This week in Key’s Cupboard at The Dabbler, A Swimming In The Head. I am confident that as soon as you have read it, you will sprint back here and start clicking busily on that Paypal Donation button to your right.
In Key’s Cupboard
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Monthly Archives: August 2010
Poisonous Men & Abominable Sprites
“Are not some men themselves meere poisons by nature? for these slanderers and backbiters in the world, what doe they else but lance poison out of their black tongues, like hideous serpents? what doe these envious persons, but with their malicious and poisonfull breath sindge and burne all before them that they can reach or meet with, finding fault with every thing whatsoever? Are they not well and fitly compared to those cursed souls flying in the dark, which albeit they sequester themselves from birds of the day, yet they bewray their spight and envy even to the night and the quiet repose thereof, by their heavie grones (the only voice that they utter) disquieting and troubling those that be at rest: and finally, all one they be with those unluckie creatures, which if they happen to meet or crosse the way upon a man, presage alwaies some ill toward, opposing themselves (as it were) to all goodnesse, and hindering whatsoever is profitable for this life. Neither do these monstrous and abominable sprites know any other reward of this their deadly breath, their cursed and detestable malice, but to hate and abhor all things.”
Pliny The Elder, The Naturall Historie, The Eighteenth Booke, Chap. 1. Of the venomes of man, in the 1634 English translation by Philomen Holland
Cornish Light
Much as I am enamoured of the idea of sun worship, as practised by Aztec fundamentalists and the islanders in The Wicker Man, among others, I cannot help but feel John Donne was right when he described the golden orb as a “busie old foole”. At Hooting Yard, it is usually overcast, or raining, or snow-smothered, which is just how we like it. (To those of you who live in snowless regions, be advised that snow is nothing else but the foam or froth of rainwater from heaven.)
One person who I suspect would have agreed with me was the painter Karl Weschke. When asked if he chose to live in Cornwall because of the quality of the light, he replied: “Cornish light? I’ve got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed.”
See how much one can learn by reading The Dabbler?
Gack Versus Cashew
In a bold move, the colossally arrogant film director Horst Gack has bought the rights to the much-loved cartoon character Unconscious Squirrel! The Unconscious Squirrel, and is planning to feature it in his forthcoming adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s poem The Moon And The Yew Tree.
The film, with a working title of Unconscious Squirrel! The Unconscious Squirrel In Sylvia Plath’s The Moon And The Yew Tree is to be shot entirely in Plath-O-gape-vision, an exciting new cinema technology developed by Horst Gack’s mysterious wife and collaboratrix Primrose Dent. According to press releases, Plath-O-gape-vision will utterly transform the viewing experience, rendering everything from action thrillers to comedies to submarine heist genre movies into a uniform “blackness – blackness and silence”.
Professor Dimity Cashew, an academic in the Department of Plathology at the University of Ack, has been quick to point out that there are no squirrels, conscious or unconscious, in the poem, only small bats and owls, and is fretful that Horst Gack’s screenplay will trivialise Plath’s work. In an open letter to the director, posted on her blog, she asks:
How are you going to insert a cartoon squirrel into your ill-advised film treatment without doing violence to the legacy of Saint Sylvia?
Horst Gack, being Horst Gack, replied within thirty seconds, in a comment, or diatribe, longer than Dr Cashew’s original blog postage. Buried within lengthy paragraphs of invective was this:
The squirrel is engulfed by Plath’s fumy, spiritous mists, and lies unconscious for the duration of the film (six and three quarter hours), partly hidden by the row of headstones. I have been able to acquire the very same headstones that were used in the graveyard scenes of Plan 9 From Outer Space starring Bela Lugosi and his posthumous stand-in, though I need hardly point out that the production values and aesthetic clout of my film will far surpass Ed Wood’s cult classic.
A war of words has now broken out across the blogosphere. No doubt Horst Gack will win the day, for we must remember that he has Primrose Dent at his side, and, if sufficiently provoked, she will simply turn off the entire internet, as she has threatened to do before, her impeccably manicured fingers poised over the big black button on her uberconsole.
The film is due for release at some point after the expiry of the ancient Mayan calendar in 2012.
Enlightenment Through Hedges
In an email I sent to someone the other day, I confessed to having an inner Guardian-reading armchair lefty airhead nestling within me, adding the parenthetical comment that he needs to be bludgeoned into submission. In truth, my inner woolly-brained “progressive” loon has been shrivelling up slowly but surely for quite some time. It won’t take a bludgeon to bash him utterly senseless.
And indeed it has not, for today I have finally understood the obvious superiority of capitalism. I really have.
There is, this week, in Trafalgar Square, a temporary maze. It is open from 11 am to 8 pm, entrance is free, and it is a proper maze, with wrong turns and dead ends and, best of all, hedges higher than Mr Key’s head. I blundered through it this afternoon, in sunshine after rainfall, and enjoyed myself, if not quite immensely, then enough, enough. It was a diverting fifteen minutes, wandering through a high hedge maze slap bang in the middle of London.
My pleasure was soured only by the fact that, on the blue plaques dotted hither and thither within the maze, I noted a number of typos. “Fred Astair” without a final “e”? A misplaced apostrophe in “Beatle’s”? I have come to expect such slapdashery, but still it never fails to depress me. The blue plaques themselves, by the way, give a clue to one reason for the maze being there in the first place, which is that it’s meant to boost the West End as a tourist hub. There are no advertisements for particular shops or restaurants, just the general message that this is a place of great historical interest which now, in the twenty-first century, is the world’s finest and most popular retail ‘n’ leisure complex (or words to that effect). That’s one reason why the maze is there, the other being, of course, simply to provide people with the chance, for a week, to walk through a maze in Trafalgar Square, at no cost, and without having your forehead tattooed with a corporate logo or some such marketing ploy.
But why has it made me embrace the joys of capitalism? For one very simple reason. Those high hedges, of which the maze is constructed, were provided by RentaHedge! What a fantastic idea for a business, one which – crucially – no bureaucrat or civic functionary would ever think up. I am lost in admiration for the entrepreneurial genius who, one day, thought: “I know! I will make a living by renting hedges to people!”
Sadly, my own talents do not lie in that direction, so I shall continue to plough my lonely furrow of prose. Pansy Cradledew suggested starting a business called RentaSedge(warbler), renting sedge warblers to those who needed a temporary sedge warbler, but a bank manager took one look at the business plan and reached for his bludgeon. Heigh ho.
Pliny’s Parrot
Conjure up an image of the ancient world. Do you see a betoga’d fellow beating a bird about the bonce with an iron bar? No? Then read your Pliny. Here he is, in the Natural History, telling us about parrots:
“She hath an head as hard as is her beak: when she learns to speak, she must be beaten about the head with a rod of yron: for otherwise she careth for no blowes.”
ADDENDUM : Pliny’s seventeenth-century English translator Philomen Holland uses the phrase “barton & mue” for aviary. This is splendid, and I suggest we all take every opportunity to resurrect so grievous a loss to the language. You may wish to write a note of it in your day-book, particularly if, as Pliny/Holland says elsewhere, your “memory is so shittle, [you] will soone forget the same againe”.
On Sawdust Bridge, Harangued
I was striding manfully across Sawdust Bridge, on my way to see a man about some snails, when I was accosted and harangued by a gobby git. His speech, if one can call it that, was indecorous and unseemly, and his head was somewhat larger than the usual head. I wondered if, in his infancy, his fontanelle had sealed properly, or if it remained ajar, as it were, allowing a surfeit of oxygen into his cranium. Were that the case, it might, just might, account for his loud haranguing. For loud it was, drawing the attention of other citizens passing along the bridge, each of whom gazed at him, and at me, before hurrying along bent upon whatever errands they were bent upon, that morning.
I found it very difficult to judge whether his torso was clothed in a pullover or a cardigan. The garment seemed to resist definition. It was certainly not a sweater nor a jumper, nor could it be called a “top”, but I could not pinpoint exactly what it was. Such was the nature of his harangue that it was impossible to interrupt him, so I had no opportunity to question him on the matter. The presence of buttons argued for a cardigan, yet it was not quite a cardigan, having a definite something of the pullover about it. It began to rain.
Atop the git’s unusually large head perched a yellow oilcloth sou’wester, suggesting to me that he was not neglectful of meteorological conditions. Given the size of his head, the sou’wester, which would have served as adequate cover for most heads, looked comically tiny. It occurred to me that he might wear it in rain or shine, as protection for his unsealed fontanelle, and that its keeping the rainfall off the top of his head was secondary, a sort of bonus. Meanwhile, with a certain brio, I unfurled my brolly. I held it aloft as if I were Liberty brandishing her flambeau, though necessarily at an angle better poised to bar raindrops from falling on my head.
And just as my brolly barred the raindrops, so the gobby git barred my progress further along Sawdust Bridge towards my appointment with the snails chap. As he delivered his loud and unseemly stream of invective, he constantly shifted his position so that he was always standing directly in front of me, as I feinted this way and that in my attempts to go where I wanted to go. I ought to have lashed out at him with my brolly, but long, long ago I made a vow. Well, if I am honest, I was forced to make a vow, on pain of eternal punishment in the hereafter, and with the added spur of the threat of having my fontanelle pierced and punctured in the here and now. The important thing, for present purposes, was that the vow had been made, and I held to it.
Raindrops were falling at a slight angle upon the buttons of the gobby git’s cardigan or pullover, and thence dripping to his feet which, I noted, were shod in the sock-and-sandal combination associated with a certain stereotype. He did not seem at all that type, to me, there on Sawdust Bridge in the morning rain, delivering his loud harangue and accompanying it now with wild gesticulations. I did not feel menaced by these gesticulations, for at no point did his arms move towards my head or my body. They were, rather, like the movements of the sails of a windmill, or of a swimming person doing the butterfly stroke. They seemed curiously disconnected from his harangue, neither emphasising points within his indecorous guttural bawling, if indeed there were any, nor accompanying it in any way. Also, he was wearing mittens.
There was a spattering of yellow stains upon the mittens, an identical shade to the patches of yellow on his moustache, which was of the walrus variety. I jumped to the conclusion that it was either mustard or custard, perhaps from the eating of a hot dog or a custard tart. I was unable to discern any crumbs, the composition of which, of bread or pastry, would have confirmed which of my suspicions was the correct one, although of course it was possible that the stains were neither mustard nor custard but another yellow substance entirely. Again, so unstoppable was the gobby git’s harangue that I was unable to question him on the point.
When, long ago, I made, or was forced to make, my vow, I was vouchsafed a few tips about what I could do, in circumstances where I might wish to lash out with my brolly, instead of lashing out with my brolly, but with similar effect. One is rarely vouchsafed anything at all nowadays, but as I said, it was long, long ago. As I peered at the gobby git’s rather gauche cheesecloth trousers – or were they pantaloons? – one of these tips bubbled up from the sea of memory and bobbed to the surface. “Tilt your head heavenward,” I recalled being told, “And call out, lustily, and high in pitch, for all the angels in heaven to beclabber together and send down to you a deus ex machina!”
Now I have never knowingly seen an angel, and instinctively I feel such a creature cannot really exist, but the gobby git was getting on my wick by this time, and so I followed the old advice I had been vouchsafed. Of course, when I tilted my head heavenward all I saw was the dry underside of my brolly, so I shifted it to one side, again with I hope no little brio, and, though raindrops immediately splashed upon my face, I sang out, imploring the aid of quite probably fictional unearthly wingéd beings. And do you know, all at once there was a mighty gust of wind across the bridge, and the sou’wester atop the gobby git’s head was blown clear away, it skimmed and swooped across the sky like a bright yellow bird, and a raindrop, perhaps more than one, raindrops plural, fell directly through his unsealed fontanelle and landed splish splosh upon his exposed brain, and he crumpled to the ground and – oh, at last, at last – he ceased haranguing me, for he neither spoke now nor croaked. He was silent.
I left him where he lay, sprawled upon the paving slabs, whether dead or alive I did not know, and I hurried onward to meet my appointment with the snails man. We transacted useful business, repaired to a canteen for luncheon, parted with a handshake in the shade of a gigantic shrub in the botanical gardens, and I made my way home. Crossing Sawdust Bridge, I saw no sign of the gobby git who had harangued me, and I learned later, listening to a local news bulletin on the wireless, that he had died, upon the bridge, that morning, of water on the brain.
I attended his funeral later that week, and placed a bunch of dandelions in the graveside mud. It was still raining.
Reading And Listing (And Quiz Question)
The splendid Wartime Housewife has a potsage* about her reading life, in which she notes that “if I stopped reading, I would feel that I had completely lost control of my life and my sense of self”, a sentiment with which I’d concur. (“Melodramatic, I know” she adds, but, ah!, where would we be without a leavening of melodrama?)
What surprised me was for one so bookish to state that it was only in the last couple of years she began to keep a record of the books she reads. From the time I began reading books – as opposed to The Beano and Wham! – it never occurred to me not to keep a list. Alas, somewhere along the line the first few years’ of my records were lost, but I have a note of every book I have read since 1982. (Which year began, since you ask, with The Annotated Snark by Martin Gardner.)
It is not often I browse back over the list – now maintained, of course, on what Dr Alan Statham at one point calls a “compyoodah” – but when I do I am struck by two things in particular. There are the books of which I retain no memory whatsoever, and could thus reread as if for the first time, and there are the ones which, even if ill-remembered, summon for me the time and the place they were read with astonishing clarity. (Why do I recall so vividly, for example, that I read the bulk of The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey sitting by a lake, to the sound of birdsong? I remember the setting, but almost nothing of the novel.)
Of late, visitors to Hooting Yard could probably piece together what I’ve been reading, day by day and week by week. There’s something to keep you occupied when you find yourselves at a loose end.
*NOTE : This is a deliberate error. It is a clue to a book which appears more than once on my twenty-eight-year reading list. But which book?
An Horrible Gnashing
Forgive me for returning to Pliny’s Natural History yet again. Here (in Philomen Holland’s English translation of 1634) he is surely describing the tribe or grouplet which spawned the Grunty Man:
“Tauron writeth, That the Choromandae are a savage and wild people: distinct voice and speech they have none, but in stead thereof, they keep an horrible gnashing and hideous noise: rough they are and hairy all over their bodies, eies they have red like the houlets, and toothed they be like dogs.”
Earlier, I cannot remember where, I have said that the Grunty Man is older than the Earth itself, but now I may have to revise that statement in the finished version of my ten thousand page biography The Life And Times Of The Grunty Man! (The exclamation point in the title is quite deliberate, and intended to impart a sense of excitement to what is otherwise, I have to say, quite a dull narrative, consisting as it does chiefly of scenes in which the Grunty Man grunts from within his grim dark foul-smelling lair, century after century.)
Tiny Enid’s Unhatched God Egg
“Now certain Nations there be that account beasts, yea, and some filthie things for gods; yea and many other matters more shamefull to be spoken; swearing by stinking meats, by garlicke, and such like. But surely, to beleeve that gods have contracted mariage, and that in so long continuance of time no children should be borne between them : also that some are aged, and ever hoarie and gray: others againe young and alwaies children: that they be blacke of colour and complexion, winged, lame, hatched of eggs, living and dying each other day; are meere fooleries, little better than childish toies.”
Pliny The Elder, The Naturall Historie, The Second Booke, Chap. 7. Of God in the 1634 English translation by Philomen Holland
One person who was very familiar with the ancient idea that an egg might serve as a childish toy, and that from the egg would hatch a god, was Tiny Enid. On the day of her birth she was presented with an egg by her mysterious, unnamed mentor, and as soon as she grew old enough for childish play it became her favoured toy. It is easy to forget, given the plucky tot’s many deeds of heroism and derring-do, that she was still but a tot, and, when time allowed, she played as other tots do. She played games such as Hide The Egg In The Pantry, Roll The Egg Down A Gentle Incline, and Balance The Egg On A Precipice Over A Yawning Chasm.
It is not entirely clear when Tiny Enid learned that her egg contained an as yet unhatched god. It is also perfectly possible that it did not, and that the venturesome little fascist simply invented the idea for purposes of self-dramatisation. Either way, we do know that one hot summer’s day she stopped treating the egg as a plaything, placed it in a carton, put the carton on her mantelpiece, and spent many hours watching over it, waiting for it to hatch.
Several writers – better to call them hacks – have devoted vast swathes of psychobabble to the suggestion that Tiny Enid was convinced, or convinced herself, that by embarking on ever greater feats of infant heroism she could somehow persuade the god to crack open its egg and burst forth into the world, ushering in a new dispensation under the cope of heaven and, not incidentally, installing the tot as its Archangel. In this reading, Tiny Enid is impelled to acts and adventures of ever greater recklessness for purely selfish reasons. The hacks who peddle this stuff never stop to consider two blindingly obvious facts. One, it makes no sense whatsoever, and two, there is no evidence that, at the end of each of her adventures, Tiny Enid dashed back to her mantelpiece to check on the egg. On the contrary, she was notorious for sticking around to receive plaudits and medals and cups and cash prizes and to watch parades pass by in her honour, and on occasions when these things did not happen, she would bash a few heads together, literally, until she considered due gratitude was displayed. These are not the activities of one who hankers for the imminent intervention of the divine, whether from an egg or from anywhere else.
Indeed, a better case could be made that a child as self-possessed and drunk on her own reputation as Tiny Enid would consider the arrival of a new god as fatally stealing her thunder. It is worth asking what sort of god she was expecting to hatch from the egg on her mantelpiece. Although she was not a religious girl, it is a matter of record that she had, like the Swiss skiing ace Woodcarver Steiner, great ecstasies. During these entrancements, did she have visions of her egg-hatched god? It is a great pity that she never left us an account of at least one of her great ecstasies in her Memoirs. The egg itself is mentioned, over and over again, at first in references to its status as a plaything, as here, on page 47:
I passed many a happy hour playing Carry The Egg Towards The Pond and other delightful pastimes
and then, from page 88 onwards, she constantly reminds us of its numinous presence:
Before revving up my jalopy to speed to the rescue of the stricken and the maimed who had been attacked by the giant lobster being, I paused to look at the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece. It had not yet hatched.
for example, and
The next Thursday was a particularly dull day without any opportunity for daring rescues of those imperilled. I spent much of my time contemplating the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece, from which no god had yet hatched.
In her lifetime, no god ever did hatch from the egg, but I suppose it is not impossible that one might still do so. For though Tiny Enid herself grew old and died, she always kept the egg with her wherever she roamed in her long life, and at her death it was found among her effects. Carefully catalogued by those who keep her flame alive, the egg, in its carton, is now kept in the Tiny Enid Museum, recently established in a cavernous hangar on a so-called “rustic industrial estate” on the edge of the mephitic marshes on the outskirts of Pointy Town. If you visit, and pay through the nose for an entrance ticket, seek out the egg in its refrigerated chamber, and who knows?, perhaps while you are there you will see the shell crack, and a god hatch out, come blind and trembling into the world.
Curst To Starve In Frogland Fens
May she be curst to starve in Frogland Fens, / To wear a Fala ragg’d at
both the Ends, / Groan still beneath an antiquated Suit, / And die a
Maid at fifty five to boot ; / May she turn quaggy Fat, or crooked
Dwarff, / Be ridicul’d while primm’d up in her Scarff ; / May Spleen and
Spite still keep her on the Fret, / And live till she outlive her
Beauty’s Date ; / May all this fall, and more than I have said, / Upon
that wench who disregards the Plaid.
So there I was, thinking that in Austin Osman Spare I had found my go-to guy for curses, imprecations and anathemas. That was until I came upon the Scots poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), of whom I was only dimly aware.
What happened was this. It occurred to me this afternoon that it was a matter of utmost urgency that I discover the etymology of “frogman”, specifically whether, at any point, the word “toadman” had been preferred. As always happens as soon as one consults the Oxford English Dictionary, I was blown off course. My attention was caught by “frogland”, which is defined, not unexpectedly, as “marshy land in which frogs abound, as the Fens, Holland, etc.” The first of a mere two citations in the OED is “1721 RAMSAY Tartana xxxiii, May she be curst to starve in frogland fens.”
My curiosity was piqued. Who was she and what had she done to deserve so awful a fate? I soon found an online edition of Allan Ramsay’s Poems of 1721 and read:
May she be curst to starve in Frogland Fens, / To wear a Fala ragg’d at both the Ends, / Groan still beneath an antiquated Suit, / And die a Maid at fifty five to boot ; / May she turn quaggy Fat, or crooked Dwarff, / Be ridicul’d while primm’d up in her Scarff ; / May Spleen and Spite still keep her on the Fret, / And live till she outlive her Beauty’s Date ; / May all this fall, and more than I have said, / Upon that wench who disregards the Plaid.
Gosh. This strikes me as a somewhat hysterical overreaction to someone eschewing the wearing of tartan, but then I am not a mad Scotsman, so what do I know?
Hay In Nosebags
“the Knyght was a little less than Perfect, and his horse did not have a metabolism”
Preamble to A Knyght Ther Was by Robert F Young, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, July 1963
This fragment from a pulp magazine was almost certainly the inspiration for Dobson’s important pamphlet, published, as it happened, on the day of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, entitled, somewhat inelegantly, A Comparative Study Of The Metabolisms Of The Horses Of Three Knights Of The Realm (out of print).
Dobson begins with a bold declaration:
In this pamphlet I am going to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt and brooking not one whit of opposition, that the horse of Sir Lancelot, of the Arthurian Round Table, had the metabolism of a squirrel, that the horse of his confrère Sir Bedivere had the metabolism of a gnat, and that the horse of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, of later date, had a metabolism so extraordinary and anomalous that science has yet to account for it. My findings, which will completely overturn the accepted wisdom regarding the metabolism of horses ridden by knights of the realm, are backed up by a wealth of evidence only I have had the energy and diligence to winkle out of the documentary record, and this evidence, in the form of a vast scholarly apparatus of footnotes and citations and what have you will be published in a separate series of pamphlets in due course.
It never was – so the reader has to take on trust forty pages of wild assertion, idiotic wittering, equine ignorance, and frankly incomprehensible gibberish, all of it written, as we would expect, in majestic sweeping paragraphs. The pamphlet is remembered today chiefly for the much-anthologised passage about nosebags crammed with hay which, though factually inaccurate, has served as a model for many a novice pamphleteer. I well remember the way these words of Dobson’s transfixed me in my early, faltering stabs at composition, and how for years I was unable to write a finished piece without inserting something about hay in nosebags, no matter what my ostensible subject. It must be said that editors were kind to me. The inevitable rejection letters I received gently pointed out that I could easily delete the hay in nosebags stuff without fatally undermining my prose. But, oh!, I was young and headstrong and I would not countenance the change even of a comma to what I had scribbled so decisively with my propelling pencil on my tablet of notepaper. In those days, I cared not to pound the keys of a typewriter like Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess. My hero Dobson was a scribbler, and so would I be.
The truth of it was, of course, that without acknowledging the fact I was being smothered under the Dobson cushion, as so many beginners have been. My salvation, and the prompt that allowed me at long last to cast the cushion aside, was a commission from a now defunct magazine, Beasts Of Barnyard And Field, to pen an article about nosebags crammed with hay. I worried and fretted at it so much that, in nervously gnawing my propelling pencil I managed to get a sliver of lead stuck in my craw, and had to be enclinicked. It was the morning of my fifty-first day there when, sprawled on my balcony gazing at the mountains, I sensed a tiny yet dramatic shifting of the integuments within my head, and knew at once that I was free of Dobson. The mighty out of print pamphleteer will always remain my idol, but on that morning in that clinic on that balcony I knew it was possible for me to plough my own furrow.
I tore up the few puny pages of prose I had written about hay in nosebags, and instead submitted to the magazine a piece about swill for pigs. Alas, later that day, listening to the news on the wireless in the clinic’s rumpus room, I learned that the skyscraper housing the offices of Beasts Of Barnyard And Field had collapsed after attack by woodworm and weevils and tiny, tiny beings that bore through cement, and the magazine had ceased publication. Ha!, I thought, I am not going to let that stop me. And it has not.