The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 6)

                                                                           
                                                                           6

It was a headline in the November 2, 2012 edition of the Arts pages of The Guardian which sent Anthony Christ-Jones, founder of the Stuck-up Artists into his final sustained Hitlarian rage;' "WEST NO LONGER DOMINANT FORCE IN MODERN ART" ' This death-knell to the English art establishment and his, Christ-Jones’ deluded central role within it chimed on, " “Heretofore I never want a Turner Prize winner to be looked for in this infernal country again", ' Stated Sir Nicohlas Serota, Director of the Tate Museums, "We’re looking elsewhere; anywhere but here. Indeed if a western European wants a standing chance he or she might have to attend an art school in Africa or the Middle East, and even then…’ This pause was the chasm into which Anthony Christ-Jones, fell; it was also the day he dropped the last two syllables of his Christian name replacing it with the single syllable‘i’, and, dispensing with the last part of the double-barrel surname, he stepped back to survey and savour the appearance and sound of his new title; “Anti-Christ”, he muttered to his reflected jack-booted dopple-ganger; ‘Definite article? Yes? No? The Anti-Christ? Maybe…?”.

The Anti-Christ took the 47 bus to his work-shop in Shoreditch to prepare an art installation to end all art installations; a delivery of uranium was expected at 11.30 am. If Serota intended to build up a collection from artists from outside the UK, from, God forbid, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia then The Anti-Christ would make sure that in the post apocalyptic after-glow his own offering would be the sole and unique likely candidate for, and winner of any and all future prizes!. It was to be called ‘The Manhatten Project Mark 2 in honour of that American uber-hero of Practical Thinking Robert Openheimer and in protest against the existence of Nigerian/British 1998 Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili in general and, specifically a response to that same artist’s depiction of a black Virgin Mary (a la fin du monde, cherchez la femme!!) daubed in excrement displayed, much to the horror of the catholic Mayor Guiliano, at the 1999 Sensation Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. To get one over on a, supposedly posthumous Serota, (given the magnitude of the piece), The Manhatten Project Mark 2 would be a video installation; a somewhat churlish codicil to any apocalyptic final testament; having recently read this cinematic art-form to be Sir Serota’s least favourite .

Yes, the former Anthony Christ-Jones’ temper tantrum appeared to have no limits and if throwing a rattle, (even if a somewhat nuclear one), out of the pram was what it took to be noticed, then that is as is; it had worked for Oppenheimer, hadn’t it…? Hadn't Hitler's artwork thus come to the fore...? The alternative was impossible to contemplate; total obscurity living his life on a horse farm in Missouri, happily married, rejuvenated by the rural life, indeed looking ten years younger, fitter, resurfacing in the metropolise to exercise his brilliant enviable polymathic intellect on ‘What Type of Person Needs To Be a Gazillionaire’ and taking a modest part of the prize money back to his beloved pastoral idyll and showering his family, Great Gatsby-like, with quarter of a million greenbacks. The Anti-Christ actually contemplated this as an alternative; unalloyed envy was exhausting and besides he could not attain the desired fission necessary for the right kind of cataclysm. It could have gone either way.

It was the archival recording of one of Alistair Cooke's dispatches from America which suspended indefinitely the End of the World. Broadcast in the run up to Christmas as part of a Letters From America retrospective on BBC Radio 4.  In 1966, Cooke re-imagines Robert Oppenheimer’s last Christmas on earth; a planet to which the nuclear physicist tried so earnestly to belong, an ambition which, from the final entries in his diary, sadly and tragically eluded him. Here is a transcript of that recent pre-Christmas broadcast first recorded by a not-yet-breathless and wheezy Cooke:

BBC Archive Recording. Alistaire Cooke's Letter From America. December 21, 1966.

Christmas in the dark had, increasingly, become Oppenhemer’s favourite seasonal past-time. As the days shortened and the nights lengthened his toes curled up with glee in anticipation of the self-indulgent moroseness he might offer himself and the forms it might take. Friends, which he had been at great pains to acquire during the spring, summer and autumn months, were unscrupulously discarded like discoloured and dried up leaves and swept away in the fetid breeze of festive anorexia.

Friends were carefully selected for their dispensability and viewed up close suffered, each and everyone from the same clarion call come the birthday of Christ our Lord, “I vant to be alone”. It is to be observed that there is no point in being alone unless there is an audience aware of your martyrdom; like the man who threatens suicide yet clings on to the vain life-line of his broadcast; one should be heralded for one’s capacity to endure loneliness or aloneness and the day that finds the bulk of humanity in festive and communal conviviality offers the perfect prism for that streak of dark grey fighting its way, in the opposite direction against the general hues of merriment and mirth.

An invitation to actually join a fellow being to share all the trimmings was received, by Oppenheimer with the most facetious plan to up the stakes and to spite the intruder who threatened to leave even a hint of glitter on his tightly patrolled comfort zone. “I don’t do Christmas, too commercial, hate it. I’m going away,” he scowled. The object of his revenge would expect to hear he spent a relatively yuletide-free week in a heathen country later to feel the full force of his ire when he would casually drop in a tale of utter solitude in a single room in a chalet crammed to the hilt with five generations of the same family in Lapland.

Another strategy to avenge those who dared impinge on his appointment with self-pity was to look them straight between the eyes and tell them he had accepted an invitation from someone they hated. This guaranteed that they would never think of asking him to pull a Christmas cracker again, ever.

His family never asked him to share this period of twinkling lights and mulled wine as, quite frankly, they had come to the consensus that he was weird, and anyway as a child he became practised at ruining their fun by creeping down at night and carefully, without piercing the wrapping, smashing the presents with a hammer. Either that or he sat in a dark corner and succeeded in out-scowling the Siamese cat until all the guests made excuses and left and the family admitted defeat and followed the guests, leaving him free to unplug the fairy lights, bin the turkey and mince pies and, as he sailed off to bed, wrestle the Christmas tree to the ground.

As the delicious dark pall of the day approached and everyone’s coat tails flapped in the rush of air on entering Bloomingdales, Maceys, Tiffanys and other Wonder Worlds of reciprocal gift-giving, he lurched from shadow to shadow descending degrees of melancholia with each fair-ground bonanza passed. A rueful eye cast on the Christmas tree in Times Square and a murderous shower of acid glares at the carol singers below its ponderous and glittering branches found him slinking away from the bright lights down the dark and barren alley of his soul along a series of darker gullies home.

There was no escape there either; through the walls he could hear the muffled hilarity of festive radio programming as he slammed the kettle on. Testimony that nothing connected him to the gaudy pot-pourrie outside, his abode allowed no concessions whatsoever and indeed, there was evidence, should anyone be let in to observe, (and they were in the countdown to Christmas Eve for what is the point of an emotional advent calendar if there is no one to open the tiny windows to see the scratched out scenes within) – they would have observed that the dwelling of the-one-who-so-adamantly-shuns-joy-and-has-become-death-destroyer-of-worlds was moving determinedly in the opposite direction. Furniture would be removed, thrown out, for maximum discomfort, books were given to charity, not out of charity but because, for maximum effect, there should be absolutely nothing to do on the day and absolutely nothing to see or to drink; a request having been made to the respective companies that three days prior to December the twenty-fifth he would be grateful if the mains and the water supply could be cut off.

Of course everyone else was having a fabulous time in each other’s company- there was no one lonelier than him, even the cockroach that had somehow entered the room and was conspiring to cheer him up, knew that. Blinking away in the dark he had reached maximum wretchedness and a monastic-like calm descended. A calm so serene, devoid of the tiniest rustle of wrapping paper and at that moment Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the Atom bomb, looked around at the cavernous emptiness of his life and contemplating the immanent apocalyptic inferno that he knew to be the crowning glory of his particular climb, muttered. “Sod this for game of soldiers!”

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (chapter 3, Part 5)

                                                                             

                                                                              5.

Telling the truth can lead to Terror. We have all fallen in love with a technology that allows us to reach the epitome of this terror;  the mob. Prior to the internet age, only a mere ninety-nine percent of a mere ninety-nine percent of the planet was populated. That one Twin-Spirit remains to recall what the actual origins of that terror was, is amazing.

“We are talking about an age before humankind reached adulthood”, the terror was in her/his old cataract clouded eyes, “there at our genesis, way before the vulture-like scramble for words and philosophies”, seated upon a rock overlooking the Southern African plains, superior ruler, judge, Caliphate, yet none of these; two beings, both man and woman in one form, yet neither. Chewing on a root, face towards the incoming sun’s rays- ‘ah’ s/he click-talked’. ‘This is good’. The majestic palm-leaf  strands of her/his headpiece reached monstrous heights and spread out ocean-like beneath her/him, when s/he talked of “those who now make up a remarkable number who now populate the earth sent away, then, individually, as outcasts, their skin that could take no pigmentation, and too watery irises, threat to the hunt, harried to the boundaries of each early settlement and left to die”. S/he coughed “Ah, petroleum in the lungs, uranium in the hips… tske… and fracking in the bones…” s/he clicked. "Look how this outcasts have survived the rigors of their banishment, and how noble they now stand. A long time I still see one or two standing in a field, trying to return’. The old wo/man laughed. “ “oh”, she clicked “they bring things, things we have no use for, gifts made of what they have found along the way, through time, cloth, beads, things that make a lot of noise; we rejected them all”.

“It is since they have been angry these children of outcast children, they have begun to bring terror. Naughty children destroying the past, very very naughty children! They crowd together but they always will carry the memory of standing alone…this is the trouble, tske, you cannot buy your way into a group that has thrown you out.”

The ancient Kosa wo/man spat out the root juice on to a patch of red dust, parting the leaf fronds of her gargantuan headdress. ‘Eh, I am very disappointed, all the gifts, they pile up like a giant dung heap and the whole won’t melt, we will have to start all over again…tske…next time the imperfect will not be getting very far.” Mo/Father Earth clicked.

This is the extraordinary dream Anthony Christ-Jones, founder of the Stuck-up Artists, had the night black artist Steve MacQueen won the Turner Prize a mere year after Chris Ofili’s success. That same evening, to Christ-Jones’ horror the two names also came up, conjoined, in one of the questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Immediately after, to really put the boot in, the question, ‘Who wrote the Principia Tapioca?’, was correctly answered as ‘B: Fatima Whitbread’. What if, since childhood Christ-Jones had been out-and-out lied to and his crisp and polished sentences and up-bringing were a charade? We will have to delve into his nightmarish dreams and visions a little more.

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap.(Chapter 3, Part 4)

                                                                       

                                                                            4.

Standing on the edge of her patio doors in full drag celebrity chanteuse Mary Mary called out for her beloved Chihuahua Mitzi who had,- between being let out for a ‘tinkle’ in her Swarovski collar and Mary Mary attaching her six layers of eyelashes and fetching Mitzi’s customary bowl of Himalayan Spring Water,- been snatched by a passing fox; Mary Mary’s evening was about to get a whole lot worse.

So, how does her tale relate to anything so far?  The incident that night will have immeasurable unquantifiable effects on the lives of others in a manner you would not believe possible.

I will attempt to connect 6 totally unconnected things and see if you can follow how I am able to make them all relate.

Mary Mary and Mitzi

Lord Raven and his two eldest sons Amarillo and Morado

The Bank of England,

The London Stock Exchange (The Old one)

The Hidden Casino, (within and between and under The Bank of England and The London Stock Exchange...called...well The Hidden Casino.)

Floy

This is a prime example of the ‘distracted taste’ or stories for those of the internet age who have the attention span of a fruit fly; or Lord Raven’s Tale with all the daedalian vagaries and vicissitudes required to reboot a comatose imagination and allow you to meander wherever Lord Raven’s fateful fate meandered before...well, his fateful fate.

There is indeed a conundrum, a dilemma, a convergence of two roads, one Faustian, the other ultimately sacrificial yet just- one of God’s mischievous games. A crossroad of choices down which either signals a loss. I urge you to think of times in your own lives when you have been thus torn.

Below, to hammer the point of the randomness of ‘distracted tales’ home, are two objects used for the purposes of our story to replace objects described and seen in both the book and the film The great Gatsby, namely shirts:

Gold Bricks. Like a smash and grab robber Lord Raven would return from long periods away at his work, accounting the vast sums made  at the Russian roulette tables at the Hidden Casino of which he had been made treasurer, and entering the door of his palatial familial home take ten paces into the living room and hurl a dozen or so gold bricks into the air. His thirteen then young children watched in delight as the bullion crashed in slow motion through the glass coffee table and dinner service onto the floor.

Silk Blankets. No part of the house was out of bounds for Mitzi’s bed and Mary Mary had spared no expense regarding the quality of material her canine companion would slumber upon; Imperial Chinese silk; a ragged tartan blanket would not do; too Scottish, a towel was too common, no Mitzi would be dazzled by the confusing sight of Mary Mary running about singing The Sound of Music throwing slow-falling not very comfortable fabric into the air.

You don’t have to have read the life of that tycoon Gatsby to realize that to him having a pool and a walk-in wardrobe was, if somewhat strange, a statement about his libido; throwing hundreds of expensive shirts in the air in front of house guests, with insouciant abandon was better than the morbid yet dramatic thoughts he harbored of diving out of a neighboring skyscraper into the shallow end of his swimming pool. Like our protagonists Lord Raven and Mary Mary he had become so wealthy he had forgotten that shirts were supposed to be worn and not thrown about in a contemptible display of that wealth.

By no contrast whatsoever both Lord Raven and the celebrity chanteuse drag queen Mary Mary were at the peak of their game and their respective shower of gifts were displays of their ample and prodigious cash flow, though at the time Raven’s Ideation Quotient was distinctly Citizen Kane and Mary Mary’s intuitively Julie Andrews. Proper uses for:

Gold Bricks, (read also, copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, titanium, indium, rhodium, praeseodymium): To shore up, secure and act as guarantor for delayed and balanced reciprocity in the name of barter and peace; a currency under the aegis of which inferior ephemeral bartered goods such at straw mats, palm oil, yams and promissory notes such as money could be merrily exchanged with  otherwise hostile lands. Traditionally held by a person of seniority in age and rank having earned his respect through the garnered knowledge that should that currency turn out to be a mere rumor trade in goods would abruptly cease and all hell break loose.

Silk Blankets. Absolutely useless in the ensuing war and famine once a system of exchange’s basic currency has been hijacked by those not of sufficient seniority and garnered knowledge to know that a rumor of gold bricks can only go on for so long before people actually demand to see…well, gold bricks.

Where is the flow of imagination taking us in our tale? This common and dysfunctional use of both the brick and the blanket has to stop. And stop it does; Lord Raven’s two eldest sons Amarillo and Marado out with a drunken party of fellow students would meet up with Mary Mary out at night in a powder blue baby-doll night-gown and slippers looking for her Mitzi. In the coming weeks and months- as news reports of the violence inflicted on Mary Mary and the hideous witness statements of her death-by-drowning leaping from  Chelsea bridge to escape her homophobic assailants, her disappearance fueling a bonfire of horror stories of her last minutes in the public imagination, - Lord Raven’s favorite and most sensitive son Amarillo began to show signs of a nervous break down.

That Ofili’s The upper Room is based on Floy’s idea  gleaned from the description of the last supper in Lord Raven’s biography is no coincidence for it was at the dinner table at the palatial Raven residence surrounded by his thirteen progeny and in the height of his power that his son Amarillo, suffering visibly under the strain of guilt, confessed to being among the gang, which included the unrepentant Morado, who inflicted violence upon and the death of the celebrity chanteuse Mary Mary. In the interim between Mary Mary’s fateful encounter and the last supper a man she had been seeing regularly enough they were about to be civilly conjoined had been arrested, charged and found guilty of her murder.

Thus was Lord Raven’s dilemma; demand there and then that this matter never be spoken of again by the members of his family assembled and let an innocent man serve a life term for the death of the celebrity Mary Mary while watching his favorite son’s mental state decline irreparably before his very eyes, or hand his own sons over to the police. For three days he brooded in his chair in a dark corner while his family, having never seen him so drained of cheer, whispered and tip-toed about. Then, one evening Lord Raven stood up and left the house.

Lord Raven returned late at night to his tall-backed chair. He sat motionless for days wrapped in an ever darkening pall, his eyes stared out in a fevered glaze as his personality seemed to dim and shift out of focus along with his posture which seemed to crack and shrink into, and become part of the skeletal structure of the frame itself.; his work phoned on several occasions, still he did not move. It was the news,- the words of which, like a dull thud, somehow filtered down the extending corridors to the startled inmates of the institution in which he had his mind committed,- that Amarillo, in prison, had attempted to take his own life that sent Lord Raven into his penultimate tail-spin. His remaining children and wife around him, he stood up slowly and then, proceeded to cry out. A long wounded keening welled up from a source his scrawny frame belied. As suddenly  he rushed about the house smashing everything he could lay his hands on, things he had worked so hard to acquire for his beloved family and now, in his rage, grief and madness would have annihilated them too had his wife not gathered them up and ushered them out of the house never to return again. When Lord Raven’s tormented whirlwind had subsided he stepped through the debris of his empire and retreated to the upper-most room of his house.