The Metaphorical Squirming of Horace Goolan

As a schoolboy, Horace Goolan had learnt about the Reformation, the name that historians gave to the change in the religion of most of north Western Europe from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.  Even now in his sixties, Horace could remember a few key facts about it. In 1516, or ’17, or something, Loofah had nailed his faeces to a door after living on a diet of Worms etc.

Another aspect of the Reformation that Horace wasn’t too sure about was what might have been called, but wasn’t, the Thirty Nine Articles. This factoid was the number of different positions that various strands of Reformation religious belief, (eg: Roman Catholic, High Anglican, low Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Anabaptist, Erasmian etc), held about the status or nature of the bread and wine ritually used in the Christian mass.

These positions formed a kind of spectrum. On one end the wafer was the flesh of Christ and the wine was his blood. On the other bread was bread and wine was wine, and if one’s particular sect celebrated mass at all, it might as well have done so with a turnip and a cup of cold tea, or find some other, or no other way of expressing whatever it was that mass expressed.

In between the poles of flesh and blood and nothing and nothing, there were ranged many intermediate positions, such as the belief that the bread was bread and the wine was wine until Communion at which point these things somehow, and for a strictly limited shelf life, “became” flesh and blood, specifically that of Christ. Others thought that Bread and wine were only symbolic or only symbolic until a priest touched them in the correct context, and so on, and so on.

It looked absurd to early twenty first century eyes, or at least to that pair of them protected by the skull of Horace Goolan; but in other parts of the early twenty first century world, people were drawing up and strictly enforcing numerous edicts about male beard length, or how much hair could show from under a woman’s scarf.

As Horace contemplated various emails, tweets, blogs and websites via his computer, he had begun to wonder if nit-picking fanaticism was not actually an inherent, deep-wired tendency in humans which, if it couldn’t be  focussed on bread, wine, beards or scarves; would get fixatedly focussed onto something else, such as the precise attitude that should be taken towards a British South Coast town council proposing to set an annual budget that would entail it in making cuts to the services that  it provided to the public.

Most of the digital correspondents whose messages  Horace saw, disapproved of cuts to public services, but this was an attitude that, in terms of public pronouncements at least, spanned most of the British political spectrum, unlike the USA where some politicians would say outright: “Damn the poor, let them starve!”, early twenty first century British Conservatives might imply that although they found hurting the poor, distasteful, they had to do it. Indeed, some seemed to find it so distasteful that, like Victorian gentlemen debauching child prostitutes, they literally found that what they did was unspeakable.

Liberals and the British labour party, (which by 2012 could hardly call itself socialist any more), also said like schoolmasters about to inflict corporal punishment; “I’m sorry it hurts, but it must be done, so down with your trousers and out with your bum.” And then others further to the left and probably further way from any prospect of real political power, floundered around mouthing like fresh caught fish in various media. Those who had got elected to a South Coast town council on an agenda of planetary rescue, used devices like extensive public consultation to conceal the fact that they too were rippers in dark alleys intent on doing a swift bit of slicing before slipping away into a dense green pea soup-like fog, leaving the coppers to ask “Whodunnit?”

The messages coming out of Horace’s computer suggested as many political stances in relation to this as there had been Reformation attitudes to sacraments. Some called the cutting councillors “traitors”, advocated walkouts, mass resignations and setting “Illegal” budgets. Others said, in effect “condemn the sin and not the sinner” ie don’t be rude to rippers and choppers as they are ripping and chopping because bad central government is forcing them to rip and chop; once they had finished and put their bloody cleavers down, they would get on with doing all the nice things, or at least those nice things that they had managed not to cut, which had been promised in their electoral leaflets and manifestos.

Horace dodged, weaved and vacillated agreeing with as many as often as he could. He swam, squirmed and slimed like an eel through the tentacles and past the beaks of many, many, many octopi. He was not dead in the water but he felt pulverised by the positioning and certainty of those around him, also swimming in the polluted seas of political discourse. They trumpeted and spouted out statements, jibes, attacks, pledges and condemnations.

Would it all blow up? He wondered. Would a cataclysm come, freezing and fossilising him and those around him in mud which would then be pressured into stone for museums, temples, ministries and palaces of some unknown future epoch? Or would it, like a squib, leave a trail of hot air behind, becoming like attitudes to bread and wine, a footnote of obscure political history? 

Mammoth eating Cousin

Thomas Doolin had a cousin called Maura who lived by the sea. She had written novels and eaten the flesh of long extinct mammoths.

She managed the former by having a powerful DeValerian imaginary view of the world. You would have insulted her, or she would have construed it as an insult, if you had called her English, but England was the English name for the country where she was born. The Welsh called it Llogyr in Welsh, meaning the Lost Lands, or at least that was the name on some road signs, Maura would have liked that.

As to the second achievement mentioned above, Maura’s novels were not bestsellers and she worked a Secretary to the Royal Geographic Society. This august body once obtained a frozen mammoth from Siberia or Kamchatka and decided to eat parts of it in a ceremonial banquet. Maura had some; she said that it tasted alright.

When Thomas first met her, he was a small boy of eight or nine and she lived in a poky damp basement flat in West Kensington. Then looking back on it perhaps Maura was left a legacy, because she bought a bungalow in a sedate Sussex seaside town. She didn’t just buy the bungalow ready built; she had it built to her specifications in a large plot of land. There were rows of about ten brick pillars out the back with a trellis over the top. It was like a mini Roman villa.

Thomas went down to visit there on many weekends with his father, who might have been having some kind of affair with Maura. Thomas was then a young boy, who was unable to know, notice or understand this. Sometimes the three of them would walk along the seafront where waves shooshed and swooshed along the pebble beach lined with vari-coloured beach huts. Once, with no apparent provocation she cried out. A phonetic approximation of her cry is: “Nyaaa harrra ny-ny-ny hyar, eeyah,eeyah. Hwawrrragh!” Before anyone could ask her “Cousin Maura, why do you cry out so?”, she explained that she had just emitted a Spanish Muleteer's cry, but this was lost on the gulls that circled above her. No Spaniards or mules emerged from the sea, or came down from the Downs inland, in answer to her call.

Maura took her hispanophilia to the point of wearing rope-soled shoes as often as the British climate allowed. Another interest of hers was ancestry, the surname that she and Thomas shared was not uncommon but Maura concocted the theory that “Doolin” was in some way more authentically Celtic than “Dolan”. Her ancestral theorizations took various differing forms over the years, once she insisted that the surname indicated descent form Czechoslovakian gypsies.

Thomas found, by trial and error, that it was difficult to disagree with Maura. Once she was charged with care of young Thomas, (his mother had died and his father was out), and Thomas had inadvertently uttered the word “bugger”, having no idea that it might be an obscenity. Maura was deeply offended and reacted with immediate severity, but instead of slaps, rage or shouting, she insisted on only speaking Spanish to Thomas for next twelve hours. It might not sound like much of a punishment in comparison to having your fingernails pulled out with pliers or something, but it induced psychological disorientation to have someone whom you had previously only spoken to in one language that you both understood, now only conversing in an incomprehensible tongue, inspire of all pleading. Looking back on this experience Thomas now though that it might have helped when he later worked as a teacher.

Later Maura somehow traced the “Doolin/Dolan” ancestry to Miltown Malbay on the west coast of Eire and she went there to die.

Thomas last saw her when he was about thirty, just before she left England. She was striding along the concrete promenade looking out across a steadily heaving sea under a grey sky perforated by shafts of sunlight beaming down to illuminate chosen patches of the Channel. Maura looked like she had already left England in her mind. Thomas did not speak to her; he was not sure what language she would use,

Over the years he got some postcards from her and sent some back. Maura's card messages were sometimes almost offensively ultra-Irish and Thomas was moving to a position of suspicion and distance towards questions of ethnicity and nationalism. He never visited her on the coast of Clare, but he could imagine her striding along the strand, uttering strange enthusiastic cries and fortified by an ancestral diet of Mammoth meat.

The tinkling teaspoons of the coast

The sound of the future is the clinking of teaspoons against the sides of china teacups, just after the spoons have been used to create millions of vortices in the freshly steaming beige liquid within the cups. The background sound of the future is polite reedy chatter in which all words are annoyingly only half audible. The place of the future is the South Coast of England, or the more picturesque, bits of it at least.The countryside of the future is nice flowery gardens with beds of neatly planted annuals and perennials. The food of the future is imported, it is all processed, it is grown and processed where labour is cheap or cheap labour can be imported to process it. The catering of the futures is carried out by polite immigrants.

Except that this is not the future, it is now. unless the future is just now but only more so, after all everything mentioned above has been going on and increasing for at least a century, may be more.

Then again different slices of now exist simultaneously in separate locations cut apart from one another by things like train journeys from the South Coast to the capital city. When Mauris made such a journey after only a week away on the Costa Geritrica, land of the tinkling teaspoons, he almost ended his journey home by emerging from the tube station that was nearest to his gaff, he was knocked metaphorically out with joy to see and hear all sorts, conditions and ages of people from all over the globe. He was happy to hear, within seconds of coming through the ticket barrier, about five different languages being spoken none of which he could understand and not all of which he could identify, even tentatively. But, it wasn’t just that, that cheered Mauris, most of the people here seemed to moving around with some purpose or aim in mind other than walking up the road to look at the sea and wait to die.

There are also other versions of present and future knocking around in the city too. Coming back from the supermarket, a day or two later, Mauris saw red and green banners flying proudly outside what had once been a small office and warehouse unit just off the Edgware Road. Mauris thought about what he would like this to signify; that a crazed vanguardist sect of eco-socialists, such as the one he belonged to, had decide to do a “Dublin post office job” to initiate the downfall of global capitalism.

Sadly for Mauris, as he knew all along, the flag fliers were marking an Islamic ceremony that was taking place inside the converted building. They seemed to be celebrating an eighth or ninth century martyrdom and perhaps their chanting could be the sound of the future, just as much as, if not more than, the tinkling teaspoons of the coast

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PsyOps in the Civic Centre Carpark

Leona Pippin reminded Norris of something on the day of the demo outside the Mosque. She stood on the back of a small flatbed truck that had been rigged up with a portable PA system to make a movable stage for speakers at the demo. She had a voice that was high pitched and clear. It carried and Norris could distinctly hear every word that she shouted into the microphone, but she was not shrill. She was fired up but she was not excited.

She just went on and on and on. She was unrelenting.

“The EDL are not welcome here. We are all assembled here because we don’t want the EDL in this borough. This is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community. People of all religions and none live here and we all get on together. We don’t need the EDL coming here to start trouble. Go away EDL, go and crawl back into your holes. We are all united to oppose you and we are not going away until you have left the borough forever……”

At the beginning of the demo a large picket, two or three hundred plus, had formed up on the roadside directly opposite the mosque. That was where the lefties were, they were mainly, but not entirely, white. Across the road, outside the Mosque people were assembled who by their dress seemed to be mostly Muslims; they were mostly, but not exclusively South Asian men. It was difficult to quantify which group had the most facial hair, probably on balance, the Muslims.

Speeches were made by political activists and priests from the back of the flatbed, but it was all to the converted. The only persons in the immediate locality who might not fit into that category were the police who were corralling the demo and the pedestrians and motorists who passed it by with apparent indifference.

Then some how the word spread, “The EDL are here”, “There in the car park over there, outside the civic centre”.

The whole demo turned and began to move about an eighth of a mile to the left, focussing on a place where behind multiple lines of police who you just make out the tops of the head of about fifteen or twenty people, the EDL apparently.

Most of the demo moved across the car park and the flatbed truck went with them and Leona Pippin’s diatribe commenced. Only after she had kept going for about an hour did, Norris recall Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. In this fictionalised account of early medieval English history, a climatic battle between Normans and Saxon rebels takes place in the Fens near Ely that involved the Normans' use of an early form of what the Americans in Vietnam were to call “Psyops”. They erected a wooden tower with a platform on top from which a witch, hired for the purpose, hurled curses at the Saxons. Perhaps this was as much to boost the morale of the Normans as to spook the Saxons, after all a marsh is not the best place for heavily armoured cavalry to operate.

Whatever the historical case had been, Leona Pippin was now carrying out a similar function relation to an early twenty-first century struggle against English neo-fascism. However in doing so Norris thought that she fell into a trap called: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” At times she was creating a verbal picture of the suburb that she was speaking in, (which was not the neighbouring suburb where she actually lived), as some sort of multi-cultural heaven, where all sorts and kinds of people united together against the common neo-fascist enemy.

Norris doubted if he needed this romanticised account of a suburban shithole to impel his political action. Norris knew that the road he picketed against racists was also the road where men outside the Mosque were rumoured to spit at passers by who they deemed to be gay: they were probably not big on Feminism either.

The situation like Norris himself was a mass of contradictions. He decided that he was a multi-layered onion within a multi layered onion which rotated in an unknowable universe. 

The Vindication of Ginger John

Norris had come to realise that he owed Ginger John a retrospective and silent apology. Ginger John had been/was/is a performance poet from the “punk wing” of what was a decade or two ago, a movement to politicise and popularise an art form that had, like a hat made from an ornamental chicken, become simultaneously effete, over elaborate and dead.

Norris could only remember three or four things about Ginger John: he was big, he had cropped ginger hair, he wore army surplus olive green combat trousers and he performed a poem about the Falklands (Malvinas) War which had the refrain: “No Blood for Oil”.

Back then, just after the Falklands (Malvinas) War of 1982, there had been no announcement of any oil field in or near these islands. The war then looked like a political manoeuvre driven by the demented patriotism of Margaret Thatcher. Some say that then she was clinging onto power by manicured and varnished fingernails; and that if she had let Argentina have the islands, she might well have consigned the Conservative Party to at least a generation of political oblivion. Thanks to some expertly organised killing, it took her about another decade to manage that, and thanks to the preceding expertly organised killing of its own population by the Argentine Junta, her military adventurism made even elected government by crass monetarists preferable to an unelected government pursuing a policy of selective political genocide.

Anyway the point of this convoluted rambling is to assert that some British lefties, (Norris included), thought that Ginger John and his ilk were wrong when they alleged “Blood for Oil”.

Thirty years later, as a South American shipping Boycott kicks off against the Falklands over the issue of British claims to own South Atlantic oilfields because Britain holds the islands. Ginger John, who did seem like a moronic yob at times, now seems like a lost prophet equipped with incredible perspicacity and foresight.

Looked another way Norris and his ilk now seem very stupid and naïve. After all every twentieth century war and probably very human war ever, and even the Chimp tribal total wipe-outs recorded by Van Lawick-Goodall, were basically resource wars. Death-dealing weapon-penises may be lightly covered by fig leaves such as nationalism, religion, liberalism, fascism, humanitarianism, and even colonialist feminism, but they are all aimed at consequence-free imperialist resource-rape. And the more black, viscous and useful as vehicle fuel that the resource concerned is, the worse the wars are. It is and always has been “Blood for Oil”.

Norris found the dead fox in his back garden

The day before Norris found the dead fox in his back garden, he had entered his own version of dreamtime whilst sculpting in his garage. As he had sleep apnoea, which meant that his fat neck sometimes closed his air passages and sent him, briefly to sleep, this was easy to do. Once in a while he was awakened from a momentary micro-sleep by the clang or click of a chisel dropped from his inert paw onto the concrete floor of the artistic garatelier.

But sculpting engaged physical routines and motor controls, which counteracted boredom, the psycho-active bit of Norris’ apnoea, and meant that he seldom lapsed in total unconsciousness. He could dream shapes into the wood that he has on the work bench before him and then he could try to define and suggest them with chisel cuts.

Norris spent about 3, almost 4, hours doing this, he could put this time aside because he had to come downstairs and sit in the garage to let in a plumber who might come to unblock the drains.

Norris thought that he achieved quite a lot this way, but, he might come back the next day and not see the patterns and schemes in wood that he had seen the day before. What he definitely had were numbed hands that felt like claws. He had never got the hang of holding the chisel properly and also, he consistently hit too hard, or sometimes he missed, or partially missed, the chisel and whacked his left hand. So when the Dyno-rod engineer came and unblocked the drain, Norris was glad was glad to stop being so creative, before managing to totally paralyse his hands.

He then locked up his garage, went into his suburban semi-detached and when inside and rebaked baked beans and dreamt again, with others, through his computer.

The next day he embarked on a series of his bus journeys around London. These bus journeys were assuming a quasi-triangular character, in that he seldom returned home, from wherever he went, by the same route which he had taken to get to the apex or notional destination of the journey; aka “there”. This triangularity of movement was a function of several factors: a disabled person’s bus pass, almost constant pain from arthritic knees and diabetic feet, and a relative lack of pressure of time. These, factors were in some way multiplied or divided or somehow influenced by the patchy nature of disabled peoples’ access to London Transport tube stations and bus stations at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

So on a bright, warm, sunny mid-winter’s day, Norris began his voyaging by turning left and uphill at the end of this cracked concrete front garden path. An unusually large flock of twenty or so parakeets flew over heading in a straight line to the north-west, squawking to one another.

Leaning on garden walls, every few yards or so, Norris took about twenty-five minutes to arrive at one of the two final houses at the uphill, northern, end of his road. This building was converted into a GP doctors’ surgery. Here both of Norris’ lower legs were redressed, which involved being washed with anti-bacteriological fluid, smeared with some sort of paraffin-wax based ointment and rebandaged with several layers. Norris conversed with Nora the Nurse who was doing these things to his limbs, they spoke of Bournemouth.

Leaving the surgery supplied with some extra anti-bacteriological fluid, and bandages, to see him over the Christmas, Norris lurched across the road from the surgery to the nearest bus stop, towing a blue tartan shopping trolley. The bus arrived and took him across the rolling hills and dales of North-West London suburbia to massive shed which was full of things arranged in piles and ranked in aisles. Crowds of people flowed like fluid through this retail maze with wire trolleys and baskets; they were aurally bombarded with cheesy carolling. Frequently their anxiety was raised by authoritative tannoy announcements about alleged offers and bargains which might go away forever unless immediately purchased.

Part of the vast shed was set aside as a café for the shoppers; Norris cowered there for a bit, ingesting a potion of sugared grease, as the entire zeitgeist of the place pressured him to consume more. He was able to disobey this because, in an amazing paradox, his own diabetes, itself the consequence of many previous episodes of over-consumption, came his rescue.

This particular mega-store happened to be situated in a pit dug out of a hillside. To exit it and get back home, Norris would have had to haul himself and a laden shopping trolley up a slope with an arm that ached from yesterday’s sculpting, on swollen feet, stressing the few ligaments that remained in his arthritic knees. It was far easier, for once, not to shop, to pull a light, almost empty trolley up the slope and across a dangerously busy road to a bus stop. Anybus could take him to another supermarket, after all, that was the only place where anyone wanted, or could ever want to go. As he came out the mega shed doors Norris felt that he had surfaced after a swim in a swamp full of mad reptiles.

At another supermarket, Norris, emerged frombus onto the forecourt that was jealously guarded by the retail company to prevent any of its customers and/or potential customers having any contact whatsoever with any political ideas purveyed by vagrant pamphleteers. Here Norris met a colleague, candidate who perhaps wanted to be a Green Party Euro MEP. The candidate beamed around and was unusually affable, whilst his eyes were flickering and searching for the camera persons and journalists who wished to depict and publicise him, smiling. There were none there, so they parted, one going north for publicity and the other, east to another supermarket.

Here, unsurprisingly, the noise blitz of Christmas yammered away at consumers incessantly again. Words like “mince”, “pies”,  "reindeer” etc, were dredged up from the bottom of some sort of Dickensian estuary, where most of London’s excrement was dumped out of the hinged hulls of sludge barges. These words were sucked to the surface like some sort raw emotional ooze or pus, then they were reconstituted into signifiers of jollity and sprayed over people in a torrent of seasonal slurry. Grim faced shoppers crouched behind their trolleys and then loaded up their vehicles in the rainswept car park. The attempted brainwashing often left people empty hearted and with an increasing tendency to petty viciousness and avarice, as if they realised that as they consumed more and more they were getting less and less.

Why, just recently some turd had stolen a £35 Donegal tweed cap off Norris when he had nodded off on somebus or other. So when he completed this particular triangular odyssey and went down his back garden to load up his compost heap, Norris was not entirely surprised to discover the rotten corpse of a fox next to the massive clump of pampas grass which the defining feature of this little patch of suburban savannah. Reynard looked flattened, it had hide but most of the flesh seemed to be gone and some bones were starting to show through. Norris initially thought it just be a road kill that someone had thrown over the garden fence , but it could just as well have got there of its own accord and laid down to die, or there might have been a bit of fox-on-fox violence .

The remotest possibility of all was that secretive urban pagans had sent the fox off to ask the sun to come back again after it had run away for the winter solstice.