PLEASING DECAY

 

 Almost five years ago – appropriately, being five years, I arrived the day David Bowie died – I went to Costa Rica for a break and forgot to come home. In that time I have seldom left the fairly sleepy tourist town in which I washed up. I think I will make my new year resolution to visit at least some of the local towns. The bus service here is excellent, partly I suspect because there are no trains, this being earthquake country.

I love the place, the town is wonderful, and I always assumed its attraction was just culture shock. There is none of the drabness of post-war British architecture here. My predominant memory of London, if I had to point at it on a colour wheel, would be a sort of battleship grey. Costa Rica is certainly shot in technicolour.

Recently, I sent a friend an email with a photograph of a small local courtyard attached. He is an excellent artist, and seems to enjoy two subjects in particular, pub interiors, and plants and gardens. He told me two things which held my attention. One was that he didn’t paint from photos as ‘the whole point is the representation of the eyes’ work’. The accomplished British portrait artist Henry Mee – who has painted most of the establishment for forty years – told me a similar thing many years ago.

The other thing my friend mentioned was a quote from John Piper – of whom I have never heard and I don’ t use Google if I don’ t know a fact like that, rather I will wait for my friend to inform me – which spoke of ‘ pleasing decay’ . Here is the courtyard, which I had jokingly suggested be a study in green.

 I realised quite suddenly that ‘pleasing decay’ was exactly what appealed to me about my Costa Rican town, and indeed what I have seen of Central America. Conversely, I realised that I dislike very much the shiny and new, and always have done. I despise office blocks and the vulgarity of shops and retail outlets. Steel and glass as building materials are fundamentally ugly to me, whereas stone and wood fade and decay in a way that suggests life and experience rather than perpetual novelty.

So, I shall be publishing various examples of pleasing decay as I photograph them. Decay as an art form has a natural and organic atmosphere about it, and it seems to be a sort of resistance movement to modernity, which I oppose and dislike more all the time.

What I dislike about modernity is its colossal pomposity, its belief that it will somehow outlast everything, and that to be modern is a good thing in and of itself. I think of myself as something like an entropic conservative, one who sees the decay and gradual collapse of structure as part of its inherent beauty. The arch decays but it remains, just as the two vast and trunkless legs of stone remain on the pedestal in Shelley’s Ozymandias.

 

 

 

 

LADIES & GENTLEMEN, COVID & WOKE!

Merry Structure, Kandinsky

 

THE MAIN EVENTS OF 2020 sound somehow like a magicians’ double-act from the 1970s: Covid and Woke. And, like a stage partnership, they have worked well together, exhibiting expert timing and synchronicity. Take the origin of Covid 19.

Whether or not the virus emerged, as in a Marvel comic, from a laboratory outside Beijing, or crossed species in some vile Wuhan wet market, China looks the guilty party. But wait. Blaming a non-white country is racist. So saith the Book of Woke.

COVID itself, of course, is racist, killing black bodies more than it inconveniences those with white privilege. This is untrue, of course, and even if true lacks the application of a study of social pattern. But things don’ t have to be true anymore, they merely need a rhetorical use value and they are good to go.

The arrival of COVID is really the midwife to woke. Citizens of the West are increasingly being forced into submission due to virus restrictions, and so are ripe for the picking when the woke commissars enter the orchard. If you are told what to wear, where to stand, and how long to clap the NHS, you are likely to be more receptive to being told what to think about race, gender and history.

Strategically, then, the woke Left have played a great game. They are like a small and dedicated band of hijackers, just a few of whom manage to take over an aircraft or a cruise liner. They know what they are doing and they are up against people who were never expecting to be required to defend their vessel.

The Left are also remorseless, the hallmark of every successful tyrant. It was never enough to treat wrongspeak with mere social disapproval. Now – and this has accelerated massively this year – it is necessary to have someone who transgresses speech codes fired and rendered unemployable, arrested, barred from social media, ‘doxxed’ (where the personal details of an offender are made public) and generally hounded out from their previously comfortable lives. No forgiveness, ever.

The woke Left have also hypnotised the political class like a mongoose with a snake. Instead of telling the wokesters to shut up and get on with something useful, they have sanctioned every kneeling policeman and footballer, praised every rabid utterance damning white people, and approved with gradual legislative creep the laws necessary to enslave a population to a code provided by the unelected and administered by the uneducated. The Scottish Justice Minister, a Muslim who openly despises whites, is pressing for a bill which will criminalise speech in the home. The Stasi have now entered the building.

The government, conservative in name only, are also agreeably encouraged by how easily a handful of academics, pop stars, sportsmen and other cultural detritus have set the people dancing to their tune. The authoritarianism shown by both woke brigade and political class alike is absolutely symbiotic, forming a virtuous circle, even if that circle resembles Ouroboros, the snake god (Ungud in Indian mythology), devouring its own tail.

What of the rest of us, the wrongthinkers and doubleplusungoods, the ones who believe a baby born with a penis is and will always be a boy, the ones who stay away from predominantly black areas not because of any animus based on skin colour, but because more muggings happen in those areas, the ones who don’ t want to see one jot more Islam in our native lands, the ones who don’t wish for fat pantomime dames to teach our small children about anal sex, the ones who don’ t find the fact that an author had a slave-owning great-grandfather a valid reason not to read him, the ones who are rather fond of being able to choose freely what we say and write, the majority of ordinary people watching the freakshow carnival as it takes over the town square and the village green?

We either accept it or we don’t. 

TRAUMAVILLE REOPENS TO THE PUBLIC

Yellow, Red, Blue - Kandinsky

WELCOME TO TRAUMAVILLE. Or quite possibly welcome back. I ran this weblog for many years and under a variety of names, then neglected it as I got involved with a magazine, British Intelligence, which has, sadly, just bowed out after a year’s service. It was a worthy project featuring a supreme effort from the editor, and it got me into the habit of writing regularly and to deadlines. In the absence of the magazine, it seemed natural to start up this blog again, which is now renamed The People’s Republic of Traumaville.

One of my maxims is that the ability to publish a weblog is a far more powerful democratic tool than casting a vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee. I have also said for many years that the elites would come for the free internet, and the current big tech offensive against any broadly conservative online opinion seems to bear this out. Writing Traumaville helped me to refine my political beliefs and to position myself far more authentically than had I been a mere media consumer. Along with a Socratism which comes naturally to me due to my academic background in philosophy, I think I have constructed a version of the way the world functions seen through a strong lens of scepticism.

The formation of the West as we see it now seems to have gone through its most radical changes in a deleterious decline almost exactly coincident with my life, born as I was in 1961, the start of a decade that would undermine traditional values in favour of more anarchic and damaging modes of thought. In that span of time, the Left have pulled off the extraordinary trick of rising to almost complete cultural, social and political power, while pretending that the West is in the grip of forces of the extreme Right. The Left have perfected the art of perceptual victimhood and disseminated it via their provisional wing on the identitarian Left, whose trade is the promotion of the rights of minorities, any minorities.

And those of us who, like Macbeth in Dunsinane, grow isolated, all we can do is register our protest, our non-conformity, our dissent. I am no futurologist, but I have a dread feeling that 2021 is going to make 2020 look like a glee party.

Anyway, I am looking forward to restarting Traumaville, and I will try to educate, inform and entertain. Hang About. Isn’t that someone else job?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the rest of us, the hegemony (to use a Gramscian term) of the Left represents actual oppression, of free speech and thought, of our behaviour in the workplace and even at home, of freedom of movemnt and assembly if you do not have approved thoughts, and so on. The British have a social credit system every bit as pernicious as that of China, just hidden in plain sight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The song of the jolly headmen

Odilon Redon, Cactus Man

The song of the jolly headmen

Now the year turns

Like a millwheel

Grinding the chaff away.

The river’s up,

The doors won’t close,

Puffed with moisture.

Or is it fairies, little Mabs

And Hobs and bottle imps?

Mischief, the old bicycle’s flat tyres,

Mud spooned over Wellingtons.

In the lop-sided hall

The fairies wash their babies in the beer.

Dreams without people.

Sandbanks. A grey silvered sky.

The hearty tramp on the moors,

The springy heather, the golden retriever

Bounding ahead, happy to be happy.

But there is something in the gorse.

It is the same shape as the gorse.

But it is not the gorse.

It is in the gorse

But not of it.

There is something in the gorse.

The dog stops and listens.

Grass wet with hovering mist.

The ticks climb the blades.

Shellacked buttons, feelers

Twitching morse,

They speak of tick affairs.

Conspiracies. The world

Is all cogs and springs and clicking gears

Run and maintained by grotesques.

Who rules a queenless hive?

Each soul has its wetlands.

Knee-deep in filmy water,

The murrain suck and pull

Of depth and marshy ooze.

She stands in storms.

She is motion and its consequence,

A woman caught in movement,

She plays with time,

Or time plays with her.

Keelhauled, roped and plunged,

This fear of winds

In a world not old but young,

Swimming in the dreaming brine

We fish together

Strung with weed.

Feed the feathered arrow through the torso.

Never pull. The raggedy flesh,

Slippy blood and gristle.

Stag’s teeth and a charm bracelet.

Your mood like fur stroked the wrong way.

Let the moral contortions commence.

The teller’s smile

A copper-wire crescent

Set in dough.

Chile powder on a horseshoe

Of pineapple,

Her hair disgraceful,

A heron’s nest of reds and aubergines.

Champagne and cigarettes,

An origami cat

Weakened by two fat raindrops.

Swill it around the mind.

Troubled blessing.

Torch the pretensions.

Let ideals smother in the crib.

We need no thinkers here,

Just pragmatists. Log-splitting men,

Cabin builders, calloused hands

And minds. For thinkers

There are crosswords and cribbage.

These hang and pluck no pheasants

Nor slat the shutters

‘Gainst the wind.

Love hides but waits to be found.

One hundred counted. Look

In the pockets of your scuff-sleeved coat,

And behind the Japanese screen

And in the coal scuttle

And in your heart last of all

Because you never want games to end.

We never met.

An echo in each other’s thoughts.

Corridors untaken

And doors untried.

After all the bright manifestoes

They still hang the prisoners.

Thirteen loops, thirteen steps,

The trapdoor surprises with its speed,

The vertebrae traumatised,

A mangle of gristle,

The spine’s perfection compromised,

Its question-mark answered.

Crane marionettes,

All-gallows eve.

There is a woman on the roof,

Astride the gables,

Set against the peat-black sky.

The thunder-heads roll in.

She holds a bird’s head

On a bamboo cane,

Shakes it in a palsy-dance,

Come, lightning.

And strike us all dead.

Tiny monkeys swarm

On beached and rotting palanquins.

The old empires pass,

Dowagers in a sick-breathed room,

Never to rise again.

Time smooths the blankets

And combs the hair.

Plants and puppets.

Unfurl the flags,

Hang them rightways

And have the village girls

Take Death down to the river.

Don’t whistle in the house, mother.

You’ll whistle away the luck

We never had.

The luck my father wished for

But never had.

Luck is a lady in the restaurant

But a harlot on the streets.

Ceremonial attire

Shaken out for wearing.

Confetti of dead moth-wings

Strews the tiles.

The ceremony is late starting,

Late finishing.

It is late now

All over the world.

The time zones come together,

The wicket-gate closes

On the dog-rose garden

Where we left our shadows.

There are eight jolly headmen.

Phobos, stripe-faced, pink- eyed,

A bobbing albino.

Kurtz, there in the heart

Of darkness.

Faustina, wife of Marcus,

The kind, wise emperor.

The wood-sprite, juju man,

With his matted coconut face.

Next Beppo,

Black head, nodding,

Red dashes for eyes.

Little Kätschen with her twig arms

Held up in glee.

Odilon with his one eye

And carven grin.

Jack the cartoon man,

Crosses for eyes,

Railroad teeth.

The shard

Of black-daubed tile

Digs the earth.

Eight jolly headmen.

Will there be more?

Hear them sing

And regret nothing.

Chickens in the church-yard.

They are the quick, and the dead

Sleep on and dream of loam

And trinket and flint.

The stolen church-bell

Was Domesday Book scriven.

Inside the church the mural,

Terracotta devils’ tongues

Of flame, the croix patée

Skewed in its corner.

The land a Templar’s,

A knight in absence,

Gone to the Holy Land.

Sir Stephen something,

Supping with Saladin

On mulled blood and old wine.

Born to be a dilettante,

Now I work the night shift

At the doll hospital.

The graveyard shift.

The dollies have no graves

But live again, remade

and recycled. All the little

Plastic arms and legs,

The eyes, the squeaky joints.

Clock in, clock out,

The dollies watch

As I go about my work.

The fan-dance has commenced and now

The town of devils must be rid.

The pharmakoi, the four bad men

And woman one in number

Outside the township limits

Must be driven. Point of order.

What of the names?

The names, the names.

In every log-book, almanac,

Or registration form,

Certificate of birth or marriage,

Bill of sale for Hackney-carriage.

All the names and signatures

Remain. The printer’s devils.

Vespers, Angelus, Domesday.

All the bells sing

And the overtones hum

and quiver.

Water-boatmen dimple the pools.

The water table’s up,

The underground river

Seeks a place in the sun,

Brings all its secrets with it

From the inky black,

The moss-slimed walls and runnels.

Artesian wells, Cartesian bells.

They ring therefore thou art.

The young daughter fears blindness.

A squint from a childhood illness

Brings twilight in like tarpaulin.

The edges of things blur and bleed.

Now she edges blindfold round the dark house.

Tap, tap, tap.

Learning the alignments and edges

For when the light fails.

You were told

Of the false lights,

Warned, cuffed once, twice.

Stay on the path, Will.

Gaseous exhalations

Sparked into a life

To flit and course the dead peat.

Thus science. Miss Abby

Says Will o’ th’ Wisp

Is come. Red dots

For eyes.

Stay on the path, Will.

Your namesake flickers,

Leads you on

To the graves of the bad children.

Unquiet

In the marshy ooze.

Down the causey.

(‘Ware the slimy steps

Do not pitch you in the Thames!)

The ghost of Bruno

Passes you

On his way up to The Strand

To the ambassadorial house.

In the end all endings

Are beginnings.

The old hallway clock

Strikes to end one hour

And begin another.

Wheel moves wheel,

Cycles, seasons and a turning.

And so the year turns

Like a millwheel

Grinding the chaff away.

****

If you've enjoyed The song of the jolly headmen, not only is there psychological help available to you, but for a modest outlay there is a book of my poetry for sale at

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08CHJ9SL7?pf_rd_r=WEAHT9QSCNKYRC21F4SD&pf_rd_p=e632fea2-678f-4848-9a97-bcecda59cb4e