Wild Teenage Beatnik Parties on the Island of the Ghost Teachers

There was a big party on Lamma Island last week thrown by a long term denizen.

Actually, there was an innocence. Sure, there was a lot of cavorting but it was all very low-key and restrained in a way hard to describe to an American.

My own country is Allen Ginsberg's "lost America of love" and William Blake’s America: "It joy'd: she put aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile, As when a black cloud shews its lightnings to the silent deep."

This was an America of first born smiles in rented apartments which long ago exported peace and love and freedom and rock and roll to other lands, and as if we were a Central American banana republic, exporting Chicago's blues and the cake walking babies from home, there seems nothing left for the homeys themselves. Just as down South America way they say yes we have no bananas, the homes in America are in my experience counseled exclusively to shape up, to self-blame, to stop smoking and to stop listening to that old Debbil music we have exported anyway.

It's gone, Flintstone.

Precisely because Janis Joplin was sacrificed on an early altar of commodification, precisely because Jim Morrison had to end up pushing daisies in Paris lest he might go on to be an aging raging prophet (his choice to destroy himself after writing, as he had to, “Father: I want to kill you” being unfree) as opposed to a cash cow for the record promoters, today there seems when I visit America a terrifying absence of that ability to forgive oneself that comes from a smile from a stranger on the street.

Elvis has left the building.

Most of the guests were Englishmen, Australians and Kiwis and they came for the music on a patch of ground that overlooked the quiet sea. It was one of those rock and roll parties of today where everyone stands around at first holding maybe a beer, and then the women start dancing, and then the dancing fools like me, and a good time is had by all.

The truth of a party (as Tolstoy knew in his description of Natasha’a ball) is that we all feel isolated and lonely until we realize that it wouldn’t matter if we were.

Since I’ve been working so hard on getting my visa and in teaching to survive this was my Natasha’s ball, my coming out, and I introduced myself to a lot of people. My conversation starter was my get-up, which was a red bow-tie from a girl-devil costume, tailored jacket and no shirt (trousers? Of course I wore trousers. Man’s not dressed unless he’s got his trousers on, unless he’s a Scots Jock or something). Many people on Lamma Island complimented me on this get up even though I am not particularly buff, and I said that I had been told that the affair would be quite formal, with jacket and tie required, but I’d forgotten “the bloody shirt”.

It was meant to be an icebreaker and it worked.

In costume, you have to behave. You already look like a damned fool.

In America my Chippendale costume would have I think produced hard stares, for the use of bodies as commodities has produced in America a sour hatred and surfeit of and with the body, with especial hatred for any body that fails to completely live up to a star ideal of Arnold or Julia, who spend quite a lot of money mostly to make ordinary working people (who might run three miles first thing before work three times a week) feel like shit.

But my own running and working out has made me very tired of having to dress conventionally, whether in a business suit in the Seventies and Eighties or Gap-casual in the Nineties. I feel rather that I just want to say, hoc est enim corpus meum, this is my body and there’s an end to it (ashes to ashes).

John Updike has a short story in which a young boy is working in a grocery store in a Massachusetts beach colony. Three girls walk in for a lark in their bikinis. Two of them are giggly and ashamed but a third, little Queenie walks in with head erect and proudly. The manager says to the girls “this isn’t the beach” and asks them to leave. Upon which the story’s protagonist quits his job.

Lamma Island is what the British Empire has come to these days, and on Lamma Island the Chinese gaze in their stolid ways on the great-great-grandchildren of the matelots who first sailed into these waters “for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all”, who had nowhere else to go, who maybe had a load of Patna’s finest opiate puggle and half the crew half-dead from hunger and scurvy.

Lamma Island is of course part of the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, and lest we forget, there was an enormous October First sign at the pier to remind us. But it’s a bit of a haven for aging Western hippies as well.

The English had a reputation as a polite and commercial people in the 19th and 20th century because politeness, “good manners”, and queueing had literally been beat into them commencing in 1688 by a fearsome set of masters, the sort of men like the first Marlborough and the Duke of Wellington who embodied Hegel’s Lordship as opposed to Hegel’s Bondage, where “he who would be king” has first not to care, not give a good goddamn, about the sweetness of life as such and who, as such, is willing to Fight to the death, especially Frenchmen, from Oudenarde to Waterloo, with Germans being acceptable in a pinch and later on.

We confuse our personality with these chaps who the media, even “intellectual” books, present to us as definitive of humanity when in fact we are being schooled to be the other and hidden term, the servant who provides the deference, and polished brass and blanco, that creates the Great Man, from Marlborough to Donald Rumsfeld.

When I was young, I hauled home as is my wont a book from the library, Prussia’s Glory, a biography of Frederick the Great. He was king of Prussia during the Seven Years war, an early world war fought even in these parts and in America as the French and Indian War:

Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a soldier of the King
In the wilds of this wild country
And for the French and the Indians, he did not care a thing
In the wilds of this wild country
Oh Amherst, brave Amherst, ‘tis a name that will live in fame for ever more

Frederick the Great had a reputation as a strategic genius by the relatively static standards of 18th century war prior to Napoleon and America’s sharpshooters, a reputation for Enlightenment by the low standards of the time, and musical abilities such as many Germans have.

But my father snorted, “Frederick the Great!? You’d have been lucky as a Nilges to be a foot soldier and cannon fodder at Hohenfriedburger”.

It is good that Frederick the Great is not something sum yung chik would know anything about unless she chanced to be a graduate student in history at Princeton specialising in 18th century Europe. I say this because the kings of the earth are as dust and nothing and Great Fred’s actual career was experienced as horror starting from his invasion of Silesia in which like Hitler 200 years on, Frederick broke a promise, in Frederick’s case to the devout and rather plain Maria Theresa, empress of Austria.

Frederick the Great may have been queer, not bonny queer like in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but twisted closet case queer like in Silence of the Lambs.

That was about the only choice for a gay man, of course, in 18th century Europe. Fred's dad was a real ogre who liked to sit around with his generals swilling beer and smoking tobacco pipes, and Fred ran away because Dad thought his devotion to music and the arts kind of fruity for a future King of Prussia. So Fred might have had some twisty passages in his soul.

Fred asked some sensible chaps at some battle, who were in the process of making themselves scarce, "do you want to live forever?", in context a rather sensitive and philosophical thing to ask as opposed to Thomas Picton's words at Waterloo: "forward, you scum".

[I'll get back to the beatnik party, I promise.]

Fred was isolated from human contact at the end of his life, the only contact being respectful, even awe-struck stares from the populace as Frederick, der Alte (the old one) rode out in a shabby field grey coat in the morning. Frederick died in the arms of a serving man.

As such he was like Hitler immune to the usual sort of charms and nonsense which occur at the usual sorts of diplomatic bun fights, and more than immune to a plump and plain Catholic empress. His promise to her meant nothing to him and he was a psycho.

The invasion of Silesia wasn’t some movie, Der Alte Konig, made by UFA, the German film company of the 1920s that turned out propaganda product that helped the Nazis get to power (just as Ahnold’s films prepared the ground for Bush).

It has to be imaged instead if imaged it must be as fear, as rain, night and fog (nacht und nebel), from the viewpoint of the smallholder at Hohenfriedburger whose lands are churned to mud and who has nothing after the great event except the chance to relieve the dead men of their watches and portable computers.

Oddly, precisely to the extent that the mass media film has in the past twenty-odd years abandoned Modernism, abandoned allegory as in Hiroshima mon Amour, and reverted to the straight, American, cater to the least common denominator literal narrative of Histree, and precisely to the extent that Branagh’s Henry V and the recent film Kingdom of Heaven, about the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem…with facts supplied by narrow boffins, buffs and geeks under precisely defined contracts to screenwriters in desperate need of a clue…with an oversharp, almost frantic digital recreation of the past…the audience is steadily more ignorant about Histree as a continuous narrative.

[Wow that hurt. Precis: digitalization destroys memory as well as preserving memory.]

It is the end of a comparative ability, for a more diffused and book based approach might see Frederick the Great in the context seen in Clive Ponting’s Sinocentric world history, in which the “achievements” of Frederick the Great are seen as limited by the carrying capacity of land and forage, and “as dust and nothing” as compared to the empire of the Mongols or of Timerlane. The Mongol was of far greater cohesion and extent because the Mongols (like the Q’ing in 17th century China) were the paradoxical imposition of hegemony by a more primitive nomadic society on an agricultural society…something that Hegel missed.

For this reason, the Mongols’ domination of Eurasia from Korea to the marches of Hungary in the 13th century, and the domination of the Q’ing from 1644 to 1911, was more flexible, less apt to unsettle argicultural arrangements about which the headmen did not care, whereas Frederick’s men thought in the same terms, were from the same base, as the farmers whose forage they pillaged: Frederick's men needed a warm bed or straw and this limited Frederick’s depredations to a brief, and ultimately forgettable, and indeed forgotten, interlude.

But any time Hollywood chooses to recall some world-class folly and nightmare with frantic digital precision and historical accuracy, the representation is confused with reality as such and the audience is taught, not a connected Histree but instead the meta-lesson of servility and bondage to an image of the hegemon…in a fashion that reverts us to an era which, as described by Foucault, was based on the Manufacture of Consent by spectacles such as the passage of the King, public floggings, witch-burnings, bear-baitings and cockfights.

The destruction of memory explains the savagery of today’s public figures from Bush to Bal Thackerey of India, described in Maximum City, a recent book on Mumbai by Suketu Mehta, as a monster…who deliberately egged on the Hindus to burn a mosque by reviving the historical memory of its construction over a temple while conveniently forgetting the less exciting history of hundreds of years of coexistence of Hindu with Moslem, and of course forgetting Ghandi-ji.

Bal Thackerey today strikes poses as a great benefactor. He’s a big fan of Michael Jackson and nuttier than a fruitcake as far as I can tell from my limited info. The hypocrisy outdoes the Victorians because during the riots attendant on the burning of the mosque at Babri Masjid mosque in 1992 men were burned to death and today nobody cares.

And the current procedure for men suspected of terrorism in America is a forgetting while our Constitutional procedure of habeus corpus is a memory. Men are forgotten in the hardest practical sense where they are “rendered” to sub-sub-contracted prisons, some of them in the former Soviet block. The keeper of the jail doesn’t know their crimes, he only under need-to-know has a contract to keep the men locked up. He lets them watch DVDs but not contact their lawyers or their families.

“The addictive system is without a memory” – Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes Addictive

In this context, of course, if I can seemingly so jump so seeming discontinuous from Chingiz Khan to Bush, I come on as some sort of nut bar quite apart from the lack of a shirt, and I have learned to be careful about the fact that, like Borges’ Funes the Memorious, I remember so much.

And in all humility I must say the memory is selective. Historically I can read a date with some emotion, whether 1644 and the humiliation of the Ming while the Thirty Years Nonsense was winding down so far away, or 1919, my father’s birth-date and the year of protests in China against the raw deal China got at Versailles.

But I’m damned if I can remember Chinese ideograms or where I left my socks. I did remember my former (and only) wife's birthday but had no money as I did last year to send her a present, and she has instructed me, furthermore, not to send Oriental knick-knacks because of the clutter factor.

[Back to the party...]

I had a pretty exchange with a pretty young Brit at the Wild Teenage Beatnik party who wanted me, five minutes after we were introduced, to try to remember her name which she had told me but once. I asked if I would get a prize and she said maybe, but she had to tell me so I got no prize. The problem was that I was circulating, I was mingling, and had failed to focus on any one person. The problem was that in my narcissism I was overly concerned with how fly I was and not how pretty she was. Memory palaces are built on feelings which are felt.

The more you travel, the more you read, the less you know. I never knew Englishmen and I thought I knew Englishmen…from the films. But I never really saw their curious block-like heads which in America have narrowed because our Celtic heritage makes us more gnomelike. The curious block like heads of the English man (and I mean no disrespect) seem to contain not rage but a sort of strength instead.

I thought the typical English man some upper clawss twit but a British coworker in Shenzen told me what it's actually like to grow up in neighborhoods where if you wear a bright color, you get beat up. He described the reality as seen perhaps in James Cameron's Titanic, the butler who punches the young boy in the stomach and leaves him to drown.

But your typical English man isn't a hired bully, he only has to deal with an overall clawss and wealth divided society that today and under Blair has lost all trace of gentility and "clawss", if it really ever had it, and is based on wealth alone. As such he has a strength that Americans lack because our Constitution protects us, to some extent and primarily for the white folks, against the naked confrontation with embodied Power.

Of course, Bush is trying to change that and in the bankruptcy and inheritance laws, create a class divide. Bill Gates, in my opinion, violated the Constitution when he accepted a knighthood but we've grown used to having people in fact set themselves up as overlords because our sense of formal, written freedom has put us to sleep.

Englishmen, I have found as well, don’t speak the old upper clawss accent but instead Thames Valley. They have a word for doing it in addition to the f word that Americans don’t use, and that is Bridget Jones’ “shag”.

It would seem to be a useful word because it isn’t a precise synonym for the famous F word. You can’t say “shag you” because its connotation is shaggy, like a polyester rug from the 1970s or Jane Fonda’s hair-style in Coming Home. The American when he wants to get F’d finds himself F’d by abstract economic forces in addition to the other way and lacks a language to ask for a more friendly and egalitarian encounter.

I have been surprised from time to time to be accused of having sex on the brain. I have been surprised because I speak and write of Ten Thousand Things. But perhaps there is something to astrology after all, and my being a Scorpio.

I learned recently that a former manager of mine, with whom I used to fight enormous battles when I’d write a hand-rolled XML parser where he wanted me to use the Microsoft parser, in which neither of us gave quarter, is also Scorpio. It’s the intensity about which we speak of Ten Thousand things that makes the more sensitive ladies check for the exits when we grow amorous.