CHOKING ON POWDERY SHITE

He loved to look at the lovely moon in the sky above him and dream that he would one day go to the moon and then one day he got in a rocket and went to the moon and he landed on the moon and lived on the moon and he became unhappy on the moon because he could no longer see the lovely moon in the sky above him and dream of one day going to the moon because he was on the moon and all it was was rocks in the dark and powdery shite.

Now, that's a little story for you. What does it mean? Well, I suppose it's just a long way of saying 'be careful what you wish for and be content with what you have.' Trite but perhaps true enough and maybe you should apply it to your life. Unless of course you are a two year old Sub-Saharan sucking on an energy biscuit and dying of Malaria. I doubt the moon story would bring much comfort to such a person. It's hard to imagine what kind of story would. I suppose stories are just comforting little indulgences for those who are not in such dire circumstances. I suppose, the less you suffer the more time you have to contemplate suffering. It might even be a case of the less you suffer the more you seek out suffering and then have to reckon with it, the very nature of it, so you need stories to explain it. Converse kind of stuff that, perverse even. There might even be a story in it. A story about an adored king who lives in luxury but all he can do is dwell on the slightly frayed trimmings on one of his robes and compose stories about them.

I'm not saying we're all crybabies. I'm just saying, well, imagine your heart is broken. That stings doesn't it? It does. Well, bad and all as that is, you probably wouldn't be worrying about it all that much if you were being chased by a lion would you? You wouldn't be going 'I wonder what she/he is doing right now,' with some roaring clawed fucker of a giant cat charging after you. I doubt you'd be remotely interested in hearing a parable involving someone overcoming their lovelorn predicament if you were involved in a predicament involving a lion.

What I'm saying here is that we have stories to comfort the comfortable and the truly uncomfortable don't get any stories, which is fine because they're too distracted to heed them anyway. If you're listening to a story, well, then things mustn't be going so bad for you and maybe you shouldn't take the story too seriously because, when things get serious, stories aren't much use at all. For example, I've never seen anyone put out a blazing building with a story about a brave firefighter. And I've never seen a man successfully wrestle a lion into submission by recounting The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stories are just made up things. They are only stories. Even the ones on the news. Even the ones God told. Even the ones you tell yourself about yourself. Instead of listening to stories, you'd be better off going outdoors and looking up and contemplating the moon and being happy to be under it and not on it, gasping for breath and crawling over rocks in the dark, being in no mood for stories and choking on powdery shite.

BEN WEST

The painting above is called The Treaty of Penn with the Indians. Click to enlarge and have a proper look at it. It's wonderful. It depicts the coming together of early Anglo settlers with indigenous types in North America. The painting was done by the artist Benjamin West, who claimed he was taught how to paint with pigments by natives. Ben's is a wonderful origin story. It's like the origin story of a comic superhero. Ben was an American art superhero in a way. I love his surname too. You can't get much better than West can you? It's tremendously Occidental. Ben West, The Man Who Painted America. Sounds like a comic doesn't it? So much history does really. It's all just an exciting story.

The painting is almost like the cover of a comic too. The United States #2 - $1. Have you noticed the way the focus is on the linen or whatever it is that the genuflecting trader is offering the injuns? It's central to the composition. The light falls upon the offering. This is the first act of trade, the thing that civilised and defined North America. The way the roll of material is portrayed puts me in mind of the infant Christ in Ruebens' Adoration of the Shepherds. Have a gander at the detail below and see if you agree.

Christ means 'saviour'. The first superhero, Christ, saved us all just as trade saved North America. That's the story of Ben's comic cover, I mean the painting. The linen is trade in its infancy just like Christ is an infant in the Adoration. It's a good story. We like our stories don't we?

People are still telling this story today, evangelising about it, going from door to door, or at least from plush resort to plush resort, in various parts of the world. Have you heard the story? It's like the story involving the twelve apostles but it's a newer story involving the G8. It's a good story. A satisfying myth. It could be the story in the comic with Ben's painting on the cover featuring the baby Jesus like linen. The only difference between the baby Jesus and the linen being that the baby Jesus wasn't purposefully riddled with a genocidal dose of fuckin smallpox. LOL!

THE STORIES STORY

 

Once upon a time there were stories and these stories helped people make sense of things. These stories lived for a long time and got to be very very old. Some of the very first stories were from Arnhem Land and came in the form of songs. Those who sang these stories believed they were singing reality into existence. What is a rock before it is named a rock and given a story about how it came to be a rock? The answer: well, nothing at all really. Perception is everything.

Not all stories were to be taken as truth but all of them were there to help their audiences deal with reality. Stories were analogous and elastic. There were fables, cautionary tales, epic poems, and morality plays. Even when tragic, it was said these stories could purge the soul with pity and fear. These stories provided solace and guidance and held great power. This was noticed by certain people and the power of stories was harnessed and then everything changed.

New stories came to be. Rather than born of the communities to which they were applicable, these stories were constructed in laboratories by committees and sent out into the world. The new story teller was not the shaman or the seanachaí. The new story teller was the PR consultant and the behavioural psychologist. The new stories did not tell us how to live, instead they told us what to want and they told us who to hate. These stories did not sing, they scuttled. They scuttled all over the globe like cockroaches and the people of the world initially loved them but soon grew tired of them and then became disgusted by them. The people of the world went back to making up their own stories instead of listening to these new ones.

But there was a problem. The people of the world had been listening to the scuttling stories for a very very long time. The cockroaches had crawled in their ears and eaten away at the parts of their brains they used for making up stories and the cockroaches had laid eggs in there. The people of the world started making up their own stories of ‘truth’ but it was literal truth and it was absolute truth and it was not analogous or elastic or interpretable truth. And these new stories were full of confusion and loss and rage and they didn’t sing and they didn’t scuttle, they screamed. And these stories were screamed over and over and there were a great many of them and most of them were about how you could not trust the rest of them. And these stories went to war and none were on the same side and they donned armour and waved swords about the place, all over the place, and instead of singing reality into existence theses stories screamed reality into extinction. A rock was no longer a rock. A rock was a cover to an Illuminati passageway or a terrorist booby trap or an MI5 bugging device. A rock ceased to be a simple rock and became the source of great anxiety.

And then something awful happened. Something really awful happened. And no one knew why it happened or how it happened so they started to scream stories about why and how it happened and these stories clashed and clanged and clattered and the noise was unbearable and the noise went on and on and on and on until the human race lost its communal mind.

And that is the stories story and if you take my advice you’ll stop listening to stories for a while and if something happens, something really awful happens, cover your ears and listen to no stories and don’t even try to make up your own stories because you are fucking terrible at it because you have forgotten how. You are no story teller but a story will one day be told and you will be in it and we will all be in it and we better hope it has a happy ending.  

 

THE TWO WORD LANGUAGE

(pictured above: Iago-good with words)

Language has gotten out of hand. The main purpose of vocabulary and grammar is to manipulate and deceive, to give the irrational the pretence of rationality, to justify questionable actions with verbose exorcisms of cognitive dissonance and to propagate ideologies and dogmas that justify the persecution of others. It’s all just spin. Language has become a nasty thing and it’s time it was reined in.

That is why I propose The Two Word Language, an international language that has only two words. One word is ‘Ooo’ and the other word is ‘Kah’. Ooo means ‘nice’, ‘like’ or ‘love’. You might say Ooo when contemplating a big bowl of custard or while getting your ears nibbled. Kah means ‘horrible’, ‘dislike’ or ‘hate’. You might say Kah when contemplating a big bowl of shite or while getting your ears nibbled by the parish priest. So, that’s it, now you can speak The Two Word Language. Two words. That is all. Ooo and Kah.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking a two word language will retard our progress as a species. You’re wrong. We will use diagrams to share complex instructions and therefore still be able to build machines and bake cakes etc. We don’t really need language for all that. ‘But Mr. Fugger, what about great works of literature and drama?’ I hear you plea. ‘Fuck em!’ is my response. What did great works of literature and drama ever give us? A heap of ‘to be or not to be’ angst and not much else. Forget all that stuff. That’s all part of the problem. Ooo and Kah are all we need. Them and the diagrams.

We may have to forget about literature and drama but we’ll still have music and images (but not films-the dialectic grammar of films is too emotive and propagandistic). We’ll even still have certain types of literature in the form of poems (but not the epic kind). Yes, there will still be poems. A love poem would go:

Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo
Ooo Ooo
Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo
Ooo Ooo

. . .and an anti-war poem or something would go:

Kah Kah
Kah Kah Kah
Kah Kah Kah Kah Kah Kah

The Two Word Language isn’t that limited at all really. Some intonation or volume variables in the annunciation of ‘Ooo’ and ‘Kah’ are also permitted, so as to express gradations in feeling (muttering Kah would not mean the same thing as roaring the word for example) or conveying uncertainty (saying Ooo with a questioning inflection at the end of the word). Actually, maybe we’ll have one more word. A phonetic word that means ‘OK’ or ‘whatever’. This word will be ‘Meh’. We already use it. You’re probably saying it to yourself right now.

So that’s it. Ooo, Kah and Meh. They are the only words we need. Anything more is just guff. We are fundamentally about likes and dislikes and that is all we need to express. We don’t have to explain ourselves to anybody, even if we did we’d just make up some bullshit anyway and others would probably only hear what they expected to hear. Language is so much wasted time. We just need to know if each other are happy or sad, pleased or displeased, and then we can get on with things. Ooo, Kah and Meh are all we need from now on. Yes, from now on, because I think we should get started right away. There’s no time like the present. THERE. IS. NO. TIME. LIKE. THE. PRESENT. That’s another good thing about The Two Word Language, it’ll stop us dragging up the past and disagreeing about the future. We’ll be forever in the present and the present is the only time that matters. The Two Word Language is a Zen tongue.

Don’t forget to return to Fugger later this week to see my next post. It should be easy enough to follow. Come to think of it, tagging posts is going to be a lot less hassle from now on too. OK, these are the last words I ever type in the old language. It’s all Ooos and Kahs from here on in. Ooo Ooo Ooo.