Down Cemetery Road
Athwart the crass farrago that is la vie moderne, the Pharos of the Chap has cast its beam, and its charmed rays have bathed chumrades new and old in the lambent Tao of Tweed. Yet it has also revealed many enemies, visible and otherwise, whose deplorable motives must be identified and denounced for the degenerative influences that they certainly are. Let us lay aside the Chinese pipe, and set our minds to the task of rendering our world one fit for the aristocracy of spirit that is certainly our credo. The mantelpiece of reflection being forever wiser than the tigers of wrath, let us repair thence, the better to know our selves and others.
The last redoubt of beauty in our society is surely the imagination, and on its defence relies the foundation of a world fit for foppery. Its territory is ceded daily to the routines of school and its elder sibling, work, in whose service the myriad confections of hawkers compete for the mastery of our desires. Such is the despair occasioned by this assault, that it can lead grown men to beg for the arm of a toad.
Roads to Toad-dom
Philip "Giggles" Larkin was one of our best known racist comedians, whose mood was obviously improved by his transition from Oxford to the librarianship at Hull University. His Toads, like much of his poetry, is a gently fatalistic elegy to the human spirit, driven under by the banality of necessity, to the surrender of a lifetime to waged routine.
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
To drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison
Just to pay a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
It seems simple enough at this point - the toad work is the blight on our lives, and to shuck his slimy caul from ourselves would be enough to free us. Yet he continues:
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
..and the picture has changed from one simple enemy to include an enemy within. A slimy Quisling, if you like. This inner toad is the force inside us that says the routine is safe, is the only reality of the two on offer that we are fit to inhabit. The other, that of "the fame and the the girl and the money" is, like rebellion, "the stuff that dreams are made on". In Toads Revisited, Larkin develops this theme to an uneasy relationship verging on toad-dependence:
Give me your arm, old toad.
Help me down Cemetery Road.
Larkin is saying he has no choice, that the toad inside him knows that these dreams are forever to remain so. Dreams of liberty, of success, of glamour and of adulation. The dream world of advertising.
The Dreams that Stuff is Made On
The specious language of managers and advertisers alike is an attempt to motivate the listener to comply with a demand disguised as an invitation. It seeks to collapse the distance between the phrase and the act, the image and the object, presenting their motives as helpful, or benign, and framing disagreement as a faintly troubling tendency likely to result in some form of ostracism. These characteristics it shares with the language of nocturnal dreams. Since Freud made a present of his Interpretation of Dreams to his nephew, the American priest of Moloch Edward Bernays, the vocabulary of the unconscious has been a tool of the advertising industry. Bernays, who said,
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,"
went on to engineer amongst other things the national religion of anticommunism through his close association with Eisenhower. It chiefly due to him that women smoke, and that bacon and eggs is thought of as a breakfast at all, never mind 'British'.
Following Bernays, in the mid twentieth century we saw the invention of the teenager, followed by the counter-culture industry of packaged rebellion. Having completed the taxonomy of both childhood, and of adolescent desires, modern advertising has carefully pursued the extension of childhood into the adult life of the consumer, giving us the 'kidults' of our times.
They are everywhere, their poor diction soiling those gasps of air yet untouched by odious corporate 'music', botoxing their faces into passive impastoes of vacuity, dressed for a perpetual playtime in some notional North American High School. Before we reach for the automatic weapons, let us dilate upon the genealogy of this malaise, in hope of a possible cure.
The Third Toad
Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin used the 'cut-up' method to create "The Third Mind" - a state where new interpretations could arise, so does the dessication of our hopes through work and mortal despair give suck to the Third Toad - debt. This unholy trinity of misery, toil and compound interest is the very foundation of our economy; tumescent in times of flagrant excess, limp in periods of sober restraint.
Every advertiser knows that a happy individual makes a poor consumer. It is for this reason that the industry relies on the promotion of impossible ideals of bodily perfection and lifetstyle to intensify the dissatisfaction of their target audiences, thus rendering their brands 'necessary'. In this sense, the notion of 'retail therapy' as an emollient has some truth, but only in the same sense that a bottle of Buckfast has for the street drinker in withdrawal.
Since the service sector is now seemingly run by a cabal of self-aware telephone messages, our economic fortunes rise and fall in line with consumer spending - spending allowed by access to debt, and fuelled by the sale of impossible dreams.
'More' is the Health of the State.
Debt, "the slavery of the free", has done much to commend to all of us the arm of the Toad work. Yet one cannot induce the happy and the sane to enslave themselves for the sake of an endless supply of hundred pound plimsolls. To this end, The Third Toad requires nothing less than the creation of a Brattish Army of lifelong children, each clamouring for the immediate satisfaction of desires implanted in them by that cult of false dreams, advertising. Through the attempt to attach one's basic fears and desires to brands, the mantras of this new priest-caste assail the seat of our motives, the imagination, the success of their methods guaranteed by continuous experiment on we their prey. The goal is to promote what Thorsten Veblen termed in the 19th century as "conspicuous consumption" - in pursuit of whose origins we must turn our gaze hindwards.
Consumer Culture in Carthage
History is a fascinating collection of cautionary tales; their content tragic, their reception comic. Those who are concerned with appearing in it seldom read it, and for this reason it often resembles a species of Crimewatch in period costume. Most of us delight in ignoring its lessons, just as unruly children do their teachers. Despite the warnings of these wise alcoholics, such miscreants persist in their gleeful ignorance., for children love to challenge a warning. To the mischievous child in all of us I offer the following example of the fate of unwary children of all ages.
The ancient state of Carthage had the custom of sacrificing children to their brass god, Moloch, as it was thought that the satisfaction of his rarefied appetite was identical with the fortunes of their nation. Priests would beat drums to drown out the wails of parents and children alike, as the young victims were rolled from the outstretched hands of the idol, to be 'consumed' in a pit of flames. Once the Romans arrived, they replaced Moloch with Caesar, and 'consumption' gradually came for us to signify the qualification for a life of swooning and versifying in a large wig.
Demonic Possession
Sadly, the days of the Macaroni gave way to those of the merchant, and by the late nineteenth century came, with 'conspicuous consumption', a further aim of work. It was no longer to be solely concerning with securing the necessities of life, but with the gain and display of totems of status. This tendency began with the erection of one kind of folly and the general adoption of another - that without ever-larger televisions, cars that resemble electric razors, and an endless supply of tawdry gimcracks our lives are worthless in the eyes of our envious peers. Evidently, without the work of the nefarious priest-caste of Moloch, the life-long sale of our minds and bodies could never be so cheaply arranged.
Hence, far from being composed of the 'agents of rational choice' of Classical economics, our country is populated by irascible debt-slaves with little impulse control and the vocabulary of a teak-skinned estate agent. When our people are not waddling to the shopping centre, they are dutifully taking the arm of the toad down a road which they mistakenly believe will lead them to Beckingham Palace. What actually awaits them is an abrupt expiration in the flames of the fiery pit of Moloch, fuelled by a pile of final demands and smouldering sportswear in XXXL sizes, their sole lament the brazen laughter of the gourmandising god.
Victim or Invictus?
The promotion of this epidemic crapulence of personality and product we Chappists abhor begins with the colonisation of the very hearts and minds of its victims, and it has led us into a Toad's Paradise, one fearfully squatting within, another riding atop like some slimy mahout. Hurried on by the hectoring croak of the third, the eyes of the many are fixed on the horizon of an ephemeral paradise, to which their true desires and dreams are forever ransomed. It is for a glimpse of this Erewhon that most of us work so hard, for so long, in servicing and swelling over a trillion pounds of personal debt.
The acceptance that we are indeed all going down cemetery road usually signifies the end of childhood, and is the beginning of a sense of outrage proper to the consumption not only of culture, but also of its population.
In the face of mortality, we are only partial masters of our fates. Yet, with a mind resistant to the mantras of Moloch, we may defray this bitter price by remaining captain of our soul.
The last redoubt of beauty in our society is surely the imagination, and on its defence relies the foundation of a world fit for foppery. Its territory is ceded daily to the routines of school and its elder sibling, work, in whose service the myriad confections of hawkers compete for the mastery of our desires. Such is the despair occasioned by this assault, that it can lead grown men to beg for the arm of a toad.
Roads to Toad-dom
Philip "Giggles" Larkin was one of our best known racist comedians, whose mood was obviously improved by his transition from Oxford to the librarianship at Hull University. His Toads, like much of his poetry, is a gently fatalistic elegy to the human spirit, driven under by the banality of necessity, to the surrender of a lifetime to waged routine.
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
To drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison
Just to pay a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
It seems simple enough at this point - the toad work is the blight on our lives, and to shuck his slimy caul from ourselves would be enough to free us. Yet he continues:
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
..and the picture has changed from one simple enemy to include an enemy within. A slimy Quisling, if you like. This inner toad is the force inside us that says the routine is safe, is the only reality of the two on offer that we are fit to inhabit. The other, that of "the fame and the the girl and the money" is, like rebellion, "the stuff that dreams are made on". In Toads Revisited, Larkin develops this theme to an uneasy relationship verging on toad-dependence:
Give me your arm, old toad.
Help me down Cemetery Road.
Larkin is saying he has no choice, that the toad inside him knows that these dreams are forever to remain so. Dreams of liberty, of success, of glamour and of adulation. The dream world of advertising.
The Dreams that Stuff is Made On
The specious language of managers and advertisers alike is an attempt to motivate the listener to comply with a demand disguised as an invitation. It seeks to collapse the distance between the phrase and the act, the image and the object, presenting their motives as helpful, or benign, and framing disagreement as a faintly troubling tendency likely to result in some form of ostracism. These characteristics it shares with the language of nocturnal dreams. Since Freud made a present of his Interpretation of Dreams to his nephew, the American priest of Moloch Edward Bernays, the vocabulary of the unconscious has been a tool of the advertising industry. Bernays, who said,
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,"
went on to engineer amongst other things the national religion of anticommunism through his close association with Eisenhower. It chiefly due to him that women smoke, and that bacon and eggs is thought of as a breakfast at all, never mind 'British'.
Following Bernays, in the mid twentieth century we saw the invention of the teenager, followed by the counter-culture industry of packaged rebellion. Having completed the taxonomy of both childhood, and of adolescent desires, modern advertising has carefully pursued the extension of childhood into the adult life of the consumer, giving us the 'kidults' of our times.
They are everywhere, their poor diction soiling those gasps of air yet untouched by odious corporate 'music', botoxing their faces into passive impastoes of vacuity, dressed for a perpetual playtime in some notional North American High School. Before we reach for the automatic weapons, let us dilate upon the genealogy of this malaise, in hope of a possible cure.
The Third Toad
Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin used the 'cut-up' method to create "The Third Mind" - a state where new interpretations could arise, so does the dessication of our hopes through work and mortal despair give suck to the Third Toad - debt. This unholy trinity of misery, toil and compound interest is the very foundation of our economy; tumescent in times of flagrant excess, limp in periods of sober restraint.
Every advertiser knows that a happy individual makes a poor consumer. It is for this reason that the industry relies on the promotion of impossible ideals of bodily perfection and lifetstyle to intensify the dissatisfaction of their target audiences, thus rendering their brands 'necessary'. In this sense, the notion of 'retail therapy' as an emollient has some truth, but only in the same sense that a bottle of Buckfast has for the street drinker in withdrawal.
Since the service sector is now seemingly run by a cabal of self-aware telephone messages, our economic fortunes rise and fall in line with consumer spending - spending allowed by access to debt, and fuelled by the sale of impossible dreams.
'More' is the Health of the State.
Debt, "the slavery of the free", has done much to commend to all of us the arm of the Toad work. Yet one cannot induce the happy and the sane to enslave themselves for the sake of an endless supply of hundred pound plimsolls. To this end, The Third Toad requires nothing less than the creation of a Brattish Army of lifelong children, each clamouring for the immediate satisfaction of desires implanted in them by that cult of false dreams, advertising. Through the attempt to attach one's basic fears and desires to brands, the mantras of this new priest-caste assail the seat of our motives, the imagination, the success of their methods guaranteed by continuous experiment on we their prey. The goal is to promote what Thorsten Veblen termed in the 19th century as "conspicuous consumption" - in pursuit of whose origins we must turn our gaze hindwards.
Consumer Culture in Carthage
History is a fascinating collection of cautionary tales; their content tragic, their reception comic. Those who are concerned with appearing in it seldom read it, and for this reason it often resembles a species of Crimewatch in period costume. Most of us delight in ignoring its lessons, just as unruly children do their teachers. Despite the warnings of these wise alcoholics, such miscreants persist in their gleeful ignorance., for children love to challenge a warning. To the mischievous child in all of us I offer the following example of the fate of unwary children of all ages.
The ancient state of Carthage had the custom of sacrificing children to their brass god, Moloch, as it was thought that the satisfaction of his rarefied appetite was identical with the fortunes of their nation. Priests would beat drums to drown out the wails of parents and children alike, as the young victims were rolled from the outstretched hands of the idol, to be 'consumed' in a pit of flames. Once the Romans arrived, they replaced Moloch with Caesar, and 'consumption' gradually came for us to signify the qualification for a life of swooning and versifying in a large wig.
Demonic Possession
Sadly, the days of the Macaroni gave way to those of the merchant, and by the late nineteenth century came, with 'conspicuous consumption', a further aim of work. It was no longer to be solely concerning with securing the necessities of life, but with the gain and display of totems of status. This tendency began with the erection of one kind of folly and the general adoption of another - that without ever-larger televisions, cars that resemble electric razors, and an endless supply of tawdry gimcracks our lives are worthless in the eyes of our envious peers. Evidently, without the work of the nefarious priest-caste of Moloch, the life-long sale of our minds and bodies could never be so cheaply arranged.
Hence, far from being composed of the 'agents of rational choice' of Classical economics, our country is populated by irascible debt-slaves with little impulse control and the vocabulary of a teak-skinned estate agent. When our people are not waddling to the shopping centre, they are dutifully taking the arm of the toad down a road which they mistakenly believe will lead them to Beckingham Palace. What actually awaits them is an abrupt expiration in the flames of the fiery pit of Moloch, fuelled by a pile of final demands and smouldering sportswear in XXXL sizes, their sole lament the brazen laughter of the gourmandising god.
Victim or Invictus?
The promotion of this epidemic crapulence of personality and product we Chappists abhor begins with the colonisation of the very hearts and minds of its victims, and it has led us into a Toad's Paradise, one fearfully squatting within, another riding atop like some slimy mahout. Hurried on by the hectoring croak of the third, the eyes of the many are fixed on the horizon of an ephemeral paradise, to which their true desires and dreams are forever ransomed. It is for a glimpse of this Erewhon that most of us work so hard, for so long, in servicing and swelling over a trillion pounds of personal debt.
The acceptance that we are indeed all going down cemetery road usually signifies the end of childhood, and is the beginning of a sense of outrage proper to the consumption not only of culture, but also of its population.
In the face of mortality, we are only partial masters of our fates. Yet, with a mind resistant to the mantras of Moloch, we may defray this bitter price by remaining captain of our soul.
posted by Fanshawe at 12:07 PM
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