Читать книгу Smithereens - Steve Aylett - Страница 2

Enjoyment can be kept sharp by the outrage of others - sadly though, genuinely-felt outrage is as rare today as it’s ever been. I rode out of a swirling vortex on a hell-pig the other day and people just stared.

It’s a world where things created for comfort are used for denial and the dwindling comb-over of culture has led to books in which the protagonist is one or other kind of automated remnant. The inherent advantage of selling limitation is that one size is declared to fit all. Support is minimal for defiance in a world with charity toward none, malice for all and the bland decree that there can be no new ideas under the local sun.

When offered a handful of options by a manipulator, we should be careful (in turning directly away to look at the thousands of other options available) that we are not being cleverly positioned to miss the billions more in every other direction.

The truly new invents new guts for itself. An angel is unlikely to be boring or devout. The miraculous should be at least equal to the forbidden. That the two are often the same thing is one of the solitaire fucking diamonds of truth.

At its shallowest an epigram is merely a sentence which strikes a pose, the sort of prim wiseacreing that fades within decades, too flimsy to depend on. There are also stegobromides - very obvious but lightly encrypted truths which, due to people’s preference for them in their obscured form, have been left to petrify inside their own code. Then there are sayings which connect up only by ignoring a lot of facts: views with square edges, cropping off bits of reality. These are even less useful than those messiest bits of folklore that are akin to tripping over a ball of snakes.

There are proverbs which are dumb and funny - human, in other words. And finally those sayings born from the compelling notion of a sentence, word or musical note which could cataclysmically open reality to even the most evasive mind. I like the last two varieties and scrawled a bunch for the sayings of Bingo Violaine, whom the citizens of Accomplice use as a sort of epigram Pez. It’s fun to drop a profundity into a scene where screaming chimps are attacking a chef, or to bat a balloon dog into a philosophical discussion.

Imagine the horror of dropping into the world’s throat while trusting others’ declarations above the evidence of your own senses! Treason is disliked because it reveals the mechanism. In this case the mechanism is that of reality by decree - a mechanism toward which the cosmos is cryptically uncooperative. The truth doesn’t actually require our attention - it persists with or without us. It’s more indifferent to us than we can ever be to it. And when everyone dodges blame, that stuff remains in the air like radioactivity.

Imagine honest, clean regret.

In toxic times an honest eye is bound to result, for several years at least, in a sort of reverse-image horror at what’s been perpetrated. The state stripped of crimes - not even a skeleton is left. This resentment is a stain left by clear perception. You become like the philosopher who repeatedly enraged Gurdjieff by shaking him awake at three in the morning. Amid drab masses seething with optimism, any true individual almost by definition won’t be heard of - but they certainly exist and are a vivid, angular joy.

You can depart an empire by turning five corners, and ofcourse a one-track god is easily avoided. But as Eddie Gamete once said, the nightmare’s likely to renew until the day humanity rests finally in lavender and ruins, becoming one big last outbreath. Patience.