On a Plate Near You

The previous post on meat confusionism reminded me of a wedding reception I attended in the days when vegetarianism and some of its attendant pieties were emerging into popular adoption. I was sitting with a friend whom I shall call Joe because he may, I hope, be alive and well. Joe had a lettuce sandwich on a dinner plate and I was holding a roast beef sandwich. I placed my sandwich on Joe’s plate in order to rest it. My sandwich was about two inches from his sandwich. Joe said “Would you mind moving your sandwich?” I looked at him enquiringly. “Because I don’t want meat close to my sandwich,” he explained.

Joe had joined a religious group led by an Indian master. ‘Master’, as he was called, stipulated, among many things, that his followers should strive not to increase their karma unnecessarily by eating meat. This was a standard Hindu dietary prescription. Joe had only been an initiate into the Master’s group for a few months. He had told me on another occasion that it was likely that Master was aware of the conduct of his initiates, even in their absence. But what was the indictable conduct in which Joe feared he might be implicated? I didn’t ask him at the wedding reception because I did not trust myself to maintain polite debate in the face of what I suspected was a preposterous and imminent assertion.

Joe clearly believed that despite the noncontiguity of the sandwiches their emblematic utter separateness did not merely bespeak an ideological or theological schism so much as a discrete space across which occult energies might travel. These energies will be called, for the sake of the ensuing argument and diatribe, Meat Rays.

This notion puts me in mind of the three month journey I made around the USA with my parents in 1951, when my mother purchased ‘Fun Fare – A Treasury of Reader’s Digest Wit & Humor’, a compendium which featured “the all-time humorous ‘bests'” chosen from the magazine. I read the book from cover to cover several times and consider it a valuable formative influence on the parts of Strength Weekly which, I am assured by kind readers, make you smile.

“Are there no bounds to his bibliomania?” I hear you expostulate. “He has memorised a 56 year old sliver of blurb!” Actually, so formative was the volume that I have preserved it for 56 years and, some minutes ago, retrieved it from its location in the “Gallons O’Laughs” subsection of my library. Having browsed the blurb I turned to the index, holding my breath because the first 136 pages of the soft-covered comedy collection are missing. Under ‘Pun, All in’, immediately after ‘Practical Jokes’ and ‘Pride, Local’, page number 308 is given.

And there it is! Good to see you again, old pun! “The late Senator Charles B. Farwell claimed that this was the only perfect triple pun in the English language: A woman’s three sons went to Texas to raise beef cattle, sheep and hogs. Stumped for a good name for their ranch, they wrote home to mother for suggestions. NAME IT FOCUS, she telegraphed. Puzzled, they wired for an explanation. The reply came immediately: FOCUS – WHERE THE SUN’S RAYS MEET.”

Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t think of that pun. It is, moreover, susceptible, if imperfectly, to inversion: SUN – WHENCE THE FOCI MEET RAYS. Which carries us back, laboriously, to the popular notion that Things Give Off Stuff.

This is a big one. Because some things do give off stuff and many things do not. Schools of thought have been constructed around both sets of phenomena, usually contriving to demonstrate that All Things Give Off Stuff. In the increasingly insistent, efficient and invasive field of forensic technology which depicts the world-as-crime-scene a feeling arises that our own meat gives off such trails and traces that we are as recent snails on the garden path.

In the next post I will extract from an aborted autobiography a passage that considers the shortcomings of the meat trace from the point of view of the Great Train Robber. I shall then return to further rumination (a vegetarian practice, as it happens) on the nature of Meat Rays and their possible significance in the world-view of the lettucely inclined Joe.

footnote: for a number of decades I was vegetarian. About 20 years ago I started eating fish and poultry, which I see as a higher form of vegetable. The post above, about Meat Rays, is inspired by events at a wedding more than 40 years ago at a time when I was cheerfully eating meat. I continue however, to get irritated by arguments about karma applied to matters of diet. Or to anything, come to think of it. I view such arguments as, to put it politely, a higher form of superstition.

30.10.2007

For a Moment I was Meat

Freud was on a train in an overnight sleeper and stepped out into the corridor to enjoy a cigar. He returned to his compartment, opened the door then reeled back in terror. A stooped, bearded man was advancing on him from within the compartment. Freud threw up his hands defensively and in the same instant the stranger began to gesture threateningly. Freud then realised that he was looking at a mirror mounted on the wall of the sleeping car.

This morning I decided to place the garlic press in its drawer. I glanced down at the brushed metal device and started. The press was full of meat. I realised that the barrel of the press, which is removable to facilitate rinsing, had been removed. I was looking at the palm of my own hand.

29.10.2007

Fusspots

Saw some fusspots today, in a café. The first fusspot said “I’d like an iced latte, please. And can you use milk straight from the fridge?” The barina said “This milk here is cold – I got it out of the fridge a couple of minutes ago. But I’ll be putting ice in it anyway.” The fusspot said “No, it’s at room temperature. Can I have it from the fridge, please?” He got his way. The second fusspot said “A cappuccino, no chocolate, quite wet please.” The barina handed her a cup topped with white foam. She said “Is it wet?” The barina said “I put extra water in.” The fusspot sipped fussily at the foam for a few seconds. “I can’t taste the coffee,” she said.

The café – where exceptionally evolved individuals seek the pamper that defines them.

15.10.2007

The Young Entertainers

Now not everybody with Britney’s background turns out like Britney but, even so, this should not deflect us from an assessment of the grand social experiment in which the popstress has been involved for much of her young life. In a comprehensive Observer piece by Elizabeth Day, we learn that from the age of eight Britney was groomed to be an entertainer. It’s at about that age that little girls (and boys) are awakening to the power of this particular elect and start, some of them, to dream about acquiring membership one day. To be enrolled in entertainer classes at this point must be profoundly confusing – the distance between subject and role model suddenly collapses, the sense of a future in which personal development must take place is eclipsed and the possibility of fantasising about other ‘things I want to be when I grow up’ is removed, possibly for ever.

Far more damaging, however, is the winding down of the interior life in favour of its learned imitation. When you are tap dancing, for example, it is advisable to smile. In ballet classes it is best to look solemn. When acting in plays it is good to foreground your feelings to the extent that nothing should be expressed without expression. Your body, when not actively engaged in an act of impersonation, should impersonate centredness, openness and willingness. (I must apologise if I have inadvertently given valuable advice to readers – this was certainly not my intention.)

Once the business of show has been mistressed, the rest is relatively easy. How long does it take to ‘train’ a young entertainer in the basics? Two or three years, maybe, especially if they attend stage schools or talent academies. So by the time the child is 11 or 12 a workable vocabulary of response is in place. A vocabulary of initiation is a trickier proposition.

Clearly it is desirable to appear to be both motivated and proactive. If the wherewithal for this has been systematically diminished then processes of identification may prove more than adequate to the task. By which I mean that when interiority is treated (as in ‘treating damp rot in the timbers of the roof’) a residue always remains. (Surely it can’t be long before this quantity can be neutralised.) It has its uses. The young entertainers (the term is now used to describe not just showbiz kids but all those unwittingly participating in the grand experiment) are able to associate themselves with those who are proactive, use their training to ‘get into their character’ and thereby present a learned, imitative vocabulary of initiation.

I’m not suggesting that the government rings up Britney’s parents and says “We have a marvellous new personality type on the drawing board – your daughter could be its polished standard bearer – get to it!” The shaping of persons by pernicious consumerism is subtle, protracted and certainly the worthwhile subject of a book I’m not equipped to write. What is clear, though, is that the mere display of goods is not enough – shell-like consumers must be recruited, their exteriors of painted sugar, their interiors echoing and free of psychological residue.

Britney, then, has been rousted from the trenches and sent over the top to field-test the kit. She took some bullets and went down. But there are lessons to be learned from this. If the progress of capitalism is to be untrammelled then certain personality types are needed. Essentially, you need empty people. People who want to feel filled. But it’s a bugger emptying the bastards. A small amount of residue is actually needed but, because it is psychological, it is unreliable. (A bit like the idea of the ‘hostile witness’ in a judicial context.)

The great experiment, part of which consists in show business functioning to communicate the desirability of the business of show, is largely successful though. In the United Kingdom, for example, hundreds of thousands of people have been successfully converted to celebrity worship. The cost of this success has not been excessive – for every celebrity meltdown there are dozens of examples of those who can play the game rather well. Mind you, it’s handy Britney is a woman because the attack on her behaviour is subsumed under the general attrition of wayward women of any stripe.

Britney has certainly let everybody down. She wasn’t meant to fall to bits – there are plenty of myths offering strategies of colourful bohemian survival that she might have utilised. When something like this happens there are no winners and everyone is betrayed. Not to worry though, Britney, waiting in the wings of the great social experiment (in which new person types are trialled) (hate that verb) are those who would counsel the waverers: cadres of recently trained counsellors who, as long as the waverer cancels her subscription to the psychological, will deliver her from evil in six weeks. These longbowmen of the post-interior persuasion – often known as cognitive behavioural therapists – are skilled at overcoming those who only have spears.

14.10.2007

The Completion

I like to read, me. If I don’t do it daily I get a rash and if I don’t go to a bookshop (usually a charity shop) every 48 hours I feel unsettled. I have a lot of books on my shelves and I hope I will be able to read them all. I have calculated that I will be dead long before I succeed in so doing. It is not as if I have stopped collecting in order to read what I’ve got. I add to the collection every few days, transferring my allegiances from the last crush to the next pash in a coldly fickle moment.

I would like to read all the books that I would like to read but I’d need a parallel life in which I simply circumambulated my capacious library whilst drinking real ale and swimming.

The pathology of plenitude is upon us. Too much stuff, too little time. What to do? Give up, obviously. Try not to think about box sets. Abstain from secondary stimulants such as magazines designed to induce purchase. Dip toes in the weir of nonchalance. Say ‘I know enough already.’ Or ‘I will stop now and let culture swim before me until I am just a figure at the bus-stop as culture rolls towards the horizon leaving flared trousers in its wake.’

Thanks to the ever-rewarding Things Magazine I learn that Penguin have issued the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, comprising 1,082 titles and retailing at $13,315.84. With an Amazon discount of 40% this works out at a trifling $7,989.50.

I am not remotely tempted. Were money no object I would not part with the requisite sum. Besides, I read at least seven of them at Uni. But as Completions go, this one is up there with The Assembled Nouvelle Vague, Its Antecedents, Its Tendencies and Its Divers Spawn, a 60 DVD set (I made that up). Certainly the owner of the Penguin set would never need to go out again. It would, on a personal level, be the End of History.

I suppose one might just buy them in order to feel better in some disturbed way but still keep going out. Much as the life of the Duc des Esseintes, the aesthete ‘hero’ of J-K Huysmans’ ground-breaking 1884 proto-virtual-reality novel of the Decadence ‘Against Nature’, has its cosy charms (the Duke purchases a chateau and lavishly decorates each of its rooms in a different style: one simulates a boat, another contains a collection of perfumes with which he composes an aromatic symphony etc) (it’s a Penguin Classic) (he never goes out again), I fear the sickly perfume of atrophy would soon drive one out to the nearest All Bar One. (‘”Mine’s a pint, squire!” barked the Duke thirstily.’)

No bugger who buys the Classics Collection will ever read it. We can speculate on how nice it feels to have it though: “Now that I have the Classics Collection not only is my library complete but I am. I have sealed the fissures through which dripped the contempt of the cultured. Like the taxi-driver I am fatly equipped with the Knowledge even if I do not, as yet, appear to know how to get to King’s Cross. I can, however, at any time that I choose, immerse myself in the canon and fire my firm self through the firmament of cultivation. It is as if I had a warm puppy in each trouser pocket, where the puppy is the good feeling and the trousers are the garments of the mind. And now, if you will excuse me, I am going to kill myself. For I am finished here.”

10/10/2007