-called Rainbow Nation where hate crimes like ‘corrective rape’ are endemic, the ANC government used anti-colonialism to justify its ‘HIV denial’ stance, causing the deaths of more than 330,000 of its own citizens while illustrating the close association between anti-WASP Postcolonialism and anti-science.
Engaging, like Kuwait, in land-grabbing campaigns of ‘food imperialism’ in South East Asia, not to mention its own ‘scramble for Africa’, emerging non-Western superpower China, is a supporter of both ZANU-PF and the genocidal government of Sudan. In Sudan, a country controlled by another aggressively anti-Western regime, nomadic Arabic-speaking Janjaweed (‘devil on horseback’) militia, are, with the overt military support of the authorities, systematically exterminating the sedentary black population of Darfur. The Family of Nations, also known as the ‘International Community’, does nothing of consequence to stop either the slaughter or the mass displacement of refugees.
Throughout history same use of similar anti-modern rhetoric has characterised the diplomacy of other non-Western regimes, like the Pan-Germans and the Pan-Slavs (including Russian Nationalists and Stalinists) or the militaristic Japanese State Shinto warmongers of the Nineteen Forties. One only has to think of the misogynist, gay bashing Iranian theocracy, and its anathemas against ‘Westoxification’ or ‘The Great Satan’, and watch similar tyrannies exploit the ‘progressive’ obsessions of both the soggy middle ground of ‘ethical’ European politics and the missionary activities of Postmodern ‘activists’. Doubtless this tactic is some small help in maintaining dominance over geo-political spheres of influence, and in brutalising helpless populations. ‘Western Decadence’ is a very convenient shibboleth for everyone, including our self-legitimising intelligentsia, a menagerie of hysterical campaigners, philanthropic celebrities, armchair radicals, parlour anarchists, rent-a-mob revolutionaries, freaky ‘sandalistas’, saloon-bar rabble-rousers, champagne socialists and cappuccino conservatives – a political class whose ascetic/puritanical tendencies are all too obvious to the weary observer.

Vicarious Egoism
All totalitarian systems have an antagonism toward factual reality because ultra-right movements (it is said) have a particularly deep investment in the plausibility and effectiveness of ideological fictions – the mere existence of any alternative viewpoint is a threat. However this reflex of antagonism toward ‘alternative’ positions is, in varying degrees, a characteristic of all ideologies. It is a common factor that defines a belief system per se because of the primacy of the defensive function.
As they all share in the fundamental mystification of actuality this reflex is true of all beliefs, including those not necessarily defined as political ideologies. The left-liberal consensual ideological ‘group think’ is driven by an emotional empathy for under-dogs or supposed fellow sufferers. But bad faith ensures the real needs of victims are conveniently commodified (‘adopt an elephant’, ‘add ethical kudos to your shopping trolley’, ‘strike a pose/save lives’) or rendered invisible by the sanctimonious nostrums of Cultural Relativism endorsed by gullible ‘luvvies’ (‘we can’t impose our Western-style democracy on them’). Indeed there are innumerable white-wristband wearing, publicity-conscious A-Listers for whom ‘concern’ is a good marketing ploy (‘it shows we care’). Desperate to ensure that they are seen ‘doing the right thing’ they will jump on any and every band wagon, especially campaigns like ‘Global Cool’ (2007) endorsed by the upper echelons and involving invitations to Number Ten for serious talks with The People Who Matter.
Behind the baroque elaboration of an improbable ideological apparatus lurks a tortured form of self-contempt not only portrayed in Ensor’s 'The Entry of Christ into Brussels' but also detected by Nietzsche as early as 1886. For him this mode of self-contempt was a corrosive strand of collective self-mortification that was, even then, undermining the European worldview from within. Following Nietzsche’s hints it is possible to speculate that this strange complex or syndrome of ‘self-dwarfing’ arose as early as the late eighteenth century for he claims that Italian economist Galiani had also detected the phenomenon in the period before the French Revolution.
One might pin the blame on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But that would be far too simplistic, especially taking into account the obvious prophetic/apocalyptic/millenarian messages lurking between the lines of the propaganda emanating from such movements as Environmentalism with its self-created legend of the Rainbow Warriors and the ‘original sin’ of industrialisation. Many on the left would claim, by way of self-definition, a historical affinity with such ‘heretical’ fundamentalist, puritan movements of the past as the Ranters, Winstanley’s Diggers, the Levellers or, even, the Albigensian Cathari. Not only are such sects of mendicants, flagellants and heretics seen through an ‘ethical’ prism of purity and moral correctness, reinvented for the modern world as ‘religious anarchists’ they also project at aura of ‘revolutionary’ anti-establishment subversion, proto-communist collectivism or even ‘mystical feminism’. While remaining safely in the comfort zone of sentimental, if unconventional pseudo-theology, heretical ideas feed into utopian, anti-capitalist notions of a ‘decentralist commonwealth’ and have become part of the counter-culture ethos and have migrated into the mainstream under the banner of Localism.
Today, this curious form of ‘sensibility’ (more bathos than pathos) has developed into a vicarious egoism in love with all possible varieties of masochistic anti-materialist, anti-Western defamation, and which is – as was mentioned at the outset – an obsessive, neurotic syndrome. It is a kind of guilt-ridden, hypochondriac, neo-phobic ‘radicalism’ disguised as a fashionably ‘ethical’ attitude energised by the emotional charge of penitence and reparation. In fact this syndrome is very archaic, being a reassertion of the doctrine of sin-atonement, humiliation and purification common to most mythic ideologies of deliverance (salvation) conditioned by an innate psychopathic predisposition. In this context the ‘original sins’ of the Postmodern era are such tendencies as Imperialism, Industrialisation and Consumerism. The dominant sensibility of this ‘attitude configuration’ is a form of voyeurism dressed up as empathy for the unfortunate, a form of nostalgie de la boue masquerading as an elevated struggle for high ideals, plagued by a perpetual sense of threat. This sense of threat – the threat of retribution as emasculation – is always there in the background. It will be meted out when the barbarians, the enemy at the gates, finally break in like the sinister biker gang roaring over the neon-illuminated Ponte Garibaldi at the end of Roma.
Of course, for many the ‘ethical’ agenda is merely a lifestyle choice: simply a question of age and temperament, a demonstration of how political commitments are, primarily, a matter of personal character and social opportunism. We chose the outlook that suits us best on the basis of psychological predisposition and in the light of socio-economic circumstances. Then, as our circumstances change, so do our ‘commitments’ even if our inflated sense of self-importance does not. That is why, once the Designer Decade was over, so many ‘student radicals’ of the seventies, who looked to the Angry Brigade or Baader-Meinhof gang as lifestyle gurus of terrorist chic, mutated into neo-liberal right-wing commentators or state functionaries. It is also why those once-fashionable Sandinistas have ‘sold out’, making a political pact with Vatican elements against the interests of the entire female population of Nicaragua. As is so often the case it is women who are the invisible and anonymous victims of oppressive cultural practices and political game playing. But all ‘radical’ worldviews are prone to opportunist manoeuvring, because bad faith is both endemic and inescapable: just watch the Greens ‘go nuclear’ under pressure from events as the energy crisis deepens. How long before Eco-Toryism becomes Eco-Fascism?

A Strangely Empty World
We, the offspring of post-war generations nurtured by a welfare state, protected by the US nuclear umbrella, and by huge loans from the same source, have come to hate Modernity because we are just so deeply dissatisfied with ourselves. We seek out opportunities for humiliation on order to assuage our burden of unconscious guilt through the self-indulgent dynamics of moral masochism.
By extension, we loathe our ‘sick post-imperialist society’, to borrow a phrase from E P Thompson, a campaigning anti-nuclear academic who exemplified the morbid psychology of early nineteen eighties political lay piety. We are Hamm (the red-robed Establishment) and Clov (the under-dog) and their warped, self-indulgent angst defines ‘us’. The vanity of our virtue dictates we salve our souls through empathy with the suffering of the entire world. This specious ‘world’ is an abstract hallucination of left-liberal or ‘concerned’ politicians hooked on a poverty porno fix, and of ‘protestors’ who like to fill their leisure time with recreational rioting. This delusional pseudo-reality is also shared by the cappuccino toff culture of ‘progressive’ UK Red Tory Conservatism, a political cabal whose old-Etonian leaders just love the ‘common touch’ of Red Wedge era hit singles.
This sanitised, virtual ‘world’ of wishful thinking, this consensual comfort zone where we luxuriate, is the sphere of the Postmodern breakdown. It is a strangely empty world – for all the subaltern masses whose real circumstances we hesitate to confront, whom we dehumanise by our self-righteous, neo-phobic obsessions with cultural purity, spiritual cleanliness and ‘difference’, have been vaporised into the paraxial. Vaporised or erased to preserve the integrity of our holy purpose. Always anonymous, their desires defined as thought-crimes by puritans for whom truth can be constructed but facts never established, the Invisible Victims of our Postmodern neurosis have ceased to exist – and their inconvenient aspirations have been consigned to the toxic landfill site of political oblivion.


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Illustration: Harmonic Of Desire, 1996

Interview With Jane Marsh

Interview with Jane Marsh
Neon Highway On-line 2006
Edited by Alice Lenkiewicz
Hi A. C.
I would imagine you would appreciate this room. On the wall there are paintings by Klimt and Duchamp. My gramophone over there plays music by Liszt and Wagner.
The CD player plays music such as The Stones and The Velvet underground.
The weather is just wonderful. We are now in Mid winter so it is cold and icy outside. The trees are bare and there is some frost and ice on the ground.
On the bookshelf you may find some collections by Plath, Byron, Baudelaire and Swinburne. There are also two recent reviews of yours on Lee Harwood’s Chanson Dada. Selected Poems by Tristan Tzara and Symbolism by Rodolphe Rapetti. Now if you just seat yourself down I would like to ask you a few questions to someone whose writing style it seems has been described as ‘macabre, hermetic minimalism’.
1.
Your work has been around for a long time and first published in the British alternative press in 1977. However it has been said that your work was more driven towards " modern occultism" rather than the conventional ‘literary’ small press. Could you explain what it was that pulled you in this direction?
Gosh, Jane! You are looking very vampish this afternoon…. And you have gone to so much trouble. It is very much appreciated and very nice to talk… But, to answer your questions: My first ‘publication’ was, in fact, 1968 when I was lucky to land a tiny contract for greetings cards. A few designs were distributed through high street shops at the height of the ‘Beardsley craze’ during the Art Nouveau Revival… Also, under the umbrella of the Convulsionists, I managed to issue some mass-produced prints and get things into the school magazine. This was all in the late nineteen sixties. After a break I started submitting material to little magazines in the mid nineteen seventies, hence the reference to ‘alternative press….’. The first magazine to take some pictures was called Sothis. I soon found acceptance with other editors in the ‘occult’ scene. There were mags with titles like The Daath Papers, Illuminatus Monthly and Nox: A Magazine of The Abyss. I was instinctively drawn to this kind of subculture: it seemed more attuned to the disruptive, paraxial fantasy I was trying to achieve than the rather staid literary scene. In any case – despite my Aestheticism – I didn’t really see my work as a narrowly ‘artistic’ enterprise – like the Surrealists I was aiming at some kind of transformational paradigm outside mainstream definitions of art/poetry. There were clear affinities between Surrealism and ‘occultism’ (a vague, dodgy term I should say) and, at the time, one felt ‘occultists’ to be more ‘alternative’ than most exponents of the counter-culture who played at being hippies at weekends. The Surrealist ‘angle’ on the occult was, of course, non-mystical – unlike the Crowleyites, or the Alexandrians, for instance, I did not view the occult as an alternative religion. It was more to do with ‘reclaiming the imagination for anarchy and nihilism,’ formulating tactics to disconnect creativity from the hegemony of ‘the establishment’. Gothic Romanticism, Baudelaire’s ‘Satanism’ and Rimbaud’s use of alchemy provided historical parallels, while Jung’s psychology pointed to an ‘interior model’ for the ‘occult image’.
2.
Could you tell me a little about your work?
The work develops on two fronts: the written and the visual. Within these two spheres I operate on a narrow spectrum of formats. The written works fall into non-fiction and ‘literary’, the visual works are black and white line drawings in either pen or pencil, collages (mainly photomontages) and, more recently digital-photo images of various kinds. Regarding the literary work I would subdivide it into poetry/experimental prose, fiction (short stories) and poetry translations from the French. In both literary and visual work I often rely on automatism and chance elements. Automatism means a kind of immersion in the unconscious process, guided intuitively. I have often regarded ‘automatic’ line work as rather like calligraphy, hovering on the borderline between pictorial representation and writing. All artistic activity is supported by the non-fiction work ranging from short review notices to extensive feature-length articles/essays like Angels Of Rancid Glamour (1998). Baudelaire said artists should also be critics – it is vital to maintain a sense of focus and context, and to engage with the history of ideas.
3.
Who were the first presses to support you?
Well, apart from the occult ‘zines mentioned the first art-poetry press to support my work was Stride edited by Rupert Loydell. Throughout the nineteen eighties Stride maintained a policy of openness to diverse approaches that was – and still is – exemplary. Stride published my first small collection Exosphere in 1984 and I contributed reviews, artwork and poetry to the magazine. Today Stride is one of the best independent presses on the UK scene. I should also mention Phlebas and Tabor who published the mini collections Chimaera Obscura and Dream Vortex.4.
Can you tell me a little about your poem Space Opera?
Space Opera was short sequence of prose-poems first published in Stride’s Serendipity Caper anthology. It was subsequently re-issued as an illustrated booklet with an intro by Steve Sneyd. Written in a kind of techno-reportage style the sequence evoked a universe where there is no distinction between inner and outer space and all communication is subject to widespread disruption from indeterminate forces. The general setting was onboard a clapped-out star-ship on a mission to investigate the mysterious planet NeoGaea, a kind of parallel Earth, but millions of light years from home. It was an attempt to fuse lowbrow and highbrow by taking a simple space adventure scenario and filtering through a mannered poetic style – the cognoscenti define this sort of thing as ‘speculative poetry’…
5.
Your work has been described as ‘artistic’ meeting ‘magical’. What would you say is your driving influence?
That’s quite a ‘deep’ question, depending on what you mean by ‘influence’ – influences should be points of departure not destinations, I think. In the nineteenth century from the time of the French Revolution to the First World War one can see a progression of ‘movements’, often referred to as avant-garde – we learn from many figures and themes of those movements and define ‘influences’ that way. That’s a very big subject and the cultural history, from Baudelaire to Beauvoir, is very important. Formative influences (i.e. contemporary, not historical) included Dada/Surrealism, Op and Pop Art, Psychedelia and Nouveau Realisme (e.g. Tinguely) – that’s on the visual side. Contemporary literary influences included Burroughs, Borges, Nabokov, Pynchon, Angela Carter and J G Ballard. As I say this it is clear that none of these were poets in the strict sense, actually they are all prose writers. I had heard about the 1965 Albert Hall event but we didn’t really take much notice of the poetry scene – the era was defined by Mary Quant and Ossie Clark not the Children of Albion. My inspirational figures were Aubrey Beardsley, Antonin Artaud and Marcel Duchamp. I think we can return to this a bit later on when we talk about the Convulsionists because, amid this welter of references, I’m thinking about your phrase ‘driving influence’…. And Paul Meunier’s observation (quoted in Rapetti’s Symbolism) that ‘artistic concerns were originally alien to the production of art.’
6.
What kind of poetry or movements in poetry do you particularly dislike and why?
I have always been against any kind of literary theory that downplays or ignores the visceral basis of creativity. The creative imagination is driven by non-verbal, obsessive compulsions that, in the final analysis, are rooted in biological/genetic phenomena. It is obvious that creativity is value-neutral and independent of any particular form of expression, visual, literary or musical. Therefore, I have no positive interest in the kind of fashionable Post Modernism that locates the main theoretical focus of poetry in the domain of ‘language’. I see this trend and similar academic fashions (Social Constructionism or Reader Response Theory) as part of the regrettable inheritance of Wittgenstein – it is clearly reactionary. For example, the current oxymoronic notion of ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry is based, according to its luminaries, on doctrines of Ethical Criticism, specifically the writings of Levinas and Bakhtin. To begin with this is contradictory in that a truly ‘language-centred’ poetry cannot be based on an ethical framework of any kind. In the second place it is intrinsically reactionary as the writings of Levinas, Bakhtin, and the other gurus, are mainly propaganda for orthodoxy dressed-up in the ‘technical’ Newspeak of academia: ‘defamiliarisation’, ‘plurivocity’, ‘dialogism’ ‘sociolect’. The doublethink is the objectionable aspect – projecting a ‘progressive’ and ‘advanced’ image but working to a regressive, conservative agenda. It’s a question of cultural politics, not literary standards, because any art that is neither entertainment nor therapy is spin and propaganda – welcome to IngSoc! The Language Poets of the 1970s de-valued, even denied, the individual voice in the name of anti-Romanticism and in so doing allied themselves, knowingly or not, with the worst kind of literary Puritanism. I don’t really care if a given example of Language Poetry conforms to someone’s idea of ‘good’ poetry, in the end its only radical chic. I would say the same about the British Poetry Revival in its earlier phases: it was an amateur way of latching on to worthless American trends – Black Mountain, Objectivism, Projective Verse and all that frightful stuff. Actually, it was a publicity stunt to promote a generational revolt against the Georgians and – wassisname? – Larkin. They want to write Modern Epics – they take themselves far too seriously – give me Fiona Pitt-Kethley any day!
7.
To what extent has alchemy influenced your work?
The function of art is the transformation of substance into style.
8.
Tell me a little about your creative process.
The ‘creative process’ is a primitive, bio-psychic phenomenon characterised by the interaction of external stimuli, unconscious drives and the neural-endocrine levels of the biological system (physis). These interactions generate the ‘altered states’ intrinsic to creativity. Cultural factors determine how various features or facets of creativity are defined as ‘artistic’. The main impulse for any creative act takes the form of an obsessive compulsion or drive-demand, often referred to as ‘inspiration’: the production of a given work of art, and its dreamlike characteristics, can be explained from the psychoanalytic perspective. Composer Toru Takemitsu said his work 'Quotation of Dream' (1991) was ‘fragmental’ and episodic, reflecting the ‘shapes of dreams’. He observed that a work can be vivid in detail but may describe ‘an extremely ambiguous structure when viewed as a whole’. Following both Freud and Takemitsu, I would say that poetic form should resemble that of a dream where, for instance, details may be clearly defined while their disposition is determined by the ‘fortuities’ of a ‘self-propelling narrative’. For me the attraction of collage – and other modes of juxtaposition – derive from conformity with the Freudian ‘dream-work’ and the laws of the unconscious – the two main properties of dream-work being compression and displacement. The law of compression determines the fragmental and condensed format of all my work in any medium. The law of displacement encourages an allusive approach to ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ akin to Mallarme’s adage ‘paint not the thing but the effect it produces’. Displacement of psychic intensities ensures that the least important features of the work are given more prominence than the most significant, leading (with luck) to a somewhat ‘hermetic’ or enigmatic effect…. I must add that chance plays a key role in everything…
9.
If you could go anywhere in reality that somehow was created from your imagination where would it be and what would it be like?
It might be like a neglected pleasure pier on the North Sea coast. During the day there would be howling gales and isolated rainstorms, at night the sea would be like purple glass – the moon would look huge. From the shore would float the distant, scratchy sound of an old 1940s Benny Goodman/Peggy Lee recording of ‘Blues in The Night’.
10.
You have said that Surrealism has been a strong influence in your work.
If you were to exhibit your work in a gallery these days what kind of show do you think you would focus on?
Dark Energy – Dark Energy comprises seventy percent of the universe and provides the repulsive force necessary to power the ever-accelerating expansion of the galaxies. Just as the existence of the unconscious can be inferred from Freudian Slips, so Dark Energy can be detected indirectly from the effects of virtual particles on the orbits of electrons. I like the idea that seventy percent of the universe is ‘dark’, just as seventy percent of the mind is ‘dark’ and seventy percent of human prehistory is ‘dark’. So my exhibition would be based around Three Zones Of Darkness. To the side there might be shrines dedicated to some modern goddesses: Veronica Lake, Caterina Valente, Julie London, Donyale Luna and P J Harvey. I think the décor would look rather like Martin Hibbert’s Burnt Out Hotel. Oh, I might exhibit some collages and drawings as well! At lunchtimes there would be tasteful piano recitals and in the evenings there would be poetry readings – in the dark, obviously…

11.
You say you enjoy the work of Louise Nevelson. I do also. I read a book about her work a while back and I was fascinated by her assemblages made from found objects and painted gold. I just thought I would mention that to you.
Yes! The Tate Gallery has a couple of her things. There was one called 'Black Wall' (1959) and another called 'American Tribute To The British People' (1960-1964). I thought the 'Black Wall' as fantastically sinister… There are Sky Cathedrals, Royal Games, Rain Gardens and Night Scapes, all very intricate and painted uniformly in either white, black or gold… there are echoes of Nevelson in some of my drawings…
12.
Can we build an assemblage together? I’ll collect a few objects and you put them together how you want. Here we are, some old boxes, feathers, a doll, picture frames, books, string, a glass case, medicine bottles, paper, broken mirror, pieces of rusty engine, glossy magazines, shoes, a mannequin, lots of old china plates and a few cans of spray paint. What do you reckon? I’ll come back in an hour and see what you produced.
OK, I have added an empty window frame and a battered wig-maker’s white polystyrene artificial head called ‘Ultima’ to this assemblage. ‘Ultima’ is an important totem. In the glass case will be several old sepia photos and the diary of a bibliomaniac. The broken mirror must be at the centre of the installation. You can just take a photo and add it here if you wish?
13.
Now I just want to show you the chamber. This is the deepest room in the house way below the ground and the steps are a little creaky. Hope you’re not too tired, it’s quite a way down.
Hope you like my spiral staircase. Here we are at last.
Please step inside. Okay please do sit down. You can use that old gravestone if you wish?
Jane, this is such a friendly way to conduct an interview – thank you, this gravestone is quite comfortable – what does the inscription say? I can’t quite make it out as it is covered in yellow and black lichen. What a gloriously spooky wrought iron spiral staircase that was – I can almost taste the rust.
Could you tell me about the group you formed called The Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group?
It is tempting to say we were just a group of alienated teenagers…! We formed the thing around 1968 and it only lasted until around 1971 or 1972. There were about five or six participants based in Chelmsford, Essex. Other places included Colchester, Ipswich and Witham… people used to meet in coffee bars after school – we were all sixth formers doing art or literature, mainly as a way of avoiding sport. The associations continued after everyone left school and tried to get jobs. Some poetry was written and experimental prose cut-up; atonal electronic music was composed and lots of paintings and collages produced. There were occasional expeditions or ‘pilgrimages’ to ‘displaced destinations’ such as the old Hungerford Bridge, the Victoria Embankment Gardens (for the Sullivan Memorial – very ‘convulsive’), The Atlantis Bookshop, or the Dashwood Mausoleum and Hell Fire Caves at West Wycombe. But mainly there was a lot of loafing around, drinking coffee and snogging – or going to see Hammer Horror films and German Expressionist movies at the NFT. There was one exhibition at Hylands House – the exhibition was for all the school leavers but we managed to commandeer a room – as the Convulsionists were the general organisers of the show it was quite easy to get the space! We came up with the term ‘Convulsionism’ after the phrase ‘Beauty will be convulsive…’ (from Breton’s Amour Fou). I felt it implied the ‘visceral’ idea - my ideal work of art was to be a meaningless allegory generated by a kind of neurological spasm or frisson that could be transmitted to the viewer – well, if it gave me a frisson it might give you one as well. One old policy document from my archive says: "CONVULSION IS CONCERNED WITH THE BEAUTY OF PURE IMAGINATION AND FANTASY AND IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED TO CONTRAPTON IN ANY FORM" (Convulsively Produced Notes On Convulsion, 1968). Earlier, I mentioned some key influences… I should add the Lost Generation to the list – the Francophile ‘Yellow Nineties’ Decadent poets and artists (Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson et al) and, also, the ultra-Symbolist absurdism (as we saw it) of Laforgue and Alfred Jarry – we were quite keen on ‘Pataphysics as I recall… There was some empathy with English Pop Art, so we rather revelled in the Mass Media – Pop Music (The Doors, Brian Auger), Jazz (Indo Jazz Fusions, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus), Science Fiction and ‘cult TV’. It was ironic that the real Surrealists disbanded in 1969 (Andre Breton died in 1966) so we settled for being Neo-Surrealists!
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What are you working on at present?
I am continually revising my ‘personal aesthetic’ (which is not a literary ‘poetic’) and have found this has absorbed much of my time in recent months. In our present situation when, for various reasons, free artistic expression is coming under threat as never before, I have been driven to ‘sharpen up’ my thoughts on such issues… On a more practical level I am revising and digitizing some non-fiction from the back-catalogue – various reviews and articles that I feel I have neglected and must revisit. I have an ongoing programme of computerisation that is quite time-consuming – some examples appear on the Tangents website. Publication-wise there are various poems accepted by magazines including Fire. Recent appearances have included ‘Vespula Vanishes’ a poem for Tori Amos (Inclement), ‘Danger (Midnight Street)’ (Pulsar), ‘Beautiful Chaos’ and ‘Dadar Radar’ (Fragments), and another piece called ‘Not The Cloudy Sky’ (Harlequin). Forthcoming, among other items, is a short story ‘Vikki Verso’ from Atlantean Publications who have taken a number of texts and drawings over the last couple of years. A recent collage, called ‘In the Beginning’ is on the cover (designed by Neil Annat) of a new Stride publication – Peter Redgrove’s A Speaker For The Silver Goddess (2006).
Thank you for answering my questions A.C.
And, thank you, Jane, for a fascinating conversation…
I’ll go and get you a glass of wine from the cellar
Be careful how you go – mind all those cobwebs!
I wish you luck and fortune with your work, as Salomon Trismosin once said:
Study what thou art
Whereof thou art a part.
What thou knowest of this Art,
This is really what thou art,
All that is without thee,
Also is within
All best for now.
Jane

Neon Highway, 2006