You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism here.
4,559 words
Part 3 of 5
Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi
In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.
Craze is the fourth book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s name (London: Avant-Garde, 1993). We will publish it online in 5 instalments.
Craze is written as an interview, but there is little overall unity to the line of questioning, but broadly there are two foci: modern art and a lesbian couple Bowden knew.It is unclear who Bowden envisioned as his interviewer and his audience. He was writing over the heads of his peers to a potential future audience who could appreciate him. Let us hope he finally found it.
As usual, real people appear under pen names. In some cases, it is easy enough to guess who Bowden is talking about. For instance, Gaudier Louter-Finiscue of the Monday Club is Gregory Lauder-Frost. Given that Bowden had a penchant for peddling fictions about his own life as fact, it is probably prudent to treat everything in this book as fictional until proven otherwise.
Eventually, a fully annotated version of Craze will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson
Question: Is there not another form of psychological trauma, another case, which excites your prurient tastebuds?
Answer: Indeed. This is a case that involves two acquaintances of Diligent Observer[1]—an artist who I happen to know—and these individuals, who happened to study at different art colleges in the centre of London, have retreated into a world of their own. Their names are Anne and Isabella[2]—an alleged lesbian couple—two Sapphic inverts in macks, as it were. Although that side of things does appear to be truly over. In fact, they seem to have retreated into some world of their own; a strange twilight world—a type of exaggerated agoraphobia, a fear of spaces beyond themselves. Apparently, they are holed up in this house in Bow, for which they pay a peppercorn rent, and they never seem to venture forth from its portals except to shop and sign-on at the labour exchange. In other words, they do not go out at all. They are living a totally isolated, externalised, and yet atrophied form of life. Where they do not see anybody else for days on end. Indeed, there is a rumour, which Diligent has picked up, that they do not have any commerce with each other now, whether sexual or otherwise. It appears that they live in their separate rooms—the small boxes; the living spaces which they inhabit—without necessarily relating to one another, never mind anyone else. Moreover, it appears that Anne—the younger, more vulnerable and more distracted of the two—even conducts her ablutions in the room. In other words, she does not even go along the corridor to the toilet but uses a bucket in her room.
In many respects, though, it is difficult to gauge what is going on—particularly from this distance. Yet what I imagine to be occurring is a strange, spectral lacuna—a gradual, if arrested, catatonia. Whereby one or other of these unfortunate women, perhaps both, is retreating into silence, the ultimate mental breakdown, the female scream in a shuttered room. It is a picture of a Virago book cover, perhaps by Gluck, in any event in lambent green, which is viewed by an observer through a cracked mirror. Indeed, the mirror has truly cracked—it has fallen to the floor and split lengthways along its side. It is as if these individuals are engaged in their own private version of 9&!/2Weeks—the anguish without any of the butterscotch and S&M inadequacy. It is a situation where Kim Bassinger walked on her knees across floors only to experience the denial of a pullulant member; the enforcement of an abstracted form of penetration. Where she lay on a bed—bronzed and in bondage—trussed and waiting for the penis to resolve, soothe, and inflame her pain—her psychological inadequacy. Indeed, the thing about these Hollywood treatments of such serious themes is the fact that they can never do them justice. It is a mere skimming of the surface—since a real treatment of the drama would leave you with an audience of criminal psychiatrists and policemen. This is a situation where Krafft-Ebbing had replaced Alex Comfort in relation to what was permissible—a rendition where a “normal” cinema audience is liable to retch rather than reach for the G-spot.
Although there is no evidence of lesbian sadomasochism, of sexual perversion, in relation to these two individuals—despite the fact that it could be an explanation in other circumstances. In that this form of isolation—where one of the women appears to be more masculine than the other—could often be due to the use of sexual force. The extent to which women who are not entirely female will test their own masculinity, will weigh up the absence of a man.
It now appears, however, that these events have taken a turn for the worse—and Anne has attempted to commit suicide. She has taken a thermometer which was full of mercury, smashed it, and then imbibed the contents. After all, mercury poisoning of the blood—with its deletorious effect on the kidneys—is a sure way to kill oneself. So one can presume from this that she actually meant it. She wished to commit suicide; she wanted to die, to end her life. This is something which she has almost managed to achieve, given the fact that all of her blood has been pumped out and replaced, and that she is presently lying in a hospital bed, on a drip and in a coma. The coma, apparently, involves a high degree of neurological disturbance—whether permanent or not remains to be seen—with rapid eye-movements and electrical storms in the brain—fierce, febrile, and inconstant moments. This is something which must be truly bizarre to observe—if, as I have heard, the eyes are still open. So to recap: the eyes have been pulled back, they are open and blank. While beneath them we find little more than an abandoned dreamscape; an untenanted lot—where her own flashbacks, intuitions, dreams, and nightmares scan across the surface just beneath the eyes, the eyeballs which stare but do not comprehend.
The reasons for this turn in events are multiple, however. All of it must go back to the room—the interstellar space—the final withdrawal, closure, and shut-down which proceeded the last stand, the suicidal collapse. For it seems that Anne has now withdrawn from other people and now from life itself—well almost—and that this was a process which gathered momentum throughout the years. First came the withdrawal, the insistent need for isolation, and this was to be followed by the final cut-off—the moment when the drawbridge went up. When she retreated to the fastness of the room, the melancholy isolation of the bucket. Apparently, this process of withdrawal and enclosure had been proceeding for a considerable time, at least from her days at the art college. It had been a progressive “journey to the end of the night,” although in her case there was no light at the end of the tunnel. It was, more accurately, a journey towards death, towards the final oblivion, the moment of release and absence of tension in a shattered (or is it shuttered?) room, an acknowledged enclosure. It was as if she lived with a certain stigmata; an acknowledged presence of her own fate. It was a type of Cain’s mark upon her forehead—a premonition that she was doomed to die (as are we all)—yet in her case before her time. She knew what it was to die, therefore. She had attempted many things near the edge—including several other unsuccessful suicide bids—none of which had ever come off, unlike the present one. Indeed, the present one is truly serious—in that taking mercury is a definite desire for death, particularly when one understands that it leads to a gross poisoning of the blood—certainly internal damage—and this in relation to a woman who had liver problems anyway. It is basically the equivalent of chucking oneself off the top of a block of council flats and meaning it! After all, there is no playback—like on a video machine—no second chance, merely the final moment, which in relation to these individuals, has already been arrived at. Yet what drove Anne to this particular debacle—this absence of self-knowledge—perhaps in turn the possession of so much self-knowledge that it was impossible to continue?
To answer that question we need to possess certain facts—certain answers—and if we do not possess them, well, there is no need to despair. We can construct them from our own knowledge and presentiment.
Anne had always had a rough and yet highly strung demeanour. This is something which had been exacerbated by her withdrawal from the world, her growing isolation in the room. Yet in a sense she was much more normal than Isabella—her cohort in crime—the woman she had given herself to since her bi-sexual turn, the degree to which she had shut herself off from her own sexuality. Diligent was always bemused by her lesbianism—her absence of the facts of lesbianism. This is something which indicates that the inversion was psychological rather than physically real. Yet given the context in which it took place one has to consider the possibility of foul play, the fact that something may have been lurking in that old house in Bow. This was the house into which they had retreated from the pain and anger of the modern world, a pain and futility which they had in good measure. Of course, many of these houses in Bow have tunnels underneath the surface, spectral arches and hidden passages which connect with underground cellars and crypts, many of which go back as far as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So, in a sense, the two women had retreated further than they intended but the spectral landscape—the increasingly isolated bordello—which they insisted on inhabiting needs to be explained. This is particularly so in relation to the choice of inversion—the necessity of the notification of the absence of a change—when Isabella, the only one of the two I met, hardly seemed lesbian at all. When I met her it was across a crowded flat at Anthony Mastropasqua’s, with Anthony bent over the gas-stove, cooking tortillas (i.e., spanish omlette), with the light flickering overhead. The light flickered because the cathode-ray tube in the strip light was long since defunct and it only continued to operate in an inconstant, not to say migraine-inducing way. At this time Isabella kept up a constant barrage of questions and answers with Anthony about the occult, a mutual passion of theirs. In that both Anne and Isabella, together with Anthony, were irrationalists tout court. They believed in the Mysteries, the impossibility of imagining that the universe was coherent, that it could be explained in a rational way when it was magical. For his part, Anthony’s knowledge of the occult was vast and yet superficial—superficial in the sense that he made most of it up as he went along. This is something which was quite permissible when we remember that most of the Occult is made up by its practitioners as they go along anyway. It seems to involve two levels at once, the one anecdotal and referential, in that it relates to past forms of the same dogma, previous essences of the same particular thing. In other words, this is a situation in which occultists, in an allegedly sinister mockery of the Catholic idea of auctoritares, use long-standing authorities, scripts, and potions—things which have been handed down from the past, to augment their present practises. On the other hand, though, the Occult involves acts not theory—the pursuance of actual mysteries, governable events, “Workings” as they are called, otherwise it is mere playacting, armchair occultism.
Anthony himself, of course, was something of a poseur—although this should not be overplayed—and he once confessed to me that he could not conjure up demons successfully because his council flat was too small! Be that as it may, Anthony quite seriously believed in the multiplicity of possible forms—the interchangeability of one act as against another—the fact that reality (so-called) consisted of multiple dimensions that inter-related with one another. In other words, one could almost be speaking to someone else when suddenly—if an individual was “hexed” or something of this sort—an arm which was green and scaly could burst out of your own. It is the belief in the redundancy of the flesh, the fact that reality is not what it seems which sets Anthony apart. Nevertheless, this house which the two girls occupied in Bow needs to be discussed further, if its true nature and illumination is to be revealed. This house was on three storeys—so far as I gather—(little more than an illumination of itself) and yet there existed a fourth storey deep below ground, with tunnels that moved back into the cliff behind. The dwelling could be approached in two ways—through an entrance in the rear, if you pardon the expression—or across the pebble bestrewn beach which looked out to France. The latter involved shifting a wrought-iron gate, galvanised and painted black but held together with rust, and passing through a non-descript strip of garden before you came on a conservatory. This was a low-lying construction which lay across one side of the house; a hot, humid affair that contained within it various pots of cacti, together with straggling, dying creeper-like plants. The thick teak door which communicated with the outside lay at the back of the conservatory and communicated with the main internal room—this is on the second floor of the house—with a splendid alcove or booth at one end and a darkened stairwell at the other. The stairwell led upstairs—past balustrades which were thick and shiny—to a small bedroom, lounge, and galley kitchen which could have served as children’s quarters in the old days. Whereas the main part of the house lay on the second storey and was painted in black, a situation where dark wooden panelling jostled with the light that came through one of the side windows, themselves gabled windows with a latticed structure. At the back of this room ran a long corridor which squeaked when you walked along it and that ran laterally with the main room in front. This corridor’s most arresting feature was a large picture of the Circus Flavius along one wall. The picture itself was huge, grotesque, realistic, in the manner of its depiction of a Ben Hur-like Chariot race and yet overdone, unduly (if not monstrously) stylized in a heady, neo-Victorian manner. The oil painting, which was under glass, was in an extremely heavy gilt-frame. Indeed, so heavy was this period piece; this object d’art, that it had to be chained to the wall. For there were two stanchions buried deep in the wall in order to support this thing, with a golden chain twisted around them to keep it steady.
The most important thing about this house, however, was the fact that it was alive; indeed, a large mysterious eye, a kernel of existence lay buried at its centre. These things were unparalleled mysteries, tombs, and deep breaths of something else, something more wondrous. Also, the ground floor connected with a tunnel that wound its way down into the earth, out of which something mangled, metallic, and yet insensate might emerge. The thing was, in turn, a metaphorization of what the young women were feeling; a signification of their own despair—a man-thing; an excretal-dot—in what was otherwise an entirely feminine world. Indeed, if one looked further into it, as in the case of Bram Stoker’s story The Lair of the White Worm, then one could imagine that this demon, this apparition of the darkness, was a monstrous and disembodied penis. This is something little more than a radical form of penis-envy on behalf of these two women; an entity which merely served to exacerbate the absence of the male. There it lurked underground—a master of sword-and-sorcery romance without honour; a sort of priapic monstrance—a burrowing member; a Worm Ouroboros. Yet the thing signified more than the absence of the lost male—the presence, if not the revenge, of the phallus, the outraged scrotum, burrowing in the earth. In that this delinquent posture of two women living with each other had established a pattern of revenged force; a steady stream of psychic antimatter—a type of electrolysis of the soul. Where a large amount of garbage, psychological ectoplasm—spent selves—had returned to haunt them. All of which is part of the occult notion of balance, equipoise—of ying and yang—between different things, little more than a restatement of Newton’s law in spiritual terms: that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The creature was masculine—if not mescaline—and it consisted of metal plates instead of a mouth, eyes or the usual features. It was crossbred with orbs for a face—perhaps large, stalk-like eyes with bobbing promontories on the edge of these protuberances. In a sense it was a cybernetic excrescence; a thing burrowing in the earth, little more than a necrophagous beastie; a runt—a syphilitic poltroon (it is indeed remarkable that Dr. Arthur Conan-Doyle, the writer who created Sherlock Holmes, earned his doctoral thesis on complications in a diagnosis of syphilis)—a “proto-plasmic Other” which was kept alive by the metal, the false limbs it carried around with it. You see, the two girls themselves were obsessed by hauntings, by premonitions of their own sense of absence. They had shut themselves up in this deserted house in Bow—something which is reminiscent of the worst type of Masonic Lodge; the guardian temple—the interior apartment à la the French Revolution (where the revolutionary groups met) if you believe in the testimony of Nesta H. Webster—a witness who I in no sense believe to be reliable. Here they practised their dark, arcane rites—ultimately their decision to remain apart, sacrosanct, and different from the world. The extent to which even their loneliness was part of a divine order, a divine other we should say, an occult sense of not belonging to what otherwise exists.
The point about Masonism is not altogether lost, however, in that it is the secrecy and sense of isolation which alienates others—that gives it a sense of mystery, even a mild frisson of terror, at least for the uninitiated. When in fact, of course, Masonism in Britain—contrary to the propaganda of anti-Masonists like Stephen Knight—is really a mixture of men in duffle-coats doing deals, exchanging strange handshakes, eating cold platters of cod, peas, and chips in ill-lit municipal halls and washing the aforementioned down with lukewarm bottles of Tizer. In short, behind the furious facade of these sinister-looking Gothic tabernacles with the windows bricked-up there lies the reality of men in aprons having a few drinks. Yet it is this sense of isolation—the bricked-up or bricked-in sense of foreboding, the sense of isolation and private trauma that gives these rituals—these necessarily ridiculous rituals—their sense of religious expectancy, occult awe. Although it has to be said that the religious act of Masonism, which I am quite sure that the majority of Masons do not understand or are not interested in, should not entirely be disrespected—since all and every exercision of power has mystical attachments. It has to cleave to itself a sense of the wondrous, an understanding of the fact that it transgresses the material. In short, all power is partly spiritual in its effects. It partakes of a ritual observance; the extent to which the maintenance of power is itself a religious act. In the sense that it is an attempt to erect order out of the facts of human inadequacy, the fact that human beings are fallen in relation to their own fate. The two girls themselves, however, were quite still at the centre of their own drama—the epi-centre of their own emotions. This was itself a recognition of the fact that they had retreated from the world into their own box—the space that they had chosen to occupy. In a sense both of them had decided that the rest of the world was to be put on no account—that, in a sense, it was of no account—“to be put on nothing,” as the Fool once said in Shakespeare’s King Lear. They believed, in accordance with their own version of a particular modernist cliché, that everyone was dishonest and duplicitous except themselves. This was an attitude which basically said that other human beings in society could not bear their radical sense of honesty—the freshness and truthfulness of their demeanour. Everyone else, in short, in relation to their radical criterion of truth—transparent honesty—was found to be wanting, to be inadequate in some way. Only they—in particular only Anne (let alone Isabella) professed the truthfulness necessary to go on, to make a fresh fist of it. Hence, we see the rationalization which they accorded their own isolation and alienation from the outside world. For such an excuse, that other people were less “honest,” less direct or truthful in aspect, served as the ideal raison d’etre of their own isolation. This was the attempt they had made to cut themselves off from the society of others—eventually their own society, i.e., the increasing disinclination which Anne professed for any intercourse with Isabella. All of this was part of a scenario whereby they refused to admit to themselves that it was they not the society which was in trouble.—To go further it was they who had rejected the society, not the other way round.
Yet neither of the two women really needed a form of external stimulation—such as drink—in order to release and abandon their desires, to become beholden to a form of abandonment, necessary murder. Whereas many individuals, such as David Trestle[3]—a mutual acquaintance of mine—require a token of gin, which is not a man’s drink anyway—to get himself totally out of his head, his “box,” to release the trauma which exists just beneath the surface. Apparently, Trafford[4] stumbled back from a social party in Barnes, southwest London, to an office where he hoped to crash out, only then to find it locked. He immediately started to bang on the letterbox and shout through the keyhole in order to raise attention, but the only person he could raise was a Spanish tenant who lived on the top floor. The tenant finally came down to see what all the fuss was about—only then to slam the door in Trestle’s face as a token of exasperation. At this point—when the door was slammed in his face—Trestle seemed to go mad. He started shouting and screaming, waving his fists in the air and gesticulating wildly. In a sense this rejection had brought the fact of many other rejections, similar moments of other people saying “no,” to the surface. It was as if a million doors—often with grubby Spanish landladies to one side of them—had been rejecting him, had been shutting the door on him (quite literally) for too long now. As a consequence, something snapped in Trafford—ultimately he had experienced one rejection too many. It had gone on too much, for too long, it had become nauseating in its expectancy, its commonplaceness.
The trouble was that just about everybody had rejected David Trestle. He had been shunted from pillar to post; rejected and abused (if not in the physical sense)—and generally ill-treated by everyone he had come into contact with. In a sense, therefore, when the door was slammed in his face in Barnes the other night it proved to be the last straw, the proverbial straw which broke the camel’s back. When this event happened he stepped back and reflected for a moment before he went berserk—then after a moment’s reflection—he went berserk. At first there was a moment of silence—the silence before the storm—the minor tremulousness which you detect just before an electric storm, a storm of fireflies. When the man was determined to make a show, to show himself in the least best possible light, to set up several tripwires for himself so that he could cross all of them at a moment’s notice. The sole purpose of this display, however, was to gain as well as express self-pity; to engage in a major statement of self-denial, to eradicate nothing more than the nature of his own conduct, its latent possibilities. As a consequence after this split second, this second of the gun, the gun which—Russian roulette-like—he had just removed from his own head, he discharged both barrels into the doorway. But he did not assault the door with a handgun or anything of that sort, he used his fists to pummel and to attempt to break down the fastness which barred the way. To cut a long story short, he rammed both fists—without protection—through the glass partitions in the door. This was something which resulted in a bizarre tableaux—if only a momentary one—an exclamation of a sudden possibility. It was a situation in which he came across the possibility of a vista of blood, flesh, shattered glass, and two lacerated fists, suspended in space on one side of the door. He then dragged his fists along the jagged glass which he had succeeded in smashing, only stopping when he found the latch which he promptly released. The door then flew open, and Trestle entered the downstairs area of the building, the area which led upstairs to the offices and apartments above. Unfortunately for him, as he had smashed through the glass panelling with his fists, he had caught a vein on a piece of glass. This was something which can be most serious later on, particularly if a caught vein leads to blood loss that in turn results in a mild haemorrhage—a loss of touch in the fingers and, to a certain extent, the loss of some control over the hands that remain partially paralysed. Trestle then made his way upstairs in a drunken stupor—screaming and howling in rage—upset and distraught, with all the latent viciousness, timidity, arrogance, mock-modesty, and internal despair on show. The police found him wallowing in his own filth several hours later.
Notes
[1] Who is Diligent Observer?
[2] Who are Isabella and Anne?
[3] Who is David Trestle?
[4] Who is Trafford?