Creationists, Conspiracy Theorists and Cranks

I have a confession to make. A confession of an addiction. I am addicted to YouTube video debates between creationists and 'evolutionists', between those who believe the literal truth of the Book of Genesis that the world and everything in it was created by God in six days no more than about 6000 years ago and those who subscribe to the conventional scientific account – sometimes termed 'Darwinists', 'atheists' or 'rationalists'. The debate is an unedifying one, but still I can't look away. I can't help myself. There's hours and hours of it on YouTube and after I've watched one clip, I'm straight on to the next. After three or four of these, I feel dirty inside. The Thunderf00t v. Venomfanx confrontation shows how crazily out of hand the argument gets.

[Declaration of religious position from the outset: I am an atheist. I was raised in a not-very-strict, not-especially-spiritual Church of England environment. I was taught to love my fellow human beings and never to judge them. There was very little to disagree with. I liked the music, but as I got older, I decided that I could no longer go to church unhypocritically, not having the belief to justify my presence there. However, I'm pleased to say that questions about the age of the universe or the origins of life never entered into my mind as part of my scepticism, as reading the Bible as literal truth was never part of my religious upbringing. My objections were more of a metaphysical nature, though even the word 'objection' seems too strong. I believed that Christian morality had no need of a supernatural law-giver in order to be applicable, that personal redemption had more validity if it was accomplished through self-examination rather than through benign divine intercession. And I had serious misgivings about the purpose of eternal life.]

On the whole, the 'evolutionists' are more entertaining to watch. They have the job of marshalling logic and evidence against blind faith, which is by no means an easy task. For some of them, this job descends to angry anti-religious diatribe; some take much delight in subjecting the wackiest claims to extensive logical dissection. Once or twice, you will find a reasonably intelligent commentator who attempts to pick apart the different burdens of proof demanded by religious and non-religious approaches and to show how incompatible they are in a non-judgmental way. (I could at this stage mention Dawkins – whose evangelical mission is against religion of every kind, and who freely mixes scientific and moral arguments up in a slapdash way – but I choose not to, as he has made it a point of principal not to debate with creationists, even though he has made a living from scoring easy points off them.)

Among the 'creationists', most are shed-based lunatics, barely able to string a sentence together, let alone an argument. Their repeated appeals to Scripture are boring, and their scientific claims so absurd as to be more annoying than funny. Only a few are really worth watching – mostly professional preachers of one kind or another, and paradoxically because it is not clear whether they really do believe in creationism or if they're just in the business of scamming donations from gullible believers. Honorable mentions go to Ray Comfort (known as 'the banana man') and John Pendleton, who are both religious quacks of the highest order, but the king of them all is (Dr) Kent Hovind*, currently serving a ten-year sentence for tax evasion at the Federal Correctional Institution in Jesup, Georgia. He's a hero of mine. An anti-hero, let's say. Yes, he's a fraud, but he takes dishonesty to remarkable levels of sophistication. He's a pretty entertaining speaker, too, and he has mountains of evidence at his fingertips for the literal interpretation of the Bible. Here's just one of his many online seminars. I recommend watching it in full, late at night in a darkened room with the volume turned up loud.

The task of collecting evidence to support this nonsense is almost, if not more, impressive than the job of refuting it. If Hovind had spent the same amount of time researching a genuine field of science as he has clearly done fabricating proof of Noah's flood, he might have achieved a small amount of usefulness in his colourful but confused life.

There is a certain mindset, which is by no means restricted to American Christians or indeed to religious people anywhere, that will believe an absurd proposition in the face of insuperable odds. In fact, the more contrary evidence the believer is presented with, the greater their conviction that there is a conspiracy to silence them. In the majority of cases, the claims made about the extent of the conspiracy to suppress the so-called 'facts' – about the moon landings, UFOs, 9/11 etc. – are even more grotesque than the claims about the facts themselves.

One of the most remarkable people I ever met was crop circle expert Lucy Pringle. She deserves a blog post all to herself. Her resistance to the idea that the patterns that appear in fields are produced by men wielding planks – in spite of the plank-wielding men themselves claiming responsibility – is extraordinary. I became exasperated by her apparently willing blindness to the plank-wielding facts and her baseless speculation that gave gullible leverage to any account, no matter how bizarre, apart from the clear, rational one. We argued, but our arguments turned out to be just as futile as those between creationists and evolutionists. We both came away accusing the other of being narrow-minded and stubborn.

On the whole, the arrogance of such self-righteous fantasists is more depressing than inspiring. Yet in spite of this, I still cannot help but feel a mischievous admiration for those who, with the heroism of Don Quixote, defend their delusion in the face of every fact. The ones without an obvious religious or political motivation are all the more fascinating.
 
Another of my favourite fantasists is Iman Wilkens, the author of a magnificent book called Where Troy Once Stood (Rider/Century Hutchinson, London, 1990; 5th revised edition published by Gopherpublishers.com, Amsterdam 2009). Over more than 400 pages packed with bogus etymology and duff archaeology, it explains that the epic poems of Homer – the Odyssey and the Iliad – describe real historical events, and that these events took place in Cambridgeshire. Sadly, it's impossible to get hold of for less than £40. While I was at university at Cambridge, I recommended it to Classics Department Library. It represents a first-class illustration of how, if you fervently want to believe something, you will never be short of evidence to support your belief.

This brings me to Anatoly Fomenko. He believes that the entirety of world history is a fabrication, almost the nec plus ultra of conspiracy theories.

It's spectacular stuff, and I want to know more. Where do you begin refuting a theory like this? As in the creationism debate, the rebuttal is not easy, which is what makes it so interesting. The extent of the bullshit is almost too great to shovel. In the words of theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it's 'not even wrong'.

To counteract my unenlightening YouTube viewing, I've started reading the works of Charles Fort for the first time. Unlike the Forteans who have borrowed his name, Charles Fort appears to be a sceptical rationalist rather than a credulous believer. Although he often states that the scientific community covers up accounts of mysterious events that contradict the status quo, he posits no global conspiracy against truth-tellers, only a human tendency to normalize data. And he resolutely offers no alternative theories, except in mischief, to throw his readers off the scent, which is a worthy end in itself. His target is the hubris of proof itself. For Fort, conspiracy theorists are guilty of the same lazy generalizations that scientists are. 'Supposing', as opposed to 'believing' is not just a more creative way to go about life, it represents a more truthful engagement with the nature of reality.

I really do wish I could 'believe', as the cranks do, and to have the sort of mind flexible enough to distort everything to fit my own worldview. How nice to be so certain of things. How incredibly comforting it must be to go through life with every fact supporting your thesis. It would be like being a baby, with everyone cooing over you and looking after you, having no responsibilities and enduring no challenges. But we must grow up and become independent, and come to terms with the chaotic confusion of signs and meanings that surround us. But with the evidence so up for grabs, as Fort teaches, it does make me wonder where proof ends and faith begins. One of the things that's so fascinating about Kent Hovind and other 'creation scientists' is their lack of awareness of that distinction. And what about people who hold 'unshakable' political convictions? How can I say for certain that the things I myself hold to be true aren't simply self-reinforced fictions of convenience? We should do our best to interrogate ourselves towards 'supposition', rather than 'belief'.

Amen. Now back to YouTube.

* Hovind's doctorate was awarded by the non-accredited Patriot University in Colorado Springs.

Blue Pigs

Big and small are relative terms, as anyone who has read Gulliver's Travels will tell you. But even in England, the countryside is big. Very big. Londoners like me feel their eyeball muscles exercising in unaccustomed ways as they focus on massive distant hills for the first time in months. Also, the countryside contains much fewer things. In the city, you are bombarded every second with logos, signs, warnings, adverts, dangers and enticements, whereas in the countryside all you will see for miles will be a hill, a dry-stone wall, some trees and a lot of sky.

We were walking from Long Preston to Settle, a journey of about 4 miles along the south-western edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Passing near a couple of farms, the footpath needed some navigation. I was showing off, as usual, making myself out to be far more adept with a map and compass than I really am. At one point, we clearly missed the right route, as we found ourselves deposited at the edge of a muddy field. We tiptoed across it, knowing we'd gone wrong, and headed over the gate at the far corner.

In the next field we had clearly come to a dead end, as the gate was tied firmly shut. An enclosure in the corner held a dozen or so pigs with distinctive white bands around their middles. We admired the pigs for a few minutes, before we noticed the farmer come riding up on his quadbike. 'You two look like you need help.' he said. He was a magnificent Yorkshireman, in full regalia: cloth cap, waterproof parka over tweed jacket, and a barely comprehensible accent. And he put the word 't', meaning 'the', in places where you wouldn't expect to find it.

'See that t'oak up at t'top? The t'path leads up just above t'there. Y'can't see it from where we are, but there's t'a wall, leads across round t'neighbours. There's a t'blue clapperboard barn, aim for that.'
'I knew we'd gone wrong when we got to that ploughed field.'

'Ploughed? That's pigs.'

Of course it was pigs. They don't grow crops in this part of the world, and even if they did the field wouldn't be ploughed at this time of year. What an idiotic thing to say. Oh, just shoot me, I thought. I clearly have such a lamentably poor understanding of country life, that my trespassing over your land can only be reckless and damaging. No wonder farmers hate ramblers. Just pull out your shotgun and shoot the trespasser. You have every right. I know you have a shotgun.

At that point, three boys aged between about eight and twelve came scampering down the hill from the farmhouse, all wearing enormous wellies.

'My boys'll show you.' And he kindly (but without smiling) let us climb over his gate to take a short-cut across his back lawn. We made our way tentatively onwards, having only understood 50 per cent of his directions, but congratulating ourselves on having discovered an Authentic Yorkshireman, which we ticked off our List of Things to See in Yorkshire.

We'd actually only been about 100 yards away from where we needed to be, but we'd been lost. In London, if you are 100 yards from where you need to be, you are not lost. But in the countryside a mistake of that magnitude means potentially back-tracking for the best part of a mile. The scale of the landscape gives you the false impression that you can be approximate in your navigation, that, for example, so long as you carry on in a reasonably straight line along a particular valley you will reach the town at the end. Not so. You need to pay very close attention to every feature along the way, particularly the gradient, to ensure you're on the right path. Realising this made the ultra-assiduous documentation of the hills by walkers like Wainwright and others more understandable. The importance of taking note of little details against a vast and unchanging backdrop produces one of those disparities of scale that forces the mind in two different directions at once. That's what is inspiring.

We had a bite of lunch in Settle, then did the slightly arduous but rewarding walk over Attermire Scar to Malham. At The Lister Arms in Malham, looking for the number of a cab company to take us back to Long Preston, we found a flyer advertising the Blue Pig Company. There's a pretty good value restaurant in Settle, called simply Ravenous. We'd eaten there the previous evening, and seen 'Yorkshire Blue Pig Black Pudding' on the menu as a starter. It was Dani who made the connection. We'd assumed at the time that 'Blue Pig' was the name of the breed, but now it was obvious that it was the name of the company based at Mearbeck Farm. The pigs we'd seen earlier in the day when we got lost had a blueish tint to them, but they weren't just the same breed of pigs as were for sale in black pudding form. They were exactly the same pigs from the same place: a cross, according to the website, between a Gloucester Old Spot and a Saddle Back. And there also on the website was a photo of Anthony Bradley, the Yorkshireman who helped us on our way, the latest in five generations of Bradleys farming at Mearbeck, and his sons may be the sixth. Small world.

We put in an online order for some pork belly, black pudding and sausages from him, by way of a thank you.

Deflowering a Virgin in front of Witnesses

The Prince's Person by Roger Peyrefitte

I've just stumbled across this in the 'Modern Literature' section of the Oxfam bookshop in Kentish Town; a remarkable bit of gossipy historical smut by the flamboyant French gay rights campaigner Roger Peyrefitte (1907–2000), in a cheap 1966 paperback edition. I won't bother reviewing it for you. Here's the blurb on the back cover:

The most bawdy, most ribald true story you'll ever read.

Was 16th Century Italy's young Prince of Mantua impotent? His pre-marital antics seemed to indicate a rampantly priapic nature – but in that case how was it that his teenage wife was still a virgin? Relatives on both sides were outraged. The Catholic Church was scandalised. The succession of the Dukedom of Mantua looked to be in serious danger. Something had to be done. Arrangements were made. The Prince was to prove himself.

By deflowering a virgin – in front of witnesses.

And wow, it is indeed a page-turner, packed with historical details, crude double entendres and unrestrained anti-Catholic merry vitriol. I'll lend it to you when I've finished it. Here's how it begins.

At the back of the book, there are adverts for a couple of other books in the 'Panther Fiction' series. This one especially caught my eye:

THE NIGHTCLERK 5/–

Stephen Schneck

J. Spencer Blight, 'the fattest man in America', presides over 'six floors of rooms to let and enough beds for nearly every bug'. To while away the night hours he reads pornography and ruminates on his years with his beautiful, impossibly corrupt wife, Katy. What years they'd been! What games they'd got up to! . . . 

'Mad entertainment' Sunday Telegraph

'Scenes of preposterous depravity' The Guardian

'A roaring success' Daily Mail

Not bad review quotes, eh? I'm inclined to hunt a copy down. Also at the back of the book, there's the following list of other authors published by Panther Books: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Alan Moorehead, Nicholas Monsarrat, Chester Himes, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, Len Deighton, Saki, Jack London, James Hadley Chase, Georgette Heyer, Violette Leduc, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Hans Habe, Marquis de Sade, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Louis Auchincloss, J.G. Ballard, Henry Williamson, Vladimir Nabokov, Fernando Henriques, John O'Hara, Howard Fast, Hubert Monteilhet, Julian Mitchell, Agnar Mykle, Simon Raven, Marcel Proust, John Rechy, Gore Vidal, John Barth, Alan Williams, Bill Naughton, John Horne Burns, David Caute, Ivan Turgenev, Colin Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft, Rachel Carson, Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Curzio Malaparte, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Denise Robins.

What a line-up. Wouldn't you like to have been a publisher in the 1960s?

A Boring Post about a Boring Painting of a Boring Thing

If I find myself alone with time to kill near Charing Cross, I often pop into the National Gallery for a few minutes and look at a couple of paintings. Being brought up on photographic images, we often make the mistake of reading paintings as though they claimed to represent reality in the same way that photos do. And it's often through the details extraneous to the main subject – the stuff in the background, a fleeting gesture or play of light, an accidental, unposed moment – that photographs assert their claim to 'truth'.

But in painting – at least, until the birth of 'modern art' with the French realists and impressionists, which coincided the birth of photography – nothing is accidental. Even when the painting is done directly from a model, the exact composition is something completely unspontaneous and the details are as significant as the overall subject. Every inch of the canvass is contrived and predetermined, entirely 'unreal', if you like. It's worthwhile – and pleasant – to throw off your twenty-first-century perspective and to flex your observational muscles by delving into a painting's contrivances (though, oddly enough, now that Photoshop is ubiquitous, the notion of photographs supplying an unaltered account of reality is out of fashion, and a whole generation is growing up with much keener critical eyes than those of their parents).

In Room 18, which contains mid-seventeenth century French paintings, near the spectacular portraits of Cardinal Richelieu, there hangs my candidate for the most boring painting in the National Gallery. It would normally have bypassed my eye muscles, but something about it must have struck me as odd. Here it is:

Allegory of Grammar (1650), Laurent de La Hyre

Its subject matter is both nebulous and uninspiring, its composition clumsy yet static, its execution flawless and banal, and its style unoriginal – a sort of sub-Poussin classicism without anything in the way of poetry about it. Allowing that Laurent de La Hyre wasn't bad at perspective, we must assume that there is a compositional reason why the foreshortening of the figure's left arm looks so odd, but God knows what that might be, and anyway, who cares? The explanatory notes for this painting are so vague as to remove any last vestiges of intrigue it might yet invoke:

This is probably one of a series of half-length female figures of the seven Liberal Arts* which once belonged to Gédéon Tallemant (1613–68), apparently painted for his house in the Rue d'Angoumois, Paris. The pictures vary in size, and all are dated 1649 or 1650.

Grammar is here personified as a woman. The essence of this art is explained in the inscription, which may be translated as 'A meaningful and literate word spoken in a correct manner'. A second series of the Liberal Arts, also by La Hyre or a member of his studio, may have existed in Rouen; and a total of ten paintings of these subjects survive today. An identical version, perhaps from the Rouen series, is in Baltimore (Walters Art Gallery).

It is 'probably' one of a series (although it might not be), and just in case you thought you could imagine them all handsomely arranged in identical frames along a corridor or library wall, we learn that they're all different sizes, with no clue as to whether this one is one of the bigger ones or smaller ones. There 'may' be more similar paintings, by him or by someone else, that also exist, at least one of which is exactly the same. Seldom has an explanatory panel cast more shadow over an already dull image. Art history will not help us here. We have to look at the painting.

The figure of Grammar is a woman – an utterly featureless, generic classical matron – watering a plant. The flowers look like violets. If the violets are being fed by grammar, then presumably they represent the young student, part of whose education will include a dose of grammar. Violets sometimes symbolize humility, and this student is planted in a very humble vessel. It looks like an bog-standard B&Q terracotta plantpot. I suppose this represents the uncultivated mind that will benefit from a grammar education – the so-called empty vessel. The other plant, which has either just been watered or is about to be watered, is a poppy, a wildflower. Odd that, as wildflowers don't need watering. But of course, it never will be watered, because the artist has caught the moment when the violets are being watered. They are to be watered in eternity. Every time you come back to this painting, the water will continue to pour down on the poor violets, which look like they're being drowned by Grammar. To emphasise the point, the water is shown leaking out of the bottom of the cheap plantpot. As an advertisement for Grammar as part of an education, it is a bad one. The flowers will certainly die if they're overwatered like that.

The other plant life in the painting are the mature trees seen through the window behind the figure of Grammar, in the upper right corner separated off by the diagonal element formed by her left arm (ah, that's what it's for!). They're placed in contrast to the young fragile plants being reared by grammar. Is this robust vegetation what a young violet can aspire to, after years of applied study? That doesn't make sense. A violet can never grow into an oak tree, no matter how much grammar it manages to soak up. Besides, these trees are uncultivated. They, like the poppy, thrive perfectly well on what rain provides. They don't need watering. It's not looking good for our sad little B&Q violets. Grammar will stunt them; other plants thrive without it. If this is what Laurent de La Hyre is saying about Grammar, he's subverting one of the Seven Liberal Arts, and potentially undermining the serious intent of the whole series.

The clincher is in the inscription: 'A meaningful and literate word spoken in a correct manner', in Latin 'Vox litterata et articulata debito modo pronunciata'. But the words meaning 'in a correct manner', 'debito modo' are seen backwards, where the strip of cloth folds back on itself. Oh yes. When the words that mean 'in a correct manner', or 'in the right order' are the ones shown backwards in the wrong order, we must deduce that Laurent de La Hyre means for us to read this painting back-to-front. This Allegory of Grammar carries a secret, ironic, anti-grammar message. Let students express themselves naturally, this painting says, rather than smother them in rules that will stifle their growth.

Well, I'd like to see the other pictures in the series, to see if they subvert their subject matter in similar ways. It's always enjoyable to discover a hidden meaning that contradicts the stated one. There are plenty of these hidden meanings to be found, not just among the boring paintings in the stuffy old National Gallery, but among the visual and written material that surrounds us on a daily basis, perhaps even in this blog if you look hard enough ...

* The Seven Liberal Arts, as described by Martianus Capella in the 5th century AD, represented the pillars of medieval educational system, the equivalent of today's 'three Rs'. They were: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music.

Psalm 47

I've been listening to this piece of music a lot lately. Psalm 47 'Gloire du Seigneur' Op. 38 by the French composer Florent Schmitt:

Also, listen to parts two and three. If I'm going to be completely honest about it, I'm not sure whether I love or hate this piece of music. One thing's for certain: it's impossible to be ambivalent about it. This is the sort of music that grabs you by the heart or by the throat – either way, it makes it hard to breathe. I walk down the road with it up loud in my earphones, and it's exhilarating, energizing. My pulse races, I break into a skip, I can sense the elements around me and the spinning planet, and tears appear at the corners of my eyes. It's like the musical equivalent of licking a 9V battery.

Psalm 47 was written in 1904, and sounds like it. For its sheer grotesque, bombastic, unrelenting pomposity posing as 'grandeur', I loathe it. The music itself is both sensual and inhuman. It seems drenched in the machine-forged passions of twentieth-century totalitarianism – more Nuremberg Rally than Cherubic Choir. Barbaric. What an astonishing thing to love a god or an ideology with such passion that you would sacrifice your very last trace of individuality in order to lend your lungs to be part of the million-strong chorus.

'Paradiso', from Dante's Divine Comedy, illustratred by Gustave Doré in 1866.

The lyrics are of course a bit scary . . .

Psalm 47

1 O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.
2 For the LORD most high is terrible; he is a great King over all the earth.
3 He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our feet.
4 He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom he loved.
5 God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
6 Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises.
7 For God is the King of all the earth: sing ye praises with understanding.
8 God reigneth over the heathen: God sitteth upon the throne of his holiness.
9 The princes of the people are gathered together, even the people of the God of Abraham: for the shields of the earth belong unto God: he is greatly exalted.

'Who would live in a house like this?'

. . . but it's not the religious content of the words that bothers me. The music itself feels quite irreligious, it has a primitive, pagan quality to it – it was a big influence on Stravinky, who'd be writing The Rite of Spring a few years later – as well as a defiantly Modern spirit. Florent Schmitt's paradise is illuminated not by candlelight but by countless electric bulbs. It evokes the New Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. And yet every time I listen to it, I'm won over by its ballsy chromaticism. I admire the sheer over-the-top nerve of building such a vertigo-inducing skyscraper of tonalities.

For all his avant garde ambitions, it must be admitted that Schmitt's aesthetic has closer affinities to the mystical Wagnerian tradition of the previous century than to the experimentalism or expressionism of the new one. And perhaps its special appeal derives precisely from its unusual place in history. It's an absurd piece of music. It's scary. It's hilarious. It's clever. And it prosthelytizes with ludicrous, dazzling optimism.

Idiolectical Cunninasus OR Sex, Lies and Noses

I’m rewatching the spectacularly good and amazingly dated A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–8), an early success by Andrew Davies. Episode 5 of the first series opens with body language expert Lyn Turtle in bed with Dr Stephen Daker (played by Peter Davidson in his first post-Who role), talking about ‘sexual idiolects’:

Lyn: You know when you were at school...?
Stephen: What?
Lyn: Did you have to read all those Shakespeare plays and things?
Stephen: One or two.
Lyn: You know, where the blokes are after the wrong girls, or wise Duke of something slips another girl into bed with him in the dark and he can't tell the difference.
Stephen: I don't think anything like that happened in Julius Caesar.
Lyn: No, but the point I'm making is: Shakespeare was a wally. Everyone is totally different like that. I'd know you anywhere. In total darkness in a split second. It's like an idiolect. Do you know about idiolects?
Stephen: No.
Lyn: Well,  quite a lot of people can share the same dialect, but no two people speak exactly the same. In that respect, we're all unique. Good, eh? We've all got our own idiolect.
Stephen: Yes, I see.
Lyn: Well, I'm a body language person and, er, no one's ever done sexual idiolects.
Stephen: But you're going to.
Lyn: Hmm. Dead difficult. Much easier to experience than describe. 
Stephen: Yes, I do see that, Lyn.
Lyn: It's you that's made me think of it. I dunno: being with you, it's, erm, it's like listening to you. I mean it's like listening to you.
Stephen: Is that all right?
Lyn: Yeah, of course it is. What's the matter?
Stephen: Nothing, really. It's just that, occasionally – I mean, don't get me wrong, I feel amazingly lucky and grateful and all, and I am – it's just that, now and then I feel like, well, one of those smoking beagles.
Lyn: An experimental subject...?
Stephen: Well, yes.
Lyn: We're all experimental subjects, Stephen.
Stephen: ... in life's cruel laboratory. That's the sort of thing Jock says.
Lyn: Hey, listen you! I was trying to tell you you're special.
Stephen. Oh.
Lyn: I'd say more, only it's against the rules.

The connection Lyn makes between sex and idiolects – and specifically the deception of the wrong person slipping into someone's bed in the dark – got me thinking. 

A swordsman and a lover.

I’ve always been anxious that when Christian climbs up to the balcony to be with Roxane, Cyrano de Bergerac has written cheques Christian's arse can’t cash. She is seduced by Cyrano's poetic idiolect, his unique and distinctive use of language, but can Christian's performance possibly match the build-up? Cyrano allows him one kiss from her – apparently satisfied that, were it not for his nose, it would have been him up there – before the plot intervenes. But does he really think Roxane wouldn't have been able to tell the difference? There is more at play here than mere poetry, but he refuses to admit it. He is not deceiving just Roxane, but also himself, and he maintains the lie until the end of the play, ultimately failing to become a real hero. It is astonishing how oblivious he is of how much he has to offer Roxane sexually, and she has no idea what she's missing. Cyrano's poetry and sexuality derive from the same outsized extension of himself: his 'panache'.

What happens next?

Pinocchio's linguistic idiolect is also founded on lies, and specifically self-deception, which is so powerful that he will actually become an ass before he becomes a real boy. (And, whereas in the Disney film he is a naïve innocent who become corrupted, in Carlo Collodi's original novel he is dishonest and psychopathic by nature. One of the first things he does is to kill the talking cricket with a hammer.) It was inevitable that film-makers would want to explore the sexual aspect of this unique idiolect, the most famous examples being The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (dir. Corey Allen, 1971) and Pornocchio (dir. Scotty Fox, 1987). Yet the little wooden boy is as much in denial about his sexuality as Cyrano is. He cannot acknowledge that his nose is growing, as to do so would implicate him in a Cretan (Epimenides) paradox. The statement 'My nose is growing' cannot be true. It must be false, because true statements do not cause his nose to grow.

Ken Campbell's Pigspurt is another story principally about lies, nasal sex and self-actualization. In the final act, when KC meets 'God', he fears punishment first for his dishonesty in introducing lies into his stories, and then for his life of coitus proboscidalis. 'God' simply makes fun of him, 'cruelly impersonating my accent' (i.e. his idiolect). 'You were always invited up, weren't you?' he says, and, in likening KC to Christian, who gets his kiss, rather than the tragic, self-deceiving and idiolectic Cyrano, who dies unacknowledged, he is making fun of KC's naïvity. For 'God', life is about what you do, not in the truth of how you tell it. Uniqueness is incompatible with uttered truth. (Life is in the dashes – the connections between utterances – not in the full stops.)

These three examples from cunninasal literature tell us something about our idiolects. It is difficult to become completely aware of them by ourselves. It is impossible to hear (or feel) ourselves the way others do, and as long as our idiolects remain mysterious to us, they will remain instruments of self-deception. (Dan Mintz explains this revolutionary masturbation technique: rather than sit on his own hand so that it feels like a stranger is jerking him off, he sits on his own dick so it's like him jerking off a stranger.) In other words, we must 'find our own voice', which is far from easy. It is particularly unnerving to listen to a recording of your own voice, or, in KC's case, to catch glimpse of your own arse in the mirror. Similarly, it requires a singular effort to become aware of your own nose, which sits invisibly in plain sight, at the centre of your field of vision, your entire life. Stumbling on the key to your own (sexual) idiolect is the first step in unravelling your own inherent self-deception and unscrewing language itself. And that is the quickest route upwards and inwards to... 'God'.

PS Afterthought: I'm surprised there's nothing nasal about Lyn and Stephen's relationship in A.V.P.P. Perhaps I need to look again, more carefully (Julius Caesar's nose?). I also need to reread the Nikolai Gogol short story. 

A Missing Book

I've lost another book. I've lost my biography of Jacques Tati by David Bellos. I bought the DVD of The Illusionist by Sylvain Chomet, which is a new animated adaptation of an unproduced Tati screenplay. Though I am no cinenthusiast, I thought was the most beautiful film I'd seen in ages when it came out last year. (And anyone who found it depressing wasn't paying enough attention.) I saw it twice at the cinema, and again tonight on DVD. And now I want to remind myself of the story behind Tati's original project, but I can't find that book.

Where is it? Is it simply by-passing my eye muscles or is something more ghastly going on? Is it behind something? Has it been left behind somewhere? My greatest fear: it is among a number of books that I have been careless enough to leave in a box somewhere, lost forever. Without a full inventory of what books I own, I won't be able to confirm or refute the 'missing box of books' theory. I have three bookcases in the living room, shelves running around the ceiling in the hallway, and more shelves in my bedroom.

There are of course numerous ways to go about organizing your books, and the best list of these was compiled by Georges Perec for his essay 'Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books', which was published in 1978. I once belived I had my system perfected. When we were living in Seven Sisters, I finally, after spending many hours, got every volume I owned in what I considered at the time to be the perfect order, according to a system was a hybrid of alphabetization, thematic association and biographical sensitivity. (Authors who hated each other in life should not be placed side by side on the shelf; Cocteau and Radiguet are inseparable, and not even the alphabet can come between them.) On those Seven Sisters shelves, they formed a spectrum of authors, flowing seemlessly from one to the next, making finding a particular book more intuitive than logical. But this system broke down when we moved house. For the purposes of putting them into boxes, I grouped small books with small books and big ones with big. By the time we'd moved another two times, my library was chaos again.

Where the hell is that Tati biography? Is it possible I lent it to someone? Did I lend it to you? Whoever has it, can I have it back? The same goes to anyone else who's got one of my books. You know who you are. You're all making me miserable.

Changing addresses is obviously the enemy of book order. I moved out and lived in a series of strange warehouses last year, taking with me one box of what I considered to be the twenty or so books I really felt I couldn't face being without: my 'Desert Island books', if you like. They included: The Great Fire of London (Roubaud), Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), Locus Solus (Roussel), the complete letters of Erik Satie, I Am A Beautiful Monster (a collection of writings by Picabia) and The People's Almanac # 2. These books thus got separated from my main library and still sit separately from their natural companions.

Missing.

I ought really to get into the habit of arranging my books, and rearranging them, of fussing over them, moving them about, bringing them together and separating them, as an ongoing project of book ordering without a particular end goal in mind. Keeping a library should be like keeping a garden, with constant maintenance, perpetual change and lively symbiosis.

Where is it? I expected to find it next to that weird little badly translated book The Films of Jacques Tati by Michael Chion (Guernica, 2003), but it's not. That's going to bug me.

David Bellos also wrote that fat biography of Georges Perec, which I'd had for years and finally got round to reading while on holiday in Thailand a couple of years ago. It's an impressive piece of research, and well told, but it lacked any Perecqian mischief. Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I'm a big fan of biographies. The story is always the same: how the 'x' (lower case), whom we don't know, became the 'X' (capital), whom we recognize and love. A good biography will make this transformation seem surprising and fresh. A dull biography will make it seem inevitable. It is as if there are two levels of that 'how': a 'technical how' and a 'deep how', akin to a 'why'. Let's try to explore the 'deep how'. How did I lose that book? How? I left it in a pub? Really? How did I do that? How?

Deep how.