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Notes
on The Blood Rules
Prelude.
1. (Dragging through...) The blood, animal energy, speaks.
It is horrified by itself, its many forms, all inextricably
linked by the dubious privilege of pain and suffering, the extremes of
which exceed any biological need for warning signals.
The blood, or the physical, is attracted by some ‘other’ or
‘you’ within itself, characterised by ‘unaware play’.
The ‘you’ in the blood is the ability to respond to the
environment with unexpected mutations—who knows, all that ‘junk’
DNA may have a purpose. This
‘you’ is the body’s unconscious imagination.
Let me stress that. I
believe that the unconscious response of the body to its environment, a
response involving the interaction of its many levels of rule-obeying
systems, is worthy of the name ‘imagination’, if only as a
suggestive metaphor. The poem argues that, since this physical imagination has
now, in humans, also become conscious, it might end up in an ‘angelic
machine’, created by us and, in this universe where even stars perish,
our only hope of survival.
Today I find it hard to believe (though I did seem to
think something like it when I composed earlier versions of The Blood
Rules) that some Omega-type Civilisation could evolve from us and
survive the death of our universe.
The need of the blood and its heir, machine consciousness, to
survive by spreading among the stars is a deeply felt one.
I now think that any consciousness, however much better than
ours, is an irrelevance. It
could never become godly and understand everything, much less do
everything. However, as I
say, the blood seems to want to live for ever, and The Blood Rules
is about that wish.
‘The eternal / withering and tumescence / of the material
void’: is an allusion to what I understand is a ‘dark energy’ in
the space-time ‘foam’ of the so-called ‘empty’ space within our
expanding universe. (back)
Prelude. 2. (Who
knows...) Not
only is it possible that we might breed our successor to colonise the
stars: this could already have happened.
Life on earth could have been seeded from space.
Hubris is passed on like a genetic disorder. (back)
Prelude. 3. (But
such...) The Renaissance reason for revering life was the
quasi-scientistic one, that life is ‘endlessly interesting’.
To suggest that it is not, or that something like ‘endlessly
atrocious’ might be a more adequate reason for paying (or not paying)
attention to it, is to raise many hackles.
To me, the unjustified enthusiasm for life, and the common
rejection of stoical pessimism, have both derived from what I call the
optimism of those who curiously assess themselves as impure.
This ‘hope-in-sin’ coloured late Graeco-Roman culture when it
converted to monotheism. It
stayed as background music through the Graeco-Roman revival of the
Renaissance, through the Scientific Enlightenment, through Romantic
Relativism and into post-modern Quantum Uncertainty.
But even if life has
been seeded from space, it makes no difference to the kind of thing it
is, which can be studied from what we are: ‘you my idea / can but
brood on me /... / if you would find where to go.’
The Blood Rules is a symphonic poem which plays with the
question about where the post-Renaissance mind is to go, out of
curiosity, in a scheme where pain is inordinate.
The ‘you’ is
inventiveness, another name for imagination in the wider sense that
embraces evolutionary responses to environments. (back)
Pain. 1. (I
am...) The ‘I’, on the other hand, is the end of the mind-body
spectrum which is mostly all-body, and mostly the unconscious workings
of the body. Now that
consciousness has become a hot topic, the concept itself is being
redefined and some even think it does not exist.
Well, some ego-thing does. I
see consciousness as a continuum which stretches from moments of
inspiration, through the ordinariness of daydreaming indifference, to
real dreaming, and then to deep, so-called ‘unconscious’ sleep; that
is, one cannot separate awareness itself from motor reflexes and
instinctual, unaware responses. A
body under sedation or in a coma is not a corpse.
The underground train
is like a creature (animalculum). From
it spill other creatures, like parasites from a host.
The commuters are bent upon the shelter of their homes where,
like the hedgehog in the park, they curl up, ‘suffering or not’:
some of the commuting parasites are in pain, some not.
But whatever our best or ‘highest’ levels of awareness are
like, it’s the ‘lowest’ strata, those layers first to react to
pain and pleasure, which make us, as a species, behave as we do.
Imagination, as defined here, built our civilisations, but it’s
energy at the most basic level that keeps us going, it’s the blood and
not the mind that rules.
The central sections of The Blood Rules were gathered
together from notes written one summer in the early 1970s when I visited
most of the larger galleries and museums in London and studied London
itself. This image of the
underground came from Burnt Oak station, from which I started my journey
every day into the centre. (back)
Pain. 2. (You
are...) Finally the word ‘imagination’ is allowed as the entity
which the body apostrophises; it is also addressed as ‘you’,
‘mind’, ‘idea’, ‘angel’.
The notion of a body-mind dualism is still potent, though I agree
that there is no real split. Imagination is the part of the whole which visualises ideas,
as different in kind as the part which makes us sweat, breathe and
blink. The mysterious loop
of inner seeing justifies, for me, the continued use of the old term
‘imagination’.
This faculty behaves
like the shape-changing of a species in evolution, being influenced by
mutant ingredients such as other thoughts, and by chance alterations of
environment via inner experience and outer accident.
Rapunzel is the lady
in the tower who let her hair down for her lover to climb.1
‘I enter Galatean2
glands’: the body extends imagination by engaging with what
imagination has created; seeing arouses feeling, for example.
The sculptor Pygmalion wanted to mate with the work of his hands,
the statue Galatea. The
body learns to celebrate and praise.
Celebration was one of the great moods of the Renaissance, which
began early in Italy. Giotto,
Monteverdi, Einstein: more or less arbitrary representatives of
architecture, music and mathematics. (back)
Pain. 3. (Smell
of...) A snapshot of the old Covent Garden district.
From almost every square and street the primary suppliers of
fruit and vegetables sold to retailers.
The smell of fresh produce was mixed with the odour of refuse in
the gutters: a ripe turn-on for those who find raw country smells
uplifting, leading us to an internal Hesperides3
or Eden. (back)
Pain. 4. (St
Olave’s...) St Olave is a church in the City of London.
It has the crypt described here, which I call ‘God’s
tunnel’, a wormhole into the celestial mind.
I don’t really believe that God (that is, Nature) has a mind,
any more than ‘it’ has arms or legs.
The idea is that myths, portrayed in images or icons like this,
straining for more meaning, more communion and consummation with
What-Is, reflect an activity in cells and genes—that is, there is
something about complexity which strives to fold back in and ‘know’
itself. This may be a
pretty conceit, it may be more than that.
I know it is current orthodoxy to hold that there is no
‘direction’ in evolution, i.e. no striving of complexity to know
itself. I mostly believe in
the current orthodoxy, but that doesn’t stop me from entertaining the
opposite view as well. Logic
and imagination do their believing in different ways. (back)
Pain. 5. (I
alchemist...) This is a picture of Pygmalion as an unpleasant old
alchemist4
or mad Dr
Frankenstein bending over his beautiful statue, Galatea, trying to bring
her to life with science, not by prayer to Aphrodite.
That is, post-Renaissance man uses science to back up his
artistic intuitions. To criticism and footnotes he adds reflections from science:
anything from quantum physics through to psychosociology.
The imagery here is from Frankenstein films (‘fobs of foil and
steel’) and alchemy (‘Purged from nigrescence...’).
Nigrescence: blackness.
Western post-Renaissance man has striven to bleach his Black Eve,
the dangerous mystery within his darkest imagination, and make her
‘burn white gold’, make her understandable. But from the time of Shakespeare and his Dark Lady, and
increasingly from Baudelaire with his mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval, the
muses and children of imagination have refused to be understood.
The
… angel’s prayer is
Praise be father I am not like you
The ‘I’ begins
here as the body, distinct from imagination.
As a mostly well-understood structure, the body is a fitting
symbol to connect with science of the reductionist5
type, which the best is not. Released
and apart from the scientist are the theories and objects he creates.
These, and works of art, are ‘other than’ their creators, in
that they are additions to existence, as is a nest made by a bird.
It is the glory of man, and not just of post-Renaissance man,
though he is my focus, that he is forever creating and adding to the
world. It should not puzzle
him, though it often does, that his additions are as much outside him,
as hard to understand, as the natural world itself. (back)
Light. 1. (The
stream...) Crucial to imagination is the act of seeing: first the
studious examination, then the imaginative conjunctions: the inspired
ideas, in language and even in the ‘pre-language’ of physical
intuition. The bird, as a
symbol of imagination, of ecstatic seeing, will arrive if one is
patient. The light will
brighten. The waiting is
all.6
(back)
Light. 2. (You
the...) The human animal is hopeful that what its imagination
produces will outstrip it, and perhaps outwit death, too.
Man is ‘dreamed by death’—when death ‘awakens’,
everything is over.7
(back)
Light. 3. (I
have...) One patiently waits for inspiration.
It’s not particularly tough that we can’t always live on a
high. Just sitting by a
door conversing with neighbours is a good in itself.
The imaginative way of seeing may desert us, becoming
‘submerged into the shrub unconscious’.
But we can wait. When
the angel returns, her ‘eye-sockets [might be] glittering with
flies’. That would be
disturbing. It could
suggest that she is not immune from error and death.
Or the bright flies could be the shining of a new type of beauty.8
(back)
Light. 4. (These
half-lights...) In the end the world will vanish. The bird of imagination will depart. Some people hope that we’ll send our descendants to the
stars. I think the best we
can expect is that the chemicals in our remains, blown into space, may
seed life elsewhere. Or
start an infection.9
(back)
Fear. 1. (Butterflies
feed...) What we create to transcend us might be flawed by its
origins. What can a
creature born of pain and fear hope to create that is good?
In this piece, life is portrayed as a series of dead-end eating
machines. See the London
Natural History Museum throughout. (back)
Fear. 2. (The
boxer...) Our instinctual fear and experiences of pain create
sadists who perform for a cruel audience.
This is an imagist piece suggesting that the fist that floors a
boxer comes vicariously from the savagery of the spectators.
(back)
Fear. 3. (If
it...) Governments stuffed with potential sadists will aspire to
total command and use terror to stifle dissent and innovation.
Bolivia and Czechoslovakia: see
footnote.10
Magna cum laude:
with higher than average, though not the highest, distinction; here it
seems ironically to qualify the mass-spectator ‘we’ aspect of life
that eases up, relents and ‘gives quarter’ to vulnerability (the
hedgehog) so long as it keeps its head down.
We despise weakness. (back)
Fear. 4. (A
blind...) An empty warehouse, symbol among other things of
mercantile decay. Heathcock
Court in Central London, I think. (back)
Fear. 5. (A
bird’s...) When economies collapse or nations are subdued,
there’s a feeling that imagination has failed, or has even died,
leaving only a ghostly ‘dotted cut-out’ and fossil imprints.11
(back)
Coda. 1. (See
that...) Any ‘higher imagination’ born of us is likely to be
crazy. If it is sane, it
should remember the pain of its origins.
The tone is not hopeful. (back)
Coda. 2. (On the...) A storm-lit,
Palladian palace,12
one of
the best fruits of the post-Renaissance imagination, is the scene of the
parting of two lovers: ‘he [goes] to his drowning’.
This is the end of the physical, political power bolstered by
pseudo-logic, signified by the male.
I think here of the demise of the faulty but nonetheless decent
political systems without being specific as to what kind they are.
Only the she-imagination is left, unprotected.
Can this aspect of humanity survive the attack of the corrupt
destroyers among us, the ‘armoured gods’, those inimical to any
enlightened, merciful and creative civilisation?
Indeed, will body-mind ever again even equal the post-Renaissance
achievement, much less provide its successor?
A rhetorical question. Not
hopeful.
Palladian: neoclassical in architecture.
Mardi Gras: a festival of high celebration in Roman
Catholic countries; in England it’s Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday, the
day before Ash Wednesday begins the 40-day period of fasting called Lent
which leads up to Easter Sunday. (back)
Alan
Marshfield
FOOTNOTES
1 I saw this enacted in a
puppet theatre in Islington. (back)
2 In the Metamorphoses
of the Roman poet Ovid, Galatea was the name of an ivory statue of a
beautiful woman by the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with his
creation. In answer to his
prayers, the statue was brought to life by Venus, the goddess of love.
(back)
3 Hesperides: in Greek
Mythology, nymphs who guarded the tree bearing the golden apples given
to Hera by Gaea on her marriage to Zeus.
It was also the name given to the islands containing the golden
apples. These islands were
generally said to lie beyond the Atlas mountains to the west of the
river (Oceanus) bordering the world. (back)
4 See Ostade’s painting An
Alchemist. (back)
5 Reductionism: in
philosophy, the notion that complex things are collections of simpler
components; for example, that everything, including human behaviour, is
explicable in terms of subatomic particles.
The term is often used disparagingly, since the idea of
ultimately reducing a science like biology to a more ‘basic’ science
like physics is highly suspect. (back)
6 Inspired by Constable’s The
Hay Wain, in which you will have to imagine a hidden
birdwatcher. (back)
7 Inspired by Gauguin’s Te
Rerioa. (back)
8 Inspired by a Dutch
painting of a primitive cottage by a forest track.
I’ve lost my notes on this one. (back)
9 Inspired by van
Ruysdael’s A View of Rhenen. (back)
10
Bolivia and Czechoslovakia.
Around 1970 it was possible to use both countries as symbols of
oppression. Bolivia:
in the late ’60s began a series of military régimes. From 1966 to 1969 the president, General Barrientos, used
armed force to put down Communist guerrilla movements and to disband
most organised labour opposition groups.
Che Guevara was executed and became a worldwide revolutionary
icon. In
1971 Colonel Banzer Suárez’s equally repressive régime continued to
suppress labour and peasant organizations and all civil rights were
suspended. Nevertheless,
the Banzer era saw exceptional economic growth in Bolivia.
Czechoslovakia (now the Czech and Slovak Republics):
after World War 2, Czechoslovakia aligned with the USSR.
At the beginning of 1968, a section of the Communist party
proposed fundamental changes to bring about basic civil rights and a
fairer justice system. Sympathetic
economists supported political change if trade liberalisation was to
succeed. Alexander Dubček
became president and in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 the new régime
started its programme. The
Soviet Union was incensed and on 20th August Warsaw pact forces, predominantly Russian, occupied
the country. (back)
11
Inspired by Max Ernst’s The Forest. (back)
12
Inspired by Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander. (back)
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