When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

My Thunks On Echthrosophilia

My body has passed through some spaces, where important things can easily be said to have happened. I ambiguously conceive (in conceit?) that I am part of history. Part of a history that will be written in any case, and who to write it? Well, myself I suppose. I am part of my own story, that becomes the story of humanity and this Earth. But I could not sit down an intellectualise why these things were important, or what important thing it is I want to say. It would be too much like propaganda, a manifesto, a system, a treatise. I am not like a house, built from a blueprint in stages, I am rather more like a tree or a chattering monkey, and that is just how I write, like a bird.

What is this animal we call Correct English? Why is it so elusive and why is it so dissatisfactory when it is finally caught? Why is it that, upon learning the proper syntax, spelling, pronounciation, phrasology and so on, we are driven by the almost irresistable urge to mar, to distort it, to fill it up with nonsense, to tear it down, this anti-babel?

Why do we draw back from saying 'Thunk' as the past participle of 'Think'? Why instead 'Thought' which changes the form, is two whole letters longer, and also takes place of a noun, as in 'A
Thought'. Is this not confusing, inefficient, irregular, immoral? By mere prejudice we have excluded 'Thunk' from Correct English because it sounds uneducated, because a certain ventriloquist had his sub-intelligent puppet speak the words 'Who'd a Thunk it?'. It is excluded in defiance of common sense, and surely the word 'Thunk' has been used aplenty, in speech, in writing. But always the speech, the writing, of those excluded, derided and outcast, the subjects of ridicule and suffocating, pious pity.

Where would we be without the incomprehensible? If the written, spoken, 'thunk' language where only a charted territory, if it were all signposts, roadmaps, satellite photos of plains, with no undersea currents, no caves, no horizons, no distant, savage lands, with debauched phrases, barbarous words, lofty syllables, weird sonorities and gutterous signifiers. If it were so I'd have to take a vow of silence, I'd have to burn down libraries, I would have to bang pots and pans together wherever I went so that no-one could hold a conversation let alone speak to me, in short
I'd have to replace all meaning with silence, laughter or noise.

Of the languages of Europe, two vast blocs divide it in two and overlap, the Romance and the Germanic. French, Spanish, Italian, from the Latin forbears, and German, Norse, Danish from the rougher-hewn Germanics. And why these two toungues in such abound? Why, because they were rampant. Invaders, raiders, traders, in short they got about. They dominated, and so their languages came to dominate.

It is clear to me that clear, correct English of the standard dialect is just the habits of speech of the conquerers, dominators, tyrants. Often they are philistines, leeching off the rich culture of their vassals, parasites of a reflected glory, patrons of a finesse they cannot conceive. And hence the rustic English of old was soused by the moustache-twirling Norman conquerers, and Latin-speaking priests plyed their trade with that language in the commerce of souls.

But then, I sometimes tend to thinking that a speaker or writer, with pirate intent, may find in the sudden influx, a glory of incomprehensibility to ransack and devour. Like a woman whose husband, lost to a lost war, seeks out and savours the victorious enemy soldiers, who drink and celebrate in the city centre. Nature and pleasure favour such courtship, for else she would not be called a traitoress, as there must be terms for all sorts of immoralities that merely follow what is advantageous and instinctive. What cares she for the country, or the men that failed her? Here in these adroit and cunning Normans lies the future, and her wombspring shall be that future, and their speech and manner shall be Frank, but the world will call them English.

And there should be a word for it, and if I cannot find one I'll make it, 'consummate desire for the enemy', as taboo as incest before the final battle, but as inevitable next day as burying of the dead. 'Hostilophilia' is well sounding, but the beautiful 'echthrosophilia' is perfectly geometric because of its deeply paradoxical meaning. 'Echthros' means simply 'the hated', and 'philia' simply 'to love'. Therefore the meaning of the word is, 'to love the hated'.

And now, seeing the word in all its perfection before me, it staggers me that it has never been called to common usage, or even appeared written, so useful and profound the semantic field it suggests. Who has not felt a momentary pang of love, friendship or desire for those they are supposed to hate? The desire of a black-clad molotoveer for the female cop in the midst of a scrum, her truncheon momentarily lowered as she looks him direct in the eyes through the mask. The white supremacist as he observes a black man brought stoically to makeshift gallows; the sudden, instantly repressed, longing for a parallel world in which they play cards and talk about the game. The Persian official on the day after Alexander of Macedon's ascent and conquest, how he looks on the fine features, the classical gaze of the new master, who his countrymen would enjoin him to hate, but he feels only love.

Echthrosophilia is all at once taboo and holy, shameful and transformative, it is quite literally 'the love that dare not speak its name', the poetic phrase seems to enforce an iron dictate on reality, and perhaps my beloved term will be born and die with this essay.

And it is with a considerable degree of echthrosophilia that I peruse the manuscripts of dead aristocrats, the novel of the inheritor, the executrix, the rakes, kings, generals and dictators.

It is with total echthrosophilia that I absorb and imitate the style of canonical literature, of traditional thinkers, dabblers and moustache-twirlers. I imitate it while I seek to destroy it, I praise it while I blaspheme against it, I besmirch, flatter, parody and enshrine, all at once, at the same time. If I write a charachter, I write how that being speaks. If I write my own voice, then what can it be except the sum total of everything I have ever read or heard? Magazine columns, street signs, car manuals, speeches, internet forum rants, the inside of album covers, grafitti on bathroom doors, Kant, Mervyn Peake, academic text books, Anais Nin, Robert Frost, engravings on tombstones, sensationalist headlines, the makers mark on the bottom of cups, tattoos, protest signs, song lyrics, ironic t-shirts, overheard conversations, names pissed in the snow, radio reports, finger marks on dirty cars, children's bed-time stories, court-room documents, love sonnets, scribbled notes stuck to the fridge, doctor's orders, Shakespeare, road signs, captions in dirty magazines, tweetings, wall posts and private messages, the instructions on the back of instant meals, Camus, Borges, Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, entries in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, written in chalk, magic marker, pencil lead, stitched in pillows, written in blood, urine, feces, come, heard from vocal chords, heard from speakers, heard over the tannoy, an echo of my own voice, imagined in the wind, spoken loudly, spoken softly, spoken malevolently, kindly, ambiguosly, facetiously, and each utterance, inscription, engraving, typed, written or pixellated unit or subunit of meaning circulates endlessly like a great current of debris round and round and round the ocean of my interior, never still, never solid, but always changing, always growing, recombining, sinking under and resurfacing.

Most days I feel like an infinite computer, one that I barely understand, that I have not the wit to program, nor even the ability to interface with properly. Words come out of my mouth, I perform actions; wash myself, try some pushups, take a crap. I sit down to write, my early thoughts about what I was doing dissolve.

My world dissolves into this endless stream. I'm writing something, I do not know what, like an ant queen lays eggs. I'm growing like the sun is growing, or like cancer. I'm eating words voraciously, its out of all control, if they gained my body weight I'd have long ago collapsed from morbid obesity, if they made me piss I'd be constantly pissing, if eating words was like fornication my entire lower body would be a gruesome, bloody stump.

And very often there is a fire in my personal library, I lose a document. I crank the old word recorder to life, it chugs up some memory, a little window opens, I tap for a recollection, then theres just a blank white page. You can select the nothingness, it has substance, it takes up space like a repressed trauma. Some of my proudest wordspawn have gone this way, to that strangely tangible blankness. And if I threw the laptop off a bridge, theres only a little floating about in that group-mind we call the internet. So, like my actual mind, my digital extension is just as faulty, a leaky bucket constantly dripping.

This was important to understand, to realise, the complete stupidity of wishing, hoping, believing in anything eternal. I'm not going to leave anything lasting after my death that will not change or be torn down.

Some seem to think that one day we will complete a perfect historical record, a perfect scientific view, a monolithic theory of everything, whole and unchanging. I tend towards the opposite view, that we will forget more than we remember, that the passing of time will wear away facts, which will becomes histories, and histories will become stories, and those stories will become myths, until one day those first myths will be gone and all will be left is their echo, repeating down through time, forever.

And on realising this, I can conceive of nothing more fun, absurd, meaningful or more Promethean than making as big a sound as possible, not because there will be anything recognisable of it in the future, but just because.

It is the same with our genes, every generation your progeny will look less like you, genetically and in culture, in thought and action they will come to resemble you less and less. That doesn't stop me wanting to spooge off some peoplespawn some day. It's not about contribution something uniquely, indelibly my own in either case, its just about participating, like playing in an orchestra even though one's modest kazoo gets lost in the symphony. It doesn't matter whether you are the bass drum, the viruouso violinist, the single chime of the triangle at the end, the conductor, the theremin, whatever; when the musics playing you are not yourself anymore, your not even the instrument, you are the symphony.

And this is what gives me the greatest delight.

And this is what gives me the greatest delight.

And this is what gives me the greatest delight.

The greatest delight.

The greatest delight.

The greatest delight.

Delight.

Delight.

Delight.

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