Most of my jobs have been so utterly pointless and tedious that the most one could say of them was, ‘i learned to hate shit jobs.’ i couldn’t bring myself to pretend that 3 months of entering numbers had been anything other than ‘data entry’, so every entry on my cv was something like: “First Bank, Oct – Dec 2004. Duties included: data entry.” Bonehead (a fellow Temp Major) commented: “Most amusing, your CV in its original form is a transparent reflection of your disinterest in work. A great testament to your honesty but not a good ticket to meaningless employement and the ‘gro’ it brings.” i did learn a great deal, but all of it peripheral to the job: how to deal with the unhinged aggression of Elderly Aggressive Female bosses; how to blend into the background when you look like you come from another planet; how to turn up late with apparent contrition every morning; how to surf the ‘net without being seen; and so on.
After 3 years of working in banks & assorted gulags and chain-gangs, my present job is Temp Paradise. As long as i keep up with the work no one cares what i do, how i dress, if i disappear from my desk for half an hour at a time, if i surf the ‘net, if i take my shoes off, if i cover my office walls with erotica & Dante, if i encourage pretty young physiotherapists to wrestle each other for my last audio tape. But i continue to learn, even in the absence of pain. My duties are divided between typing for physiotherapists and Occupational Therapists, and secretarial duties for Speech and Language Therapy.
The former is unexciting but instructive. i had never before given much thought to punctuation and the matter of paragraphs, but when you type out variations on the same dozen or so letters every day, your attention inevitably switches from what you’re writing to the bones of technique, where exactly to place a comma, if a semi-colon is called for, where to break for a new paragraph. i now notice other writers’ punctuation, and respond to the subtleties of rhythm, the implications of a comma’s pause, or hesitation, the boldness of a semi-colon, the finality of a full-stop; and the decisive act of a paragraph break.
There is also the matter of the terrible prose i am given to fashion into some kind of sense. ‘Inglish’ i call it, since it seems to have broken off from English and become its own language. Just one of many examples: “Access – patient was unable to gain access to her house safely with assistance to use step.” What the fuck? Sometimes i edit, sometimes i can’t even guess at the meaning, and leave it as it is. Sometimes i edit and my slightly altered version is returned with marginal scribbles indicating the perfection of the original; so i corrected ‘aleviate’ to ‘alleviate’ only for the physiotherapist to tell me it’s spelled ‘aleviate’. Sure it is, after all, what would i know?
For most people, being able to write comprehensible English is on a par with being able to speak Sanskrit, or play a period harpsichord; and to care about correct or semi-correct English is to be a contemptible pedant. Who cares if you have to read something 5 times to even half understand it? Or if it sounds like a neanderthal grunting session? There is in this a curious alliance of the fashionably educated, the disciples of Literary Theory, and the least educated, the virtually illiterate: for both, clear language is unnecessary.
My other job, secretary for Speech & Language Therapy, chimes strangely against this. Wittgenstein wrote of philosophy as ’speech therapy’, and i have increasingly come to see language not merely as the expression of thought, but as its determining medium. Life is not free of its forms, wrote Wallace Stevens; language, as one of the distinguishing forms of humanity, conditions not merely thought but experience (Newspeak in 1984). Language has limits but within those limits it is very powerful. The degraded and coarsened language of this generation of idiots is of a piece with the vulgar, cheap sensations of a culture of reality TV and chav idols. Is it coincidence that the principle offender in this deluge of stupidity and human ugliness is called Big Brother? This disease is one with Literary Theory: a poisoning of the wells of language, of thought, and of humanity. Consider the following choice excerpt from the fashionable panjandrum Judith Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The disciples of this vomit claim that anyone who sees through it, or simply turns away in just disgust, is uneducated, just as the NKVD said that liberated Soviet prisoners of war, reporting of the high standard of living for German workers, were ‘uneducated’, not Politically Correct. Or consider the life of one of the chief Assholes from France, Foucault:
Foucault came to enjoy imagining “suicide festivals” or “orgies” in which sex and death would mingle in the ultimate anonymous encounter. Those planning suicide, he mused, could look “for partners without names, for occasions to die liberated from every identity.”
Behind the bad faith of Literary Theory, and behind Big Brother’s purposeful coarsening of sensibility, is the same nihilism – a flight into the abyss; a cultural suicide. Both Literary Theory and chavtainment are pathogenic, and call for hygienic precautions; luckily one can (at the moment) simply not study the Humanities at university, or turn the television off. In time they will collapse, as must everything that lacks substance. In the meantime they spread contagion, and poison sensibility, coarsen and blunt thought. Literary Theorists will in time be seen not as pedantic oddbods, like the Medieval scholastics, but as traitors to the human race.
There is hope. Just as the Irish monasteries acted as storehouses of learning and wisdom through the Dark Ages, so i think if anything can come through the coming apocalypse, it will be through language. Only the simplest of technologies will survive. Perhaps, after the abyss into which we now plunge headlong, some shattered remnants will take up what books remain. i see my writings as a very small stand against the onrushing dark. If the nihilism of Literary Theory and chavtainment have substantially damaged the common language, and so thought and experience, then presumably it is possible to check this assault by using language well.
The War is inevitable now, i think; but afterwards, the lasting works of men like Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Milton, can rekindle the human fire. Although the post-war generation will be born in a shattered world, ruined by pollution, with vast, uninhabitable areas, poisoned rain and air, and a dead sea, at least the necrotic tissue of Literary Theory and television will have been purged away.
So, let the War come.
After Rose, that is like a bucket of cold water. Great post, though. And what punctuation. The semi-colon in the last paragraph definitely had a touch of genius about it. It took my breath away.
Great post. Yes I’d never realised that before, just how ironic it is that a reality TV show is named after an Orwell book.
Your work remains uninspiring. Why not re-invent yourself? Mage, guru, alternate healer? Beguile needy MILF’s with your smattering of Italian? Teach total strangers the meaning of life (according to Elberry)? Assume a new role at work? Doctor? Manager? Consultant? Take this new role very seriously and never step out of character.
MILFs not MILF’s – the plural of an acronym doesn’t require an apostrophe. Otherwise a good idea…if i’m not found dead in a ditch before i can implement it.
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
I never realised language could be so beautiful and esoteric. As though the food of the gods took linguistic form.
Andrew is joking I presume. The metre is one iron fist after another.
Still, regarding circuitous prose in general, I remember finding this quote funny when I read it in a book about existentialism, though to me it has much more life. I recall it, perhaps imperfectly, from memory:
‘The movement which began as a revolt against Hegelian metaphysics is, therefore, metaphysical in another sense, since the dethronment of an essentially conceptualising rationality in favour of a more existential approach, which accords greater importance to the testimony of affective human experience, was intended mainly as a way of impelling man towards a new awareness of being.’
Made me laugh, anyway. I believe by a chap called Ronald, or maybe Howard, Grimsley? I was in Oxford waiting to have my University interview. Perhaps it was why I failed.