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5,738 words

Part 2 of 7 (Full series here.)

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in six volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. These 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.

Deliverance is the fifth book in the second volume. It had not been previously published. We will publish it online in seven installments.

Like many of the Collected Works volumes, Deliverance  covers a wide range of political and cultural topics. But instead of interspersing these analyses with fictional narratives, Deliverance is fictional from beginning to end.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Deliverance 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

For Brian had called me out to that God-forsaken watering spot — the barman, Matthew, would have been better off as a lampshade, if you take my meaning — in order to discuss politics: the rodomontade of the fitness to rule: the fact that some are called and others chosen. In that Brian always considered himself to be one of those with a political gift; a man with much to contribute; a mover and shaker; a man on the move; behind the scenes — remaining incognito, John, incognito — (this last with a chuckle) — only to reveal himself as the hidden hand behind contemporary events. For Brian was concerned with the internal deliberations of a political club — on the conservative fringes — which was at war with itself. He was on its executive, pursuant to its innermost moments, the dramas of its existence, a man who remained between the various factions, above the fray; attendant to its gossip — semi-detached, as Sir Bernard Ingham once said of John Biffen MP — bemoaning the fates: ready to throw his pygmy-like strength into the fray at an opportune moment. Toad-like — he crept between the benches — an arbitrator: a man who went out before the others (and yet who contrived to remain a little behind the rest) — a man whose idea of paramilitary activity was, as one wag observed, the belabouring of lamp-posts with stickers: a sticker blitz. There was also a certain violence to Brian: crude — splenetic — rages — a man given to bouts of uncertain enthusiasm: a witness to the absence of the fates; a sort of helium filled spastic; a dirigible; racially-minded — Rostockish, in fact — and yet often contemptuously weak: a man who has been dubbed in these narratives (heretofore) as Cheated Spiderman or Lift Those Weights Spastic. The strength in his frame was, in short, all he carried with him — a mere anatomical embrace — a skeletal frame — as in a medical encyclopaedia or Dürer’s Anatomy:[1] the strength or sense of fitness of High Barrow or Low Tor — the excavations of Dr. Mortimer, the uncovering of disused skulls. These were little more than the exhibits, in showy cases, tinted green in the glass, of the Royal College of Surgeons — off-limits to the general public for fear of afrighting them too greatly. This was the mixture of bony hands clawed together at the bottom of valises: independent means — the redundant stare of dead fish eyes from beneath glass plate: a finished article; topary [topiary?] of the skin; as yet undiscovered, naked to the day, the skeletons of former hybrids — great apes with white fur — gleaming in the barrels. This was the abandonment — the Crying of Lot 49 (to betoken Pynchon’s usage) — the silent scream — as in the black opalescent mirror to which we have referred — which greeted you inside the black room; box, jar, museum — without efficacy of thought; the uncontrollable urgings of the unmanaged flesh. Sat opposite me — within a yard — Brian was nevertheless seen to pass down the row of exhibits, his face blanched, as if seen to be suffering from some strange wasting disease; the last puppeteer of lost enchantment; the Joker without the grin; the man who smiled without mirth; a sufferer from white leprosy; a man who had dined well on a fish supper before throwing it up prior to the meeting. The cadaverous gleam (but not necessarily in the eye) was merely the sign of inner disease; wasting; post-pubescent flesh; the inner phantasies; the healing balm of what otherwise remained fossilized and congealed; uncleared in the stomach; the psychoanalysis of a dwarf; the impossibility of registering on consciousness a transparent object: question: how can you psychoanalyse a foetus in a bottle?  This was the dilemma one entertained in trying to assess Brian’s personality with any sense of rigour. For the being who shuffled across the exhibition cases in the Royal College of Surgeons at night — all crinoline and black lace (and that was just the mask) — was difficult to sum up with any sense of certainty: but one had to attempt the task. For with Brian, a sudden and concealed anger could always burst out — it was like a flash of orange; a swarm of fire-flies above a swamp; circling dizzily; the premonition of electricity in the air; the possibility of lightning at a future date; quietness covered over with the absence of joy — prior to the eruption: the Vesuvius-like nemesis. This was the moment of boldness which was otherwise a token of weakness — a recognition of the emptiness which lurked in the flesh. It was rather like the falling face of a businessman in a blue suit (circa 1955) in relation to the work of Francis Bacon: the anger would pour forth — a type of distemper (the absence of moral renewal) across the canvas — blue admixed with orange and red: a burst of gun-fire in the night-time: the onrush of a pregnant stillness — itself redeemed by fire. Touché! It was like a sheet of vomit — but this time (once and for all) it was the colour of blood! It splurted across the canvas — across the tableaux: a token of outraged indifference: it careened into one obstacle and then another: it moved and ricocheted from one object to another: barely stopping for stillness. In truth, all was measured, listless and quiet — positively lugubrious. It was the embrace of a positive

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics here.

nihilism — positive in the sense that it offered a meaning in its redundancy: it said, as Bacon himself intimated, possibly with David Sylvester, about his own work: life is essentially meaningless but we give a purpose to this carousal by the nature of our drives: to be wholesome and free as well to be lonely and isolated, bereft of fate — lacking in internal sustenance: prone to the onset of either disease or the craving for destruction. This is truly what has to be watched. It was this burst of lightening or distemper; the disacknowledgement of fate; that harried Brian beyond the boundaries; across the mountains of his own inexplicable rages; his obscure and tangential satisfaction — as he saw the blue, grey, green, yellow and magenta — soar across the space. He would be sitting quietly in a room; face down upon the table; with another committee man to either side of him; listening to the ministrations — the internal meandering — of the Chairman Dr. Mark,[2] for instance — and then something would set him off. He would be ignored; one of his prize suggestions did not find favour — and he would be convulsed with rage: a bodily distemper, an ague of the joints: a burst of fire. He would scream and wish to rush around the room (metaphorically speaking) with his hands clasped around his head; before he dashed his head against the four walls of the upstairs dining-room at the Red Lion, Parliament Square, SW1, the extant committee room — from which Norman stole the bottles when drunk; Teacher’s Whiskey, Lamb’s Gin; Smirnoff — non-Soviet imports rolling around at the base of a plastic hold-all; the room the Club used for its deliberations — if it did not meet in the adjacent Abbey Gardens or the House of Commons itself — with the Lord Merlin in the chair.[3] The very fact that Brian could be convulsed with a pitch of rage; the blind fury of pitiless hate; meant that his own psycho-neurotic persona; the ministrations of his own flesh; came preciously close to that of murder — the psychic disequilibrium; the disturbance in the sou — as Dostoyevsky would see it — which leads to murder: the subdued, distant and yet furious student, Raskolnikov, who clubs the tight-fisted landlady to death with the back of an axe-handle: only to sit down and watch the blood, the dark crimson liquid — admixed with a pinch of black — you know the myth of black blood (?) — “was his blood red or black?” — move in equidistant circles of ever-increasing radius — the further they moved away from the shattered skull. All of which relates very much to the Black Museum and its sister institution (at least metaphorically speaking) — the London College of Surgeons (as mentioned heretofore) — the exhibits of excitement, exhilaration and loss — the testicles in tubes which crowd the benches: as Brian sprawls amidst the bottles, tubes, coils, human condiment jars, racks of limbs, spare toes and mucous membrane: viruses of emptiness which line the study — as in Conan Doyle’s The Dying Detective — concerned with the contraction of a rare Sumatran disease. The cases — the polished glass of extravagant ecstasy — stared back at Brian: full in the face: he latched onto this mismatch: the fact that here in the cases were the absent breed; the night-swarm; the circuitous oval of other delights; the boundaries of bat’s droppings; the circumference of dust; as he wandered thither; finding out for himself that nothing existed in the cases save the absence of death. This was a foreknowledged disclosure: here before the glass: behind the livery: the transparent fate of those who were born — not to be free — but dead inside: the fact that such people lived the option of their days — the transparent ache in ducts down deep; the black cherries of the wandering soul; broiling in brine; smoke; the bracken of firs; light pumice;[4] the understanding of what had been missed — as they rode out amidst the dark plumage; the tumbril of the underbelly; the fixed consciousness of the nether depths. Here — Exhibit 164, don’t you know — lay the elongated skeleton of the so-called Elephant Man — Joseph Merrick — grossly disfigured — a human man-thing (swamp-thing in the DC vintage): a victim of imaginary napalm; smuggled in the dust; alone, besides the time; rampant in the face; a charging mastodon — the hecatombs of human slaughter opening up — the rock-drill (Walter Epstein, please take note) bit the dust — ravaged in the heat; raddled; pissed on, down below; the ducts of Hell; loose bits of flesh around the teeth; a salami sandwich for a face — indifferent to the fates — his mother’s womb trampled on by an elephant (allegedly); in short, a monstrosity let loose in the community — an exhibit — Quasimodo without the bricks: yet underneath all — a heart of gold — the Bible learnt off by heart — the poetry of Shelley and Keats — the remembered beauty of his mother (inside); the ugliness (without). For this was true — alone and above the rest! As one looked around the cases — dark and hushed — an expectant gloom: distraught, isolated and yet solemn — you see the reflection of Brian’s gaze: jovial and yet abstracted: diffident and yet easily censorious; a commingling of frustration, bodily tension — sub-Reichian armour about the neck — and inverted snobbery: fuel for the flames of a barren and yet agreeable nature. Here in the cases of the Royal College of Surgeons — a dungeon of misplaced physiology — one sees the greed of vertebrate manhood; the leprosy of the hidden hand; blow me down for a sixpence; the jars and bottles of contemptuous spleen; the deliverance of bilious tissue — for it is here that the scorbutic undergarments of the soul find themselves revealed. Here the hanging torsos; gaunt and hanging fire — Rembrandt’s ox in the moonlight — are to be seen in the foreground — the vertebrae of a large fish — but this time a human being, lying adjacent to the rest across the way — the way-station of the mind: that which was fit to properly respond; sheafs of scalp — skeletal chart, the inhabitants of mucous; follow the blade down beneath the arteries; the clavicle of fashion; inebriate manhood; the falsity of what was to come: alone, despairing, gibbering in its glass-case; alongside the side-board of upturned stones. This was the residue of the after-taste of death — strychnine in the mouth — disclosure of evidence — muscular manhood — let us out of here! (a cry in the background of the bar –overheard at a distance) — in this way the gibbering insensate froth of the man-made monkey continued on, facing the mask; blank and furious; wondrous in the dark; aloft — the bitter taste of surgical notation — knife in the water — a second’s blindness: what it was to be free and uncircumcised — beneath the shutters — the

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.

envelope atop the canvas: as in Bacon; to be free or not — the question of the hour; stopped dead by killing. This is the moment of the plunge; the sick-bed; Alice; wondering aft; nickers on corpses — MPs in the stocks — a ridiculous base-ball cap atop a tableaux of meat: flies around the flesh: joyless; covered with lead — moving across a tableaux of mud (as in Beckett), alone before the others — let loose, murderous; hate-filled; of spume and fury; the charge of the heavy brigade into the butcher’s back-room; hacking and charging at the meat; ramming it through: alone of fate; empty of release; waiting for capture and imprisonment; the clink of metal on stalk-like wrists. We know what we want — cried the others! All of which leaves Brian — alone and before his master — circumspect and yet waiting for guidance: this is the token of his empty fury — not least our interest in it — before the moment of punishment: the guidance before the plot — here and now — this minute — to be free. We know what it is to be human — averred the governing counsel of this plot! Yes, indeed. For here also — resplendent in darkness — hidden beneath the sheath-like extremities of its rubber — sex-doll Dianne — a redundant dribble of the human (as in a baby’s whisper — gossamer on the tongue) — was to be found the remains of Christie: the fifties Notting Hill murderer: dead amidst garbage; mask in the snow; hanged for his pain — cried the news-vendor. Christie was here [as Brian looked on — desirous of more punishment] — the secrets of Rillington Place had come to be exhibited in the Royal College of Sugeons! Here was the glass-jar — distended and screaming — the mouth within it closed in a snarl: the ingratitude of a death-mask taken from a fresh corpse: hot from a hanging: the imprint of the rope still discernible around the neck. Christie knew when to wait: when to fall in: when to be arrested — in the soul as well as within the flesh — (but not before he had sent another man to the gallows in his stead) — this much was clear. We must win through {Brian thought to himself} as he hacked through redundant follicles. This was the moment — staring here at Christie in the exhibition case — skull in torpor / part bone / unmasked / the servant of desire / etched with leather coruscation / the brittle aftertaste of tone — and back at me — in the bar, the “night-club” in deepest Soho — remembering what had been. For Christie’s face; the pale patina of destructive banality; was etched in pain; aureole-like; circumspect; a Christ-mocker — the impression of council house decadence — warm tea, chill faggots, munching lettuce, titbits in the gutter, Pigeon Post and rotting NHS dentures. It was a mixture of yellowing shirts; straight black ties (a la the Krays); hidden and yet obscure gratification; monstrous misjudgement; arrested fate; over-fed goldfish; mum with burps — driving slow so as not to upset her — coming back from the sea-front; Folkestone promenade; Herne Bay without the gas-tanks and peeling paint; the screaming of the wind; stale chips mashed with vinegar and trodden underfoot; beastly children — Evelyn Waugh take note — fair-ground rides: accents of Hitler — suppressed glory — the barker at the fair; crying through a megaphone; delirious with rage; tears streaming down Grock’s face — only then did he notice the difference — the salt in the spray at Herne Bay; Alan: hen-pecked rat’s-tails: Afrikaner mother; Springbok jersey, stained, running to fat — The Decline of the English Murder and jam and custard [bakewell tart / cream pudding] — this is what he remembered. It all came back as he stared at the glass contraptions before him — back in his mind — beyond the fixtures and fittings of the Club (already described) where we sat at table. Christie’s rubber and sullen masque was hidden away in the recesses of consciousness — in the backroom garbage — well out of sight — reminiscent of a deservedly forgotten stage-play — his first effort (I believe) by Howard Brenton — a re-call of sudden energy. Something which is all too easily connected — as we discussed at the bar — with the sexually laced, “underground” death of Stuart Milligan MP (Eastleigh) — ex-Social Democrat — a victim of Krafft-Ebbing’s taxonomy of the couplings of the flesh — a man found dead and naked on his kitchen table, busy wanking, in women’s silk-stockings, with a plastic bin-liner over his head, tied tight with flex, whilst sucking on a mandarin orange which had not been spiked with amyl nitrate![5] Brian chortled in his near sleep — a moment of redundancy or fatuity. The symmetry with Christie — forever disregarded — did not touch him: it was beyond his ken, alone in the lamp-light, outside of the refracted intensity of his days — he stared against the wall and saw nothing. Although the Kray-related wide-boy patina did strike a chord — a somewhat subdued one — the fish in greased wrappers down Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, South Hackney, E1, the birthplace of the twins — malevolent — bereft of fate — next to the market which straddled the High Street going east towards Cambridge Heath Road — up from Whitechapel — reminiscent of the small box-like houses of terraced brick, with off-white curtains, dew-laps without liquid, unseen eyes, next to scrubbed and white-washed steps you could eat your dinner off, ma’am. Brian was from Leyton originally, down the false tracks, on the other side of the tracks, occult scrapings on walls, rooms basically unfit for human habitation, without curtains, up winding flights of stairs, behind the back of bombed out buildings, across from Coronation Gardens. This was his world. It was a world of warm beer: tyres in the heat: grotty ceilings and billiard halls with peeling paint, blue cigarette smoke circling in the air around a naked bulb, as a moth to the flame wherein it will be extinguished — the culmination of its own particular task — the squeak of chalk — blue, fine and crumbly — around the edge of a cue — hoarse, bad breath, calloused palms, the chink of pennies, a blackened glass out-front with a slight crack running laterally across the corner — pictures of Alex Higgins and Terry Griffiths reversed out — grey shadows in the glass. Brian’s attention wandered here: the red & white: bold colours in the dawn: the O’s — chant from the terracing, come on you O’s, come on you fucking O’s!, (Leyton Orient Football Club), the day-break lost, the sixties tower blocks in the distance — out towards Whipp’s Cross — due for demolition and reconstitution as affordable terracing — the return of the pre-Blitzkrieg era — as Militant Tendency (the Revolutionary Socialist League) intended with their housing programme — orchestrated by Hatton in the early eighties — the T. Dan Smith of his era — without the prison record. Brian gained succour from this past — the old blue railing — lying in the dust, bereft of the shine of the moon upon it, without forethought, the gate-crossed steel of Leyton station, multi-racial hodge-potch, rotting and cold, the Waltham Forest Advertiser blowing in the streets, he remembered it all (just about) with a touch of distant warmth. This was the monotony of the cold grit blowing in the streets — slightly redeemed by the whiff of rancid bacon from dim-lit cafes (as I have said before the accent on the E was always redundant) — these recollections warmed the marrow, the stunted marrow, of Brian’s cold and relatively forbidding heart.

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The dun-coloured “caffs” were owned by Greeks (in the main); men who wandered towards sweltering ovens — staffed by women — in various back-rooms: beef-burgers on griddles, the ready sweat of meat; its sucking juices, pineapple, the raw absence of herb, decked out across the hot-plate — the large multi-faceted and yet begrimed kitchens (subject to Health & Safety inspection) — which can cost a cool £50,000 to install. While out in front you had old men; pigeon fanciers, white hair streaked purple with over application of dye (too much Henna — a special offer from Boots); continence pads, the revealing brown streaks down the trousers; the dribble — silent shaft — and spurt of shit; bacon and eggs, moving, viscous upon the plate, white enamel or porcelain, the tang and gasp (Aahh!) of strong tea (five bags to a pot); orthodox Jewish tramps, flotsam and jetsam from the proscribed ghetto in Stamford Hill, rummaging outside bins in Dalston Market, Ridley Road. These individuals were strange apparitions of the nether depths — forgotten to Brian’s imagination — wrapped around with bandages, almost mummified against the cold, the cry of the Turkish vendors, slatternly mid-wives in the street — women of the street (not far off); the deep drums of cooking oil; rolled around amidst the saw-dust on the floor; the strong Turkish coffee; humous; and Turkish aperitifs, vodka, various liqueurs — the presence of the infidel; the hint of the revenge on Europe; the hooked noses; the guests from Eurasia; the Ottoman rulers followed by Attaturk; the takers of Constantinople; the men that Cossacks love to kill; the enemies of the Russian and Greek nations (amongst others). These were the sights and sounds in Brian’s past — bagels trampled underfoot — newsprint, galoshes, coffee and whiskey, shuffling tramps in out of the way kiosks, there to collect the tips, refill the ash trays (after partaking); here in these bistros on the Charing Cross Road; grinning proprietors with overworked daughters; there was to be found racks and racks (whole display cases) of cigarettes from all over the world; from every imaginable clime; arranged in due order, in due proportion, red, yellow, dark blue, black and white, Camel, the chocolate-laced froth of cappuccino, the strong coarse grains of Russian and Turkish tobacco. This was the brilliance of the East — its aftertaste of despair! Just because we have chosen to concentrate (for a moment) on the millimetre of dirt underneath the finger-nail, on the blind detail of the east, does not render it harmless. No siree. The sense of violence is always there. You can only concentrate on the facts, sheer, heavy — weigh me down — facticity — when there is something else in the background: the facts themselves, the endless detail, the epi-phenomena are of scant importance unless there is something behind them which gives them life — and what else is this but the presence of death: the nature of an absent slaughter. As was the case with the Krays, for instance. Where the Kray twins represented an arrested ecstasy: Cockney hyperbole, back-slapping and mateship; the sense of welfare which inundates you as the bacon rind is pushed to the edge of the plate — down at their watering hole — Pellichi’s[6] — on Bethnal Green High Road — up from Vallance Road — where they were born. The restaurant consisted of old man Pellichi — a faded and yellowing half-tone on the wall — the faded patriarch — with the matriarch near by, staring down, in a manner beyond either approval or disapproval; the smell of lamb and onions frying in the background — let’s have a coffee, Nev — as the Greek gangsters enter the parlour — high on speed: pitching for a hooker, a meal or a fight — what with the daughter at music college in Manchester — soon to be dispensed with — the growling of an enormous mastiff / part hound / part boar — outside the door; its knuckles, calloused, walking on them, bleeding, owned by Kelly’s Pie & Mash shop yonder — the legendary dispenser of Cockney pie & mash (by way of Dundalk) to the East End trade — this was Pellichi’s emporium — in the heart of the benighted East. But underneath all stood the grim visage of the Krays: solvent: powerful: puissant: resolved: aggressive: brimming over with respect (primarily for themselves — but not necessarily): plotting a deal; a robbery; the division of the readies; the necessary proceeds; a stylish — if not roguish “League of Gentleman” — who did not give a damn: a matter of after-shave, muscle, knuckle-dusters: East End suits and Sam Weller’s rackets. They were genteel roughnecks: spivs in dog-collars; belt and braces; the leavings of the thighs — dead bird-meat — the scenario of pyrotechnic fury, care of a penny-dreadful novel / screenplay by Robert Bloch — the administrator of Psycho — and all wrapped up with mum & custard; old Aunty Flo and all — home for tea. This was the world they sought to leave — by trawling into the East End: against the furies: Diana Rigg (not Mother Courage) in the West End: London aflame; those fires are burning — remember the old costumes from The Avengers dancing in the snow? These were the days. It was a matter of bouncing on ponces in glass houses — bestrewing the ground with dirt — expected moments — Jack “the Hat” McVitie (as in the Digestive biscuits) cut loose from this folly; stabbed through the throat; the blood flowing sweetly and without reserve; across the palm of one’s hand; precious resource; token of all life — provender of new life — done to death in the basement with a steaming palm. This was the muscle — the glue and the blue — the wrack and the wrench — which managed pain: assessed it: moved onward into the morning: all aglow: remembering the past: out of sight; across a meadow in the sun-light — only to find (as in the North of Ireland on Gaelic soccer pitches) that the fields had been strewn with glass. This was the beating up on those who were bound to fall — as Brian strode onward amongst these memories: beyond the others now — out in the lead: aggressive and yet suggestive: a chance to please; the remembrance of things past — lock-up garages; mobile homes in inner cities; bull-dogs on chains; bully beef; Captain W. E. Johns had nothing on this; the semblance of kid’s play; gangsters at the row: fifty quid, mate , else we’ll slash your tyres! Brian had moved up (socially speaking) without falling; a longitudinal rising; a defeat of the absent prospect; yet he had got nowhere — from west of Leytonstone to the balmy evening; Bromley & white flight; urban overspill; the burghers of Kent open their arms in mute surrender — this was the prospect: the beginning: but it did not (could not?) abate the anger which was welling in the breast: the near-hatred born of weakness (perhaps): but more than likely to be a recognition of the well-hung nature of the skeleton; the tremulousness of the genes. Absent folly; arrested grace — this was the clue. Savage anger; hatred in the breast — it had to follow: sure as day; the snuff of snow — whiteness without the dwarves — the things which crept round the edge of ones vision — with talons out-stretched — to bloody weary (and yet reclining) flesh. As Brian left this world — for the sunny uplands of downside Bromley — that middle-class barrier reef — he left nothing behind but the sweat; the rheum and liquid, glistening on the outstretched south-paw of a boxer — “nigger’s all”, as he would habitually remark — at the York Hall, in darkest Tower Hamlets. Here was the process which made him restless — he moved to complete it in the shade — the viper in the nest — his wife (from Liverpool) down the hospital yonder — remove this axe from my head will you, dear boy? — It fits snuggly in the scalp, but is a trifle irritating to one’s nerves. Especially when one has to spend so much of one’s time, politically speaking — with near-proletarian trash like Brian and Ted (mused Gregory L—-F—): Brian’s bete noire of the moment: the man who, by the by, he had come to discuss, deep down in the merry bars of Soho. But more of this anger; its insouciant rages; the capacity it had for bursting forth! Let us see now — do not stop the clock! For Brian had a certain ability in relation to incontinent rages — he was a samurai of his own imagination; a man set apart from his fellows — primarily, as we have already discussed, by virtue of that strange mixture of bodily strength, forethought and determination — and psychic weakness and inanition (when compared to the former commodity). It was merely the strength of the skeleton — the resolve of the man standing upright — the pasteurization of fate — its deliquescence, ugliness and sense of lost grandeur — in the face of civilization’s advance. When, all of a sudden, an onrush of wind — a fart, catalepsy or belch — could burst forth from the arrested arteries of innocence — from out of Brian’s breast — doubled up with mock-Delirium Tremens — he could shout and scream: that fucking bastard! Cunt! Bitch! And Whoremonger! — usually directed against Dr. Mark or Gregory (the officials of this political Club): each one a particular bete noire of this moment: a simulacrum of release. As in a Dr. Moreau-related flash-back — the rheum and spent fluid would pour forth — in abandon and without respite — without necessary let-up — in the fate of his aforementioned days: days at the crease, coming into bat, as well as before the tomb stone, the expectant grave. Suddenly from out of the posture of chirpy Cockney innocence — of arrested expectancy — a flash of lightening would emerge — a tableaux of frightened and ill-omened proportions — the studied figurines, dwarfish and twisted, of the religious delirium of Hieronymous Bosch. From amidst the widespread vista of cable phone-lines and satellite TV — white-booted trainers and baseball caps — Cup Finals, Jimmy Greaves & Fish & Chips — warm beer before and after the prospect of defeat — there opened up a hellish pit — blood running in the gutters between the aisles of the forgotten man — and, in such an opening, one had a glimpse of headless trees with red-shot unseeing eyes (a la Bosch) twisting in Saturnalian winds. These, in turn, were reminiscent of the Great Triptychs, the desiderata of vengeance and the after-life — the unwholesomeness of the pit which existed beyond this life — and yet which awaited each human being if they fell from beyond the portals of this life. To see them is to open up the nature of the beyond! Here is the Last Judgement, a triptych oil on wood, where the central panel is 164 by 27 centimetres; the side panels 164 by 60 centimetres; it resides in the Akademie der bildenden Kunst[7] in Vienna and according to a minority of

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism here.

critics it may be a copy of a lost painting attributed to one of his most gifted pupils, Peter Huys. However, most commentators — Combe of the Italian Universal Encyclopaedia of Art not withstanding — believe that it is a genuine or authentic Bosch — a true transposition from the hand of the master — inspired (quite possibly) both by drugs and the symbolic and apocalyptic content of Tondalus’ Vision — and, according to the critic Mario Bussagli, it originated from the multifarious collection of the Archduke Leopld Wilhelm. In it a strange, fluted creature — part donkey of release — Satyr of the eye — wished to rear its head in its nakedness — playing a flute — an image of both satire, mastery, ethereal beauty and the hint of a malevolent corruption — an ecstasy which was yet to come. The image was made more (or in some sense less apposite) by the presence of boots — loud, avuncular & baggy — upon the feet of this particular monstrosity — benign ape — a case of Hellish Jackanory semantics: a situation where Zippy or the creatures of the Magic Roundabout: satanic and ever-present foundlings from Rainbow and Playschool’s “Through the Windows” (Through a Glass Darkly?) — seem to cavort and stutter — more accurately, play the flute — in expectation of a pessimistic danger: an apprised recognition of consciousness: while in the foreground one sees a banjo-strumming ‘Ape of God’: a transposition of indifference. When this was itself the result of drugs (quite possibly): the transubstatiation of essence: a foreknowledged disclosure — long before Evolutionary or Darwinian doctine: the hint of anti-Creationist doctrine: the unfolding nature of the absence of the spirit: man as the result of the creation not of the Divine world but the animal world: the infinitude of beasts and dregs: the world at once biological, bio-morphic — sedentary and yet active — from whence we emerged — in a manner which had to be repudiated; man, alone and unarmed; crawling in the mud; the arrested gossip of ecstasy, procrastination and fulfillment — man, alone in the mud, pulling himself forth, across the plateau of his days — arrested fate — wild and yet innocent — Beckett’s characters in Comment C’est [How It Is] — {a refutation of the fact that this author did not readily comment on “the human condition” [sic]}. When such creatures do not allow themselves the knowledge that they were created (quite possibly) from out of the near-mud: by virtue of the present absence of His hand. Creationist hermeneutics do not necessarily find favour here! [When, interestingly enough, the Stopes’ Monkey Trial which aroused so much flatulent liberal piety / nostalgia / false triumphalism in the United States in the 1920s was not necessarily about Evolutionary theory at all. To be sure, it drew upon a fiery Protestant fundamentalist backlash, primarily against humanist and semi-scientific notions which were then flooding the schools, but in actuality the lawyer behind the case — who prosecuted it most articulately and expertly (unlike his more simple-minded Southern brethren) — did not give a sweet damn for darwinian biology & its treatment in the schools, biology lessons and so forth. No. What he was opposed to was the extension of Darwinian ideas out beyond the class-room into society — namely; social darwinism or socio-biology (its more modern incarnation) — and the fact that this viewpoint was pagan, Nietzschean — possibly racialist (at least around the edges), vitalist, neo-aristocratic — the preaching of an aristocratic morality & so forth — and amoral. All of which meant that it was unChristian — not in its theology (this would not have concerned him) — but in its ethics. This was the point of the matter].

Notes

[1] Albrecht Dürer, Four Books on Human Proportion (1528).

[2] Mark Mayall, Monday Club Chairman.

[3] Merlin Hanbury-Tracy, Lord Sudeley.

[4] Pumice?

[5] Stephen Milligan, Conservative MP for Eastleigh till his death on February 7, 1994.

[6] Pellicci’s.

[7] Künste.