A Delight in Disorder

1:
You know what the problem with the artificial trees is? I asked my mother; who nevertheless had turned her artificial tree at her city home into a creation worthy of Christmas Magazine, resplendent dim white lights and ribbons of muted silver and deep burgundy and dangling clear glass baubles that caught the light and refracted the shape of the evenly green boughs beneath, and constructed yet again with not one gaudy or out-of-place decoration. The problem is that these trees are too perfect; they lack the character of real trees because of the fact that they take all the best qualities of a tree and they smooth them and they sharpen them. And they give you a tree of a perfect shape and a tree with even branches and a tree that will never tip because it has been calibrated and balanced by a computer in a wind tunnel.

Compare this with the tree that we had at the farm, a real tree that we wrapped up with a string of multicoloured lights and that we decorated with every loose bauble and completely tasteless knick-knack we dredged out of the garbage bags and crumbling boxes we rummaged up from the basement. This tree had a top so uneven that the angel tumbled off continually and finally we gave up and left it sitting halfway down the branches, upside down, and who gives a shit? The tree was so uneven that three times in fell right over on some unsuspecting toddler who broke out in a wail of horror from beneath its prickly branches and finally we took a long rope and lashed the tree to the ceiling.

Yes for all of this, I think that the practice of chopping down a tree just to have it sit in the parlour for a week before it is thrown into the street or burned in the fire is a foolish waste and I wish someone would make an artificial Christmas tree that was as defective and unwieldy as a real tree but that could be reused year after year while leaving the real trees to grow in the woods so they could keep on cleaning the air and providing places for animals to nest and helping the soil stick to the ground and all the things real trees do that fake trees don’t.

But who would ever buy a fake tree that was advertised as being effectively defective in certain ways? This tree is guaranteed to fall over on your child at least once. This tree is specifically designed so that your Christmas star will fall off the top of it no matter what you do to keep it up there. This tree has been made with uneven looking branches and bald patches. This tree has special fall off needles that you will keep finding around your house until next July.

I realise that I am projecting a kind of third person effect onto the Christ-masses by thinking that they want anything other than the real deal or a Stepford tree but you have to at least admit that the marketing logistics for an imperfect fake tree would be complicated.

Case in point:
Consider these websites offering “realistic” artificial trees.

http://www.balsamhill.com/Artificial-Christmas-Trees-s/1.htm

http://www.treeclassics.com/

These trees are only realistic in the neo-classical sense of the word. They are obviously inspired by their counterparts in nature, but the human compulsion to make a tree out of all the best elements takes over every time and what we end up with is the Platonic ideal of a tree as it might have been painted by Valenciennes.

2:
Speaking of Stepford, I suppose a similar thing is happening in the world of robotics, as it converges with the world of artificial sex dolls, and you might have been noticing the number of new robots that look like attractive young women. I got a kick out of this article in the Globe and Mail last week:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081223.CROSBIE23/TPStory/?query=robot

I wonder how the imperfect woman android would be marketed? The not so compliant woman with enough personality to fill the Great Lakes Basin. The one who would hog the sheets and snore and one who would refuse to make love to you if you hadn’t had a bath for a few days and the one who would not necessarily answer the phone, even is she knew it was you, because she was in the middle of something and she didn’t want to be interrupted and the one who frankly liked having armpit hair and didn’t give a damn what you thought about that and the one who was like no one else you had ever met and the one that you had to work for months and for years to convince her that you loved her for real and that this was a good thing and the one who tested you intellectually and physically and the one who drove you nuts sometimes because it seemed that she had three personalities and only two of them liked you and the one who, if you offended her, she would not speak to you for weeks or would have enough dignity to never speak to you again and the one who didn’t mind crying sometimes and the one who wanted you to be there for her sometimes not just the other way around and the one who only put as much love into the relationship as you did. That’s the robot I’d line up for.

Show Business part I.

(written in 2001)

After coming come late and going to bed feeling like shit, I was awakened at 10:30am by a telephone call from my friend Sion. Sion’s friends were shooting for a film that day, he wanted me to come and be an extra on the set.

“It’s at some place called the Reverb Room, have you ever heard of this place?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” My eyes full of snot, my mouth stinking and dry, unshaven, the sunlight causing me to press my face back into my pillow, I cradled the phone against my head and replied in a cracked voice.

“It will be really great, they’re shooting a scene where the lady (she’s a dominatrix/poet in this film) reads some of her poetry live to an audience. There’s free food, cold cuts, it’ll be really cool…well ok, not cool, but I think you’ll have a good time.”

“Arrgh.” I said.

“All you have to do is be a guy in the audience, you can just sit at a table and relax, have a couple of beers, you know.”

“They don’t have any tables at the Reverb.”

“Well you can stand up and have a beer.”

“Fine.” I said. Apparently they were shooting from 2pm until six, so I told Sion I’d be there at two, ready to be filmed.

At 2:51pm Sion called and woke me again, and asked me if I was coming or not. I told him that I had assumed that this was a massive production, and that they didn’t really need me there, but he was adamant that I should come, and I felt kind of like a dickhead for just going back to sleep so I said I would come for sure this time.

There were a few complications. I was out of toothpaste, and I thought I could squeeze a little more out if I cut the tube in half and scooped out some with my brush, but then I couldn’t find a cutting implement suitable and finally I settled on a hacksaw. After that I didn’t feel much like grooming, so I left as I was and went to the Reverb.

When I got there, Sion was just about to leave. He showed me the cold cuts, but they looked pretty nasty: all that curled up ham hidden in a dark corner begging to be laid on a white Kaiser bun and swallowed down between mouthfuls of iceberg salad with orange plastic French dressing.

Sion introduced me to a few people. They seemed nice. He told some lady with a clip board that I was a famous actor.

“Really?” She asked, seeming to believe it.

“Oh yeah,” I told her, “I’m like the biggest star there is.”

Then Sion departed. God love him, he’s my oldest friend, but he left me at the mercy of all these makeup people who dragged me off to their makeup zone because they felt they had to powder me up for whatever it was that they intended me to do.

There were a lot of people in the makeup area who were madeup, looking very artificial with all the gunk they had on their skin. These people were talking in loud voices about how fabulous they were. One girl was talking about how good looking she was, and another guy was talking about all the photo-shoots he had worked on. I guessed that these people were the actors. The makeup lady sat me down on a stool, and made a few comments about how messy my hair was. I told her I’d just gotten up, and that her hair spray had better not mess with my salon perfected do. That apparently wasn’t a funny show-business type joke though, because she didn’t laugh.

Some more people with clip boards and headsets came up to me from out of the tangle of cameras and bodies on the audience floor. One asked me if I was the bartender. I told her I had no idea. Another came up to me and said they needed the back of my head. I told her that was fine, I never used it. Also not funny. Someone wanted to know if I was the big star that Sion had been talking about.

After this they all more or less ignored me for a while. They started shooting scenes where various poets got on stage and read their poetry to the imaginary crowd. It was some of the worst poetry I’d ever heard in my life. It sounded exactly they way you’d expect poetry to sound if it were written by a screen writer. I tried to read a bit of Apvlei Metamorphosen, which I had brought with me, thankfully, but the actors had the microphone, and so I didn’t make much progress.

At one point I looked up and this truly lovely girl, with long blonde hair, was staring back at me from the makeup chair. She looked away though when I looked at her, so I went back to my book. She started talking to the makeup people about how she was going to be appearing in a pop tart commercial.

This went on for a while, but my interest in stardom was waning quickly, so I got up out of my seat, put on my coat and walked off the set, down the steps of the Reverb, and out onto Queen Street, which looked much the same as it had before I became a big shot movie star.

Walking down Queen towards Spadina, I started to feel pretty bad. I mean, I didn’t give a fuck about the movie, but I felt kind of like I was letting Sion down. He really was trying to get things to happen for the people making that flick, and I suppose the least I could have done was stick around and make good on my commitment. But then I though about how much I hate being photographed, how much I hate stage make up, how much I hate actors. I though of how very little I had to do with those people, and I decided that I would go do something else instead.

I went up to College and Spadina and looked to see if the Mongolian Buffet was open, but it was not. I felt like shit. I got on the street car and rode back to Coxwell and then I went into the supermarket.

The girl working the cash was the one who is such a fan of Robbie Burns, or so she claims. I quoted Afton Waters to her and she gave me a smile, that made the day worthwhile. I don’t know how Burns read or was read in his day, but I feel certain that if he were in my place he would be equally unwilling to get himself tangled up in a low budget Canadian film.

A lot of people are waiting for their big break, a lot of people are dying for exposure. A lot of people are busting their asses so that they can become recognized by the general public, and so that they can live by the fruits of their artistic accomplishments.

I think this is noble, in its way. I would far rather live by art than by any manner of unrelenting physical labour, or by the clock in an office tower, dressed in a suit, and wading through stacks of paper. I don’t know if I ever shall, but that is another story.

The one thing I fear, though, is undying recognition. They say that if one wishes for immortality, one must live on in the minds of the following generations. This seems to me to be the worst sort of delusion. To be remembered is to leave a trace of yourself that takes too long to erase, too long to be reabsorbed into oneness. To be forgotten allows one to become nothing, to return freely to the basic and infinite matter of the cosmos. Indeed, to live forever, is to never exist.

Review of Barbarella (a classic revivied)

Clearly Barbarella is intended to titillate its audience, but one thing which struck me even through this was the odd symbolism of each of Barbarella’s four sexual encounters. In the interests of clarity, I imagine the four sexual encounters to be: on the frozen lake, with Marcan, in the Labyrinth, with Pygar, in the secret headquarters with Dildano, and in the Excessive Machine, controlled by Duran Duran. I do not include The great tyrant’s encounter with Pygar, nor the prospective menage a trois which ends the film, as both of these are encounters unrealized within the experience of the audience, and I believe that the depiction of Barbarella’s orgasmic state is intended by Vadim to evoke in the audience a sort of catharsis, and this orgasmic state is only visible after the four above mentioned encounters.

In these encounters there are other common themes, but no theme seems universal to all beyond the orgasmic state—and even this is questionable in the episode with Dildano. In the first three sexual gratification is awarded in return for the rescue of the protagonist from mortal danger, yet in the fourth it is the reverse, and it is through being put into mortal danger that Barbarella is gratified.

The main issues to consider, however, are the symbolic possibilities of the characters with whom Barbarella has intercourse, and the creatures from whom she has just escaped in order to have intercourse. I suggest that there is a reverse parallelism between the attacker and the rescuer which plays out through the film imbibing it with a very pleasant symmetry.

Consider the first encounter, with Marcan. Barbarella has just been rescued from an attacking horde of mechanized dolls, controlled by wild children who live on the frozen lake. Following this, Marcan compels Barbarella to make love to him in his sail ship. Marcan is more beast than man, dressed all in furs, he prefers life on the edge of civilization. When Marcan removes his furs it is seen that he is as furry underneath as is his dress. At the end of the encounter, Barbarella dresses herself in skins, but she soon discards them and changes into the white costume necessary to meet the blind angel Pygar.

In the second encounter, Barbarella is rescued from a Leather Man by Pygar. I imagine this to be a symbolic progression on the part of Barbarella because she has gone from making love to a beast-man in skins to being attacked by a creature that is composed of nothing but skins (in this case leather), to making love to an angel, clearly intended as a bird symbol as well by the fact that the act is consummated in a nest above the Labyrinth. Whereas the first encounter was a liberation for Barbarella from her Earth set ways of having sex only by taking a pill and then clasping hands, the second encounter—while clearly as orgasmic as the first—is more of a liberation for Pygar who suddenly regains his ability to fly, and thus carries Barbarella up to the city.

The rescue from death comes a good deal before the encounter between the rescuer and the rescued. Duran Duran intervenes when the Magmus is about to consume Barbarella, although he alleges that it is on behalf of the Great Tyrant. Duran Duran places Barbarella into a cage full of vampire parakeets at the behest of the Great Tyrant, and Barbarella is rescued by Dildano. Thus we see that another symbolic progression has taken place. Barbarella has gone from making love to a bird creature to being attacked by birds, and she is rescued by a human being.

Everything about Dildano, however is false. His machines do not work, his henchmen are utterly inept, and even the name Dildano implies, clearly, an object which is a replacement for the genuine article. Dildano is a dildo in every sense of the word. It is not surprising, then, that when it comes time for the sexual act to take place, Dildano insists that it be done as it is done on Earth, with a pill, and holding hands, but without under any circumstances penetrating. Barbarella is not pleased by the idea, as she has grown much fonder of the old style of making love, but the consents none the less.

The scene of the orgasm is a funny one, at first Barbarella seems to be taking some pleasure from the act—her hair even goes curly—but then she is distracted by a man entering the room, and from this point on she seems to have little interest in the act, actually breaking the contact with Dildano at one point and carrying on a conversation with the man who has entered the room.

Following the encounter with Dildano, Barbarella again meets up with Duran Duran who takes her and places her in the Excessive Machine. In this case the symbolic progression is from a sexual encounter with a human being to being captured by a human being, and in a sense rescued by a machine even though this machine is intended to kill her through excessive orgasmic pleasure.

It should be noted at this point, as well, that the symbolic progression is also from the half creature to the full as the lover becomes the attacker. Marcan for example is only half skins, but the Leather Men are all skin; they are the absolute symbol of the beast archetype for when they are blown apart there is nothing recognizable to life inside them, no organs, or flesh; they are simply the skin, the thing which becomes a symbol of power when slain, but becomes a symbol of fear when its mortality is removed from it.

Pygar is only half bird, he has the wings and the nest and the flight, but he is not truly a bird in any sense. A parakeet is clearly a bird. Dildano is hardly a man, he does not know how to make love, he is not actually from Earth, and if I may be so bold, no self respecting man would ever wear brown leather underpants with a cape.

Duran Duran, however is all man. He is an ex-astronaut, a citizen of earth, and unlike Dildano, all his machines do what they are supposed to (though he never expected to meet the power of Barbarella). Duran Duran even captures Barbarella at a place where women sit and smoke “essence of man”. This is the masculine overpowering the feminine in every aspect. It is even the case that like the Biblical Moses, Duran Duran has been aged by his exposure to the ruling power of his planet: the Magmus. In every sense, though, Duran Duran is an anti Moses figure for, unlike Dildano who wishes to liberate his people, Duran Duran seeks the role of the pharaoh: to enslave, and he has in his power a plague his gun which can send people to the fourth dimension, never to return. Like the pharaoh, however, hubris consumes Duran Duran in the end, and he and everything he desires are swallowed up by the Magmus, but back to the point.

The fourth encounter is also with a being that is only half of what it seems to be. For while it is described as a machine which can cause death, it proves to be unable to cause death. The dolls, the Leather Man, and the parakeets, and certainly the Magmus all can kill if given the opportunity, but the Excessive Machine can not. It blows apart, leaving Barbarella totally satisfied. It is also only half and half, because while it acts as an attacker, it also acts as a lover.

Thus a certain circle has been completed. I imagine it as something of a psychic journey for while Barbarella in ever other case is not able to reconcile herself to that part of her former lover which is not like herself, in this case she suddenly embraces the complete unknown and but this act is able to complete herself. The mechanical dolls that attacked her at the beginning now become the warm pleasures of the organ and Barbarella has become a complete individual. Witness the fact that she and her opposite: the Great Tyrant are able to become one by the end, carried off into the heavens by the same angel, like two sides of a soul which have been searching and have suddenly found each other.

Künstlerroman:

I killed more sensitive plants than I care to mention when I was a child and only because I could never stop myself from running my fingers over their tiny fern-like leaves whenever I caught them open in my window sill and so maybe they just didn’t get enough light because they were always curled up into themselves when I was near and my fingers were out or maybe it was because they were just touched too much and sometimes every living thing just needs a little time in solitude or maybe it was that I didn’t give them enough water or too much or maybe they are just difficult plants to keep but anyway one by one the sensitive plants I had in my window sill all died. And every time I went back to my grandparent’s place in Goodwood and we’d pass the nursery I’d heave my hand sweaty pennies up to the counter and cart another victim out to the car with its tiny stalks bobbing in the sunshine over the gravel parking lot and then I’d carry it home in my lap, touching the leaves and watching them scrunch up in horror and then uncurl and I’d touch them again and they’d scrunch up in horror.

Goodwood was the world to me in those days, and not just because I got the sensitive plants there, but the ten acres my grandparents had, and the house on it designed board by board by my grandfather to be exactly the place he always wanted to live, was more than enough to contain me and the machinations of my mind when I wanted to go one on one with nature. There were three small pinewoods planted in the dirty thirties and now the long shady rows of conifers with their brown needle beds loomed over me as I crept along the soft prickly ground between the chickadee’s songs and the terrified toads and the woods gave way to long stretches of grass here and there and an apple orchard that I never got to see come to maturity and the old oak tree under which my parents married and then at the very far end of the property, over a rusted cow fence with its ancient wires still twisting up out of the mud was the conservation area; my passage into it marked by an abandoned car with an old curved roof that someone must have abandoned forty years before and now nothing was left by oxidized metal and animal shit stabbing up out of the grass and beyond this the deep woods with scattered stretches of fallen leaf piles studded with odd coloured mushrooms and moss covered rocks as daunting as mountains when I climbed over them and now and then if I was careful and quiet enough a deer would pass me silently, suddenly putting up its head and bounding away into the underbrush as it caught my scent on the wind.

And now’s its all gone, as far as I know, and on one side the old farmer, who used to bring us fresh eggs and who put up a big billboard in is back field, overlooking the highway, to let everybody know that Jesus was the truth and the way, and on one side the old farmer, whose fields full of corn used to tilt up over my grandparent’s land, is gone now and whatever he made in this life is covered over by a subdivision and it’s filled with commuters and flat screen televisions and manicured streets and on the other side it’s the same and beyond that there’s a gravel pit and you can probably hear the trucks constantly grinding gravel up out of the soil and carting it away to wherever gravel is most needed and so now and, as far as I know, everything is gone but I know each one of us who knew the place is still trying to hold onto it in one way or another and in some ways we’re building new dream worlds and in other ways the past is still slowing our steps like we were always trying to walk forward in heavy mud and not tip.

And eventually I gave up on sensitive plants and I moved on to other things but then a funny thing happened to me one time while I was traveling in Southern India. I stayed for two months or three months or more at this village in the South, up in the mountains and one day (it was Christmas day in fact, 1992) a man who lived there, Ravichandran decided to take me with him on a trip. We switched busses a few times and waited for hours in different stations and I remember I was singing Christmas carols on the bus and everyone was looking at me like a madman because no one had any idea about Christmas and they didn’t care about it and at one bus station I remember that at one moment while Ravichandran was off at the toilets or some such thing there was a woman who came up to the window of the bus and I thought she was going to beg but instead she presented her child to me, a child of no more than four or five years old, as I was looking down at them from out of the open bars of the bus window and she lay her child down on the red mud and the child put a piece of wood over his belly and then the mother counted to three and stepped up on the piece of wood on the child’s belly and then stood there playing a tiny tin drum with a pair of broken sticks and singing a slightly unpleasant folk melody. Under the mother’s feet the child grimaced, clearly in some amount of pain. The mother then moved onto the next part of the show, stepping back and forth over the child’s belly while performing some kind of dance and after a few agonizing minutes the show was over and the mother put her cupped hand up to the window, asking to be paid for the show and I refused. It was the worst performance I have ever seen.

After this, in the evening time, we arrived at the place we were destined to go. The last part of the trip was through a stunning and at the same time nerve-rackingly twisted climb up through the jungle on our rickety bus with great and primeval slashes cut out of the earth on one side full to the brim with countless treetops and above us on the other side rose further cliff faces and we kept climbing and climbing through out the darkening day with oncoming traffic swerving round us on the thin road and film music blasting continuously on the buses loudspeaker. Look here, said Ravichandran, do you see this spot? One time ten elephants died here all at once, and he pointed to a high cliff on the other side of the canyon. They were walking along the cliff’s edge, and holding each other’s tails, or so I was told, and thus when one slipped they all lost they footing and down they went. Their corpses are still down there under the broken trees, he told me.

And finally we came to the hill station where we planned to stay and we had just settled in for tea when an ex lover of Ravichandran’s arrived and she was the last person in the world he wanted to see and her husband, who had travelled with her, was the next last and we all got drunk and tried to forget about it and they tried to make me do a little song and dance routine and I refused because I found it humiliating that they laughed at me and then when I went in my room I found that there was a lizard in there that must have been four feet long and chased it all around the room trying to get it out the door and I swung at it with a broom and it bounded up the sides of the walls and fell back down again like a terrified spider trapped in a bathtub with the water rising and finally it found the door and bounded out into the purple dusk and, why were you attacking that lizard? Ravichandran asked me. I wanted it out. Well it is one of the most poisonous animals in India, he said. And after all this, with everyone feeling tense, we all went to bed angry, and the general sense was that the day had been a complete disaster.

The, the next day, with the sun just making its way over the tops of the green hills I stepped out from my room and walked barefoot across the still dewy ground with the air crisp and blanket wrapped around my shoulders. When I looked down at the earth I realised that the entire ground was over grown with sensitive plants, they grew here wild, and they spread flat in ever direction and when I looked behind me I saw that the plants had closed up in the shape of my footprints, recording my passage forward in time and as I stood watching the plants slowly opened up again to the sun and with that my footsteps vanished.

Old Ms. Bishop

‘Twas minus seventeen the day
that old Ms. Bishop came to stay.
A relict in a long black cloak,
who often scowled, and rarely spoke.
Her bony fingers fiercely seized
the handle of her black valise.
“What’s in that case?” The children cried,
as old Ms. Bishop stepped inside.
“Why, in this bag I keep my strap,
so watch your step, or I shall snap
this tar dipped switch upon your hides.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” The children cried.
From her bag she pulled a paper:
“Your wise parents signed this waiver.”
To which the children sulked: “We’ll sue,
and that will be the last of you.
You’ll expire in a dungeon,
if you ever try to bludgeon
even one of our precious pates,
our lawyers will retaliate!”
Ms. Bishop’s blood began to steam,
her face turned white, then red, then green.
“Impertinence!” Ms. Bishop yelped,
“I’ll have to learn you little whelps.
I conferred with your lawyers, too,
and they consent that I’m right to
go with your parents given leave
to thrash your bottoms ‘till you bleed
if ever it pops in your head
to skip your prayers before your bed,
or if you ratiocinate
to leave food on your dinner plate,
or if I find your shoes are dull,
I’ll gladly split your ruddy skulls,
and suck your brains out for a snack,
now run and play—while I unpack.”
And with this she trudged up the stairs,
and left the children in despair.
The children wept, and cried, and sobbed:
“Our parents advertised this job
widely, where are all our options?
Come and save us Mary Poppins!”
The children sobbed and wept and cried:
“Soon enough we will all have died!
It’s us or her, she’s got to go!
‘But how to snuff her?’ –‘I don’t know!’”
The children cried, and sobbed and wept:
“Remember where the guns are kept?
And go and fetch a pointed stick,
and gasoline and arsenic.
Go get sharp things from the kitchen,
anything to do that witch in!
We’ll shoot her, and then stake her heart,
and then we’ll cut her all apart,
and poison every part we’ve cut,
then douse her down, and blow her up!”
So each child tiptoed like a mouse
to scrounge for weapons round the house,
then each child tiptoed up the stairs,
and waited twitching, and prepared.
An hour passed, an hour more,
no sound was heard behind the door.
They stared morosely at the clock,
‘till one child said: “We’d better knock.”
“No one answers,” the knocker sighed,
“Well take a peek!” the others cried.
and so they eased the door a crack,
and there the crone sat, staring back,
the frown still frozen on her face,
but eyes a glaze, gazed into space.
…For sadly, she had just expired,
the stairs were too much for her tired
heart, the exertion left her dead.
The children laughed, and then one said:
“I wonder if our parents care
that this week that’s our third au pair?”
They threw their weapons on the rug,
and shared in a communal hug.
They hugged a while with all their might,
then went to have a snowball fight.