by Stewart Home
I asked Callum how he had arrived at an alphabetical order for the circles when there were both variant spellings and variant names. He said it didn’t matter. How random is random? Where there’d been choices he’d opted for the name or spelling that most appealed to him. There was no definitive list of Grampian stone circles. Of course, many of the circles Callum listed had been destroyed but we could still visit the sites and imagine what was, or at least what might have been. Callum asked me if I’d like to accompany him to the Auld Kirk o’ Tough since he was going there that afternoon. I agreed but insisted we took a walk on the beach before leaving. On the way out of the flat I noticed several unopened letters addressed to Alan MacDonald.
We strode down to the seafront. White foam, gulls whirling above our heads. Down on the beach we couldn’t see the cafés or the esplanade that ran from them to the western edge of the sea defences. The smell of salt. Seaweed that was salt encrusted. The ocean vast, heaving, amorphous. The white surf, lights of ships bobbing on the waves. White spray, surf, the roar of water forever rising and falling. I pressed a palm against my forehead. I felt all at sea. No longer knew who I was, whether anything separated me from that great mass of work. The ocean, the desert, inside outside, all around. What was I doing? I had to get away from the water. My mind spinning. I was in danger of falling. I mumbled something to Callum.
We turned around, turned back to the beginning, climbed up onto the esplanade. There was no beginning. Saw that cars were still cruising up and down the strip. The mystery was resolved with the stroke of a pen. We’d stopped living. The beginning did not, could not, exist prior to the end. A man no longer called Alan came to Aberdeen. He told me his name was Callum. I believed him. Interpretation spelt out the elements of a dream. Hallucinations within the hallucination that was already speech. The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature. Works of condensation and displacement. Living out the death of these fantasies in blasted and blistered night, we were consumed by the turning of a page …12
FOOTNOTES
1. How different this ‘seaside’ town is to Ann Quin’s imaginary! The prose in this opening section and at the close splits the difference between Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Avoiding Ernest Hemingway, I detour instead towards Ann Quin. Disliking Hemingway, I detour instead towards Ann Quin. Avoiding Stein, I detour instead towards Ann Quin. Disliking Stein, I detour instead towards Ann Quin. Feeling Beckett is too obvious a point of reference, I detour instead towards Ann Quin. Despite ongoing rumours of a B. S. Johnson revival, I feel our attention could be more usefully directed towards Ann Quin.
2. Alan’s sexual prowess is arresting because British Intelligence are after him for pandering and plagiarism. Alan also got into trouble recently for calling Julian Barnes ‘effeminate’. After much argument he managed to convince a number of his drinking cronies that by ‘effeminate’ he meant ‘someone who literary reviewers often profile as an English experimental novelist he ha’. Incidentally, Alan’s principal difficulty is that he has been unsuccessful in getting his fellow pissheads to call him ‘Callum’ – something they refuse to do because of the alarming frequency with which he makes anonymous heavy-breather calls and the fact that he insists on drinking expensive malts like Springbank and Talisker.
3. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari usefully theorise microfascism as a phenomenon that exists across the political and social spectrum. Nevertheless, despite reiterating Jean-Pierre Faye’s description of the cry ‘Long live death!’ as stupid and repugnant, D & G fail to address how this slogan functions or indeed why it is so well suited to the necessarily ambiguous agenda of fascist modernism. As well as celebrating destruction, ‘Long live death!’ simultaneously announces the death of death and the birth of a new and supposedly ‘immortal’ order. If D & G attacked the implied rhetorical claim that ‘Death is dead, long live death!’, there would be little need to read Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death as a counterbalance to the faulty logic of their over-rationalised ‘reasoning’. D & G simply don’t understand that the slogan ‘Long live death!’ sets up an irresolvable dynamic between opposed but balanced meanings. There is an aphorism traditionally attributed to the poet Jeppe Aakjaer that will usefully assist us in reorienting this debate: ‘I learn nothing from the dead words of living men. I learn everything from the living words of dead men – long live the dead.’ Obviously, Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death provides another line of flight within this debate. For a critique of Baudrillard’s positions on death see ‘The Margins Of Theosophy’ by Stewart Home in Re: Action 9 (London, Autumn Equinox 399 MKE).
While it goes without saying that D & G’s theorisation of desire as productive is useful in undermining the notion of repression and thus the entire edifice of organised psychoanalysis, their concept of the machinic production of desire is still grounded in a massive and unexamined belief in the so-called unconscious. Likewise, in reading Brown on death against D & G, it is also necessary to read D & G on becoming animal against Brown. D & G’s pack machine should be hooked up to Brown’s individuality machine. Likewise, D & G’s anti-Hegelian rhetoric machine must be hooked up to the many master/slave dialectic machines that have already attached themselves to Brown’s reading of Hegel in his chapters on death. Despite D & G’s attacks on Hegel as a State philosopher, there are readings of Hegel that when hooked up to D & G’s anti-Oedipal machine greatly strengthen their analysis of microfascism. With regard to this Paul Gilroy’s interpretation of the master/slave dialectic in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is crucial. Likewise, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays by Gillian Rose is a useful point of reference for those negotiating Gilroy’s oeuvre. We must be careful not to over-rationalise capitalist societies since it was precisely this error that led to the sorry spectacle of ‘ultra-left’ negationism.
4. Payne’s experiences can be usefully contrasted with the urban myth about a mental patient who was subjected to a lie-detector test in which he was asked if he was the writer Kathy Acker. Guessing correctly that the doctors wanted him to deny his ‘true’ identity, the patient told the two men interrogating him what they hoped to hear. However, the lie detector indicated he was lying. This fanatical belief in their own bullshit is doubly true of unsuccessful writers named Joseph Farquharson, a dead Aberdeenshire painter famous for his rustic scenes featuring sheep and snow.
5. As well as disliking Raymond Queneau’s fiction and the dandyism implicit in it, I also feel extremely ambivalent about his role in assembling Alexandre Kojève’s talks on Hegel. While it is useful to have access to Kojève’s lectures, I nevertheless believe that, by bringing them to print, Queneau extended their already deleterious impact on French culture. Kojève’s simplistic reading of Hegel quickly became a standard one among Marxist intellectuals in post-war France.
6. I shit you not and let me assure you that after eating this Clatterin Brig Restaurant house speciality, I made good use of the toilets located between the dining area and the gift shop. It should, however, go without saying that this platter is a big improvement on Blaster Al Ackerman’s clam-supreme surprise which surprises all of those who eat it when they discover they’ve caught botulism. After visiting Ackerman in Baltimore and consuming the fare he offered me, I went around for several days thinking I was a ventriloquist’s dummy and going ‘toot toot’. Unfortunately, I’m not sure whether it was the ‘vegetarian’ clam-supreme surprise he made in my honour or the Four Roses bourbon we drank that had the more noxious effect.
7. On top of being stupid, Jay Allan is every inch the privileged bigot facetiously placing the blame for racism on its victims. For example, he rants about there being football troubles ‘wherever there is a drop of Irish blood thick enough to recall 1690’.
8. I also recorded another dream from that night in my diary. In the earlier dream I dreamt I was my future husband Dudley Standing and that we’d been married for 15 years. Our relationship had long ago reached that st
age known among Fleet Street hacks as ‘married patience’. My spiralling overdraft provided conclusive proof that like my love life, my career was in terminal decline. The bottom had dropped out of the market for my brand of underground movie-making, which was basically soft-porn dressed up as art. For reasons that had always remained obscure to me, there was a time when millions of university-educated men would only watch an actress get her kit off if she mumbled a few lines paraphrased from an existentialist philosopher before indulging in nude frolics. The craze for amateur porn, which many intellectuals view as ‘non-exploitative’, thanks to the participants’ supposedly eager and unpaid engagement in sexual athletics, had put me out of business.
My financial worries manifested themselves physically, much to Anna’s chagrin, and for more than two years, I’d been unable to get it up. However, the lack of physical intimacy between us was the least of our worries. Thanks to negative equity, it wasn’t possible to take out a second mortgage on our home, and it looked increasingly likely that our eldest son would have to give up his public-school education, due to my inability to cover the fees. I suppose Anna has always worn the trousers in our relationship, and it was her bright idea that I should try my hand at faking amateur porn, which, with its ultra-low budgets, is highly lucrative. The wife even suggested that we could star in our own production. My immediate response was that this was an absurd idea because at the time I was incapable of doing anything more hard-core than a nude kiss and cuddle. Anna, ever the practical mind, pointed out that this was not really a problem, because we could contact men looking for a free shag through the classified advertisement sections carried by the less reputable type of glamour magazine. All that would be required of me was the ability to point a camera lens at extended bouts of horizontal action.
Leafing through various girlie rags, I was dismayed by the crudity of tone employed by many of those seeking their jollies in the sexual underground. Messages along the lines of ‘you can screw my missus if you don’t mind me watching’ were obviously phrased to attract the attention of building labourers and other undesirable types. Since Anna was sacrificing herself for the good of our family, I wanted to track down some caring and sensitive men. My first attempt at a classified – written in Latin with several very witty classical allusions – met with no response whatsoever. Eventually I placed an ad that stated: ‘Ornithologist with own bird seeks males to interact with his pet. Photo essential, video audition awaits. Here’s looking at you, kid!’ While those involved in the sexual fringe seem to thrive on its seediness, I hoped that by very partially veiling my desire to engage in voyeurism I would discourage the more extreme brand of degenerate.
The first contact we invited to our house described himself as a book collector. Alan seemed a pleasant enough chap, he chatted about contemporary classical music over several cups of tea until Anna suggested we all make our way up to the bedroom. Alan’s character underwent a drastic change the moment he spotted the oversized tailor’s dummy that had been used in one of my films and was subsequently kept as a memento of a highly successful shoot. Alan immediately leapt at the mannequin, wrestling it to the floor, all the while screaming: ‘Help me, Jennifer, help help me Jennifer.’ Anna rushed to the phone and called the police while I barricaded myself and the children into an upstairs bedroom.
This defensive reflex proved unnecessary because Alan attempted to crawl into the dummy, all the while relating how the highlight of his life was an unpleasant scene he’d created early one morning in Charing Cross Station. The cad boasted of upsetting a party of schoolgirls by spilling what he called his ‘genetic wealth’ into a basket filled with skinhead gear, old pieces of laundry, dead peafowls and artificial limbs, while dressed in a pillow-case hood and claiming to be called ‘Young Ling’. It turned out that our guest was well known to the local health authority and he was eventually carried from the house in a straitjacket, bellowing, ‘Come, feel my love muscle,’ at the top of his voice. This incident had a number of unpleasant repercussions, not the least of which was the fact that several of our neighbours stopped speaking to us.
9. Alan never did present me with a copy of his bibliography. Among his papers that I now possess is a page that might be a sketch for this missing document. It runs as follows: ‘BOOKS/PAPERS. Refer to Burl, Hayman, Garden, Gordon, James Anderson 1779, Pennant 1774, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland by Wilson 1851, Sculptured Stones of Scotland by J. Stuart 1856, Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries by Ferguson 1872, Hill Forts … and What Mean These Stones by MacLagan 1875 and 1894, Broomend of Crichie PSAS by Dalrymple 1884, Stone Circles near Aberdeen JRAI by Lewis 1888, Fred Coles 1899–1910, Norman Lockyer, Rev. Browne, Sir A Ogston, Pixley, Campbell, Foster Forbes, Watkins.’
From this bald page and my own researches in the reference section of Aberdeen Library I have constructed a bibliography that I believe comes close to replicating Alan’s missing work. It goes like this:
Aberdeen Spalding Club (1843) Collection for a History of the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff
Aberdeen Spalding Club (1847–69) Antiquities of the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff
Alexander, W. M. (1952) Place Names of Aberdeenshire Aberdeen
Ashmore, P. J. (fthcomng) Temples and Tombs London: Batsford
Boece, Hector (1527) History of Scotland
Browne, Rev. G. F. (1921) On some Antiquities in the Neighbourhood of Dunnecht house, Aberdeenshire Cambridge 7700.f.12
Brown, P. L. (1979) Megalithic Masterminds (Robert Hale, London)
Burl, A. (1979) Rings of Stone: Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd x.322/8945
Burl, H. A. W. (1976) Stone Circles of the British Isles Yale X.421/10279 WW
Garden, J. (1766) A Copy of a Letter from the Rev. James Garden … to John Aubrey (1692) Archaeologia
Gordon, Cosmo A. (ed.) (1960) Letters to John Aubrey Miscellany of the Third Spalding Club (Aberdeen)
Feachem, R. (1963) A guide to Prehistoric Scotland Batsford 7711.t.39
Forbes, J. F. (1945) Giants of Britain (Thomas’ Publications) 7711 a.21 St Pan
Forbes, J. F. (1948) The Castle and Place of Rothiemay 7822 bbb 35 St Pan
Forbes, J. F. Living Stones of Britain WP 8387 WW
Grinsell, L. V. (1976) Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain Newton Abbot
Hannah, I.C. (1934) The Story of Scotland in Stone Oliver and Boyd 07815.eee.54
Hayman, R. (1997) Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons YC.1997.b.839
Heggie, H. (1981) Megalithic Science London
Keiller, A. (1934) The Megalithic Monuments of North East Scotland A reprint for the Morven Institute of Archaeological Research, London
Kirk, W. (1953) Prehistoric Sites at the Sands of Forvie, Aberdeenshire Aberdeen
Lewis, A.L. (1888) Some Stone Circles near Aberdeen Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 17 pp 44–57
Lockyer, J. (1906) Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered London 07709.cc.8
MacDonald, J. (1900) Place Names of West Aberdeenshire Ac.1483
MacDonald, J. (1891) Place Names in Strathbogie Spalding Club 12978.c.34
MacKenzie, D. A. (1930) Scotland: The Ancient Kingdom 9510.bb.13