Month: Jan 2016

Self-Taught: Monitoring The Vocab Stockpile

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Will Self & the Defenestration of Crypto-Lexicographical Codswallop

“And on The Guardian pedestal these words appear,

My name is Will Self, king of kings:

Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Will-ymandias – by the Second Coming of Percy Bysshe Shelley

       You’ve got to love this guy. He’s a hard act to follow and even harder to precede, but  imagined in the parlance of the Self himself, the compliment might instead go something like: having an enduring affection for this goy is a sine qua non. More than likely, though, his choice of words would be dripping with English sang froid on account of the scalpel he incises with when surgically he writes. Let’s face it, Self has more ways of saying essentially the same thing as the Jews have for Yahweh and the Muslims for Allah. Even at the ripened age of 50-sum, the boy’s got game. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster could not conspire to keep Will Self’s hand out of the alphabetic fire. Yip, this guy’s diction leaves me for dead, in a most edifying manner.

There, I hoodwinked you. But before I venture further into the murky world of words, I must digress without remonstrating the anterior cruciate of my eclectic somnabulance too much (now that is just piffle!). Hoodwink – seems straightforward enough in its etymology. Enter the flux capacitor: you’re temporally regressed to Paris in Anno Domini 1474, to a squalid, whoring flagellum that wriggled into architectural being just inside La Porte De Clignancourt. In this fleapit addendum of the damned, where harlots cling to the mortified remains of last year’s brood, where charlatans hustle in dank passages, and jongleurs in colourful tights hold street court with acts that are the forerunner to the Edinburgh Fringe, the Capuchin hoods of the medieval geezer conceal a knowing signal of the eye. The hoodwinked do not even know they have been hoodwinked because the hood covers the sly wink.

So anyway, de toute façon, I’m sitting there outside a bar in a small town by a lake in the central highlands of Burma (or Myanmar, as they having been insisting and we have been ignoring in favour of colonial revivification since 1989), as you do. This hotshot photographer from Toronto is sitting on the other side on the garrulous but very likable female barrister from the self-same city. We fall into talking. I say that someone has been hoodwinked, for reasons i can no longer recall. Thought that was a perfectly normal, legitimate phonetic route to go down, seeing that we were in Burma – sorry, Myanmar – and the clocks were running down to midnight on this the ultimate day of 2015. So, the photographer gasps in disbelief. ‘Hoodwinked?’ Then in that ineffable and slightly irksome big round green fruit North American city sophisticate kind of way, exclaims HOODWINKED? Upping the vocal notches still, he then rants, ‘what the fuck does that mean? Hoodwink? I’ve never heard HOODWINK before. I mean what does that MEAN? The final word attenuating as he chimed it right out of his smoke-free lungs.

I try explaining without making too much of an arse of myself. ‘You know, hoodwink. Means to…hoodwink someone. You know?’

‘What?’ he decries. ‘Like pulling down a hood and winking? I get that part. I get it. But i mean, what does it MEAN?

We scramble for the smart phone, the postmodern arbiter of all things everything. Shit. We’re in Burma, rural Burma – sorry Myanmar. Of fucking course there’s no arbiter to arbitrate this spot of definition-deficiency. Internet is that thing that lives elsewhere. So, scraping the barrel of my temporal gyrus, I make the nueral handshake and soon the synonyms are flowing faster than the Myanmar – sorry Burma – beer from the keg in the kitchen. Dupe; fool; kid; deceive; trick; pull the wool over one’s eyes. Now do you see, Mr Ace Photographer?

‘Fuck yeah! Why didn’t you say? Hoodwink. Who uses hoodwink? In the middle of Burma? At New Year? Who in their right mind uses hoodwink? I love it. Tell ya…’

He’s in his stride now, regaling me with the story of the Japanese girlfriend who, upon being ditched in favour of Narita Airport and a one-way ticket home to Canada, farewelled him with the unforgettable, but eminently forgivable, line: Go fuck your face!

‘What does that mean?’ he announces. ‘Go fuck your face?’ I mean, how do you fuck your own face? I’d like to know that.’

‘How do you hood your own wink, for that matter?’, I added for good measure as the countdown commenced to midnight and another year beckoned for those dastardly words. .

Will Self writes as few others scarce can or dare do. He is a curious hybridization of an 80’s under-performing undergrad with a nose for neologistic modernism, and one of those polymathic linguaphiles scattered to the four winds of empire, reluctantly repatriated after partition in 1947. Proust on a Monday, Calvin & Hobbes on a Tuesday, Rumi powdered with Rachmaninoff midweek and a nihilistic dose of Turgenev and Indie-Punk come the weekend.

I’ve just read a piece by him on his tainted blood (not the Soft Cell song). Stopping frequently in the lexicographic lay-by of my limited vocab to consult the map of obscure words and aphorisms, I came across the following: the great pathetic roué, the sooty furlongs, the hypertrophied concrete bunkers, the admiral-tipped bodkins, the no-nonsense veridical Guignol, and most imperious of all, the fictive inscape. If they didn’t exist, you would have to invent them, which of course he did. No, closer to the truth would be to compare Self to a midwife, but not the conventional type, rather the type who does the impregnation before delivering the miracle of birth onto the white space of various media.

For someone who, by his own recurrent admission, whacked his grey cells a bruised shade of purple with opiates and cocaine, it is small wonder that he can fetch words – specializing in the sleepers strewn across our 600,000-strong English lexical canon – quicker than a 2-year old Labrador a stick. The harder they are, the faster they fall. If Adolf Eichmann had been a 7-letter word, Will Self would not have needed Mossad; he would have been camped out on the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi, book in one hand and rollie in the other, before Eichmann ever set his sights on obscure, little San Carlos De Bariloche.

As pole dancers are made in the villages on North Thailand, so words are formed in the Wernicke’s Area of the temporal lobe. When you fuck this up consistently by hammering the head with drugs, brain acuity can often go by the wayside. But not in the case of our Will. He bucked the trend there, didn’t he? Scag was grist for the mill for him, making la farine plus fin dans sa tête.  You can picture it as a kind of cerebral battle of Monte Casino – Self’s Wernicke’s Area defended viciously by his SchutzStaffel intellect against the Opiate allies besieging him on all sides.

You’ve got to love this guy. He has held out against the forces of globalized democracy, whose prime directive is to make us all say the same shit with diminishing returns from the vocabulary we used to boast. In a world where the outscape is factive and bloody dull to boot, Self’s fictive inscape is a welcome retreat, into a interior hidden kingdom of mountains – like Bhutan squeezed into one’s head – which when you near them turn out to be Will’s vocabulary piled high, still lifting under a process of Selfian orogenesis.

It is these stockpiles of the wording mind that make climbing Will Self such a technical challenge, yet if summitted offer the lucky few a Wittgensteinian view of reality worth every goddamn penny, or if you’re a young Wittgenstein growing up in Vienna, a krone.

Gone But Not Forgotten

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He passed away three years ago yesterday. There was nothing could be done. Dogs cannot describe their symptoms, only in as much as their physical discomfort speaks it for them.

He had been limping badly for months. I had taken him with me to France four months prior to his death and even then it was evident that walks in the vast forest of Compiegne were not the wondrous canine adventure they had once represented. Indeed, the very sight of the tree line stretching away toward Paris had brought to those transparent eyes at best a look of indifference, at worst dread.

Initially, I thought it was hip dysplasia. The way he was going lightly on his hind quarter suggested a mechanical ill-fit or maybe rheumatoid arthritis. For a dog born in the Eastern Mediterranean, a life in damp NW Europe might well be leaving him singularly susceptible to the fraying of those Aegean bone ends. A visit to a vet confirmed the hip theory. A shot of cortisone later and Harry was bouncing on a new set of shock absorbers. To my dismay and his quiet disappointment, this spring in his step soon ran out of tension. Within a week he was back to his old moping, hobbling self. He walked through that beautiful forest as if each and every step was shot with pain, his likeness stabbed with pins by juju witch doctors in a far away forest. His pain was my pain, and much as i did not want to accept the fact, he was going downhill rapidly.

When neither relationship nor job failed to satisfy, i took Harry home to England. I remember well him sitting serenely on the back seat of my VW as we boarded le Chunnel in a freight transporter. I swear, it was as a passenger in a car that Harry loved best. Sitting on his haunches, watching the world go by with the sort of knowing one associates with a previous life. That’s how I remember him three years after he went from my life.

Back in England, his condition deteriorated, his mobility reduced to cinders. The woefulness in his eyes could have melted the heart of the iceman. Unable to bear this rapid demise I was witnessing, Harry was taken for a second opinion. Within minutes, the trusted Yorkshire vet located the pain not in his hip but rather in Harry’s knee. Just as i had suspected! The French vet had been wrong all along, and not only guilty of medical incompetence, he had also acted with a pomposity and peremptory manner i had elicited from no other Frenchman or woman, in spite of their global reputation for cutting off that Gallic nose despite that Gallic face.

When the vet’s roving hands hit the weak spot, Harry curled his lip, baring those ferocious gnashers. It was his wont when someone touched him off-limits.  An ACL – anterior cruciate ligament – rupture was the Yorkshire vet’s diagnosis. Now, this is a sporting injury by any measure. In footballers it is treated with six-months of inactivity followed by stringent rehabilitation. In dogs, however, the snapping of the ligament necessitates the same response as a racehorse breaking its leg. Undaunted by the vet’s gloomy prognosis, horrified by his offer of instant mercy, I mobilized the troops within to invade the headspace that would become the colony of ideas. What could be done? Dogs manage on three legs, don’t they? Better their three than our one, right?  Soon, it dropped like rain from the sky. The solution lay in the pioneering science of orthotics. If they could mould a stifle brace to the knee of an injured horse, by God they could do it with a dog a tenth of its weight. A few resourceful calls later, and I had my deliverance. American technology had gone Transatlantic, allowing a whole generation of dogs with mechanical injuries the chance of a second life.

Returning to the vet, I told him of my discovery. Impressed, excited by this development, he went home and read all about it. Calling me up, he seemed buoyed and ready immediately to make a cast of Harry’s knee joint. It was arranged then, to take my bewildered and inconvenienced dog boy off his comfy bed and in for exploratory treatment the following day. I had resigned to spending the next year as the dog’s de facto physio. What the hell? I had parented him for nine years, so this was the least I could do.

That evening the weather took a turn for the worst. The cold snapped, as it had nine years before, the day I found him half-drowned, half drenched, half-dead at the foot of a mountain at the other side of the European continent. My friend, and Harry’s second favourite person in he world next to my father, had come to visit. Out into it the three of us ventured. Harry loved having his dad and his uncle chaperoning him. We had his back. The snow floated down in fat flakes. The sight of it gave Harry a new lease of life and into white wilderness of the village he forayed. His demeanor had visibly improved. As always, Harry knew. I don’t know how. He just knew. This pain would soon abate and like the pensioner after the hip replacement, the old eyes would regain their youthful sparkle.

And then it happened. He slipped on ice and went down. Bang! We could hear it. Like an explosion inside his knee. Helpless he lay there, in the snow, ashamed to be collected up, afraid to be left alone. I laid him down on the sofa and for reasons I still cannot fathom, left him there with my Mum & Dad while I fled to the ignorance of my friend’s place. In our hearts we both knew that this was a fall Harry could not come back from .

The following morning, I collected his heavy self up and carried him to the car. Quite what he thought of all this I still cannot say. For a mutt with a prescience he was remarkably inexpressive about this, what would come to be his green mile. When the vet met me it was with quickened steps. ‘Yes,’ he uttered, excitedly. ‘I think this might actually work.’ When i lowered Harry onto the treatment table, the vet’s face fell almost as fast a the dog’s legs from under him. ‘The other one popped last night,’ I said. ‘He went down like a stone.’

He was dejected for me.

‘I am sorry,’ he replied. The man’s eyes said that orthotics was no longer the pioneering voyage worth taking.

Both Harry’s ACLs ruptured within days of one another. The rehabilitation, in the vet’s learned opinion, would be monumentally difficult for both owner and dog. His quality of life had now been scythed from beneath him and at the age of 9, could not be recovered so readily.

Watching him buckle and fall each time I stood him on all fours was about the saddest thing i ever did see. With a tacit nod the vet brought out the death warrant. Never had i signed something off with such a lack of flourish. I held him as my friend looked on, his eyes welling with tears. The dog never much liked surgeries; now less than ever. The vet approached with a sedative encased in a large needle, yet for each time he tried to find a vein, Harry rounded on him, snapping his jaws, flashing his teeth. Once the needle had gone in, still he would not lie and capitulate to his fate. Harry had fought death from the moment i found him as a sole survivor in a family drowning in the wilds of the Greek Peloponnese where he had been born illegitimate nine years before. When I picked him up shivering and bleating from that waterside on that cold January day in 2004, he was smaller than my hand, his heart a beat away from infant mortality. With warmth, love and condensed milk I fought for him then, yet here was me now, complicit in his premature death. For this he could not abide me. Another needle went in and like a great lumbering beast his head began to swoon. Now sedated, we lay him down on a blanket on the surgery floor and i kissed his beautiful head while the vet prepared the death serum. From the moment the heart-stopping liquid coursed through his veins, he was gone from me. Nine years on life’s journey with him and the serum had kicked him off the train as quick as that.

Nudging my head into his, still warm, I tried saying goodbye but it seemed insincere. Why farewell him when I would see him again some day? I didn’t know where nor in what guise, but I knew he would come calling again, in a daydream, in a traffic jam when least I expected it.