Solomon Kane 2007

It’s an odd thing, but when Robert E. Howard (yup, the Conan bloke) wrote his Solomon Kane stories, he provided an uncannily precise analysis of a certain kind of American exceptionalism.

Solomon Kane is a sixteenth century Puritan with a thirst for justice, who travels the world righting wrongs. He’s occasionally assisted by an aged Voodoo priest; he carries (the original) Solomon’s wand, introduced in a wonderfully offhand way; and he always fights evil, and he always wins out.

At one point, in ‘The Moon of Skulls’, Howard gives a very interesting description of Kane’s character and motivation. Here are the key elements:

‘He never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered, once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings… A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice.’

The contrast between the universality of Kane’s goals and the limitations of his methods is fascinating. Implicit in his character is a lack of a need for knowledge, a sense that by just acting he’ll be right.

You can read that as an illustration of Nietzsche’s ‘noble morality’, whereby the strong perceive any action they make as being by-definition right – but it comes alive politically when you compare it with the famous ‘reality based community’ quote.

Journalist Ron Suskind, interviewing an unnamed White House insider in Autumn 2004, was told that:

‘guys like [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which [the insider] defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”’

Here, too, is a rejection of a judicious, empirical study of reality – ‘cold and logical reasonings’ – for something far more impulsive. It’s implicit in the rhetoric, which neatly separates thinking from doing: ‘we’re history’s actors… and you… will be left to just study’.

It’s the Solomon Kane ethos writ large, expressed at the level of empire rather than person. I’ve always felt that much US pulp fiction is America dreaming about itself – but who’d have thought that Robert E. Howard could ever have dreamt of the Neo-Cons with such force and precision?

The diamond cutter

Much reading and writing over the last few weeks, and in amongst it all I’ve been particularly enjoying (and enthusing about) R.F. Langley’s ‘Journals’. He’s a poet, a (far more bucolic and less intense) disciple of Jeremy Prynne’s, bending language in strange and interesting new ways.

What’s valuable about his journals is the precision of observation therein. Langley’s obsessions – the natural world, small rural churches, tiny private moments – emerge again and again through absolutely committed, jewel sharp prose.

The book is a masterclass in concise, exact evocation, and also in the deep sensual engagement that supports that kind of evocation. More broadly, it’s one more demonstration of the writerly skill of just looking at the world that goes all the way back to Homer, and no doubt beyond.

It gives the lie to an often-made criticism of the kind of poetry that Langley, Prynne and others write. They’re accused of not engaging with the world, of purposely obfuscating it. The depth and quality of Langley’s journals easily and absolutely refute that.

Prose of this quality is documentary proof of a deep concern with the floating world, a concern that cannot but suffuse and animate every single line of his poetry. If we miss that deep engagement, then it’s our fault as readers, not his weakness as a writer.

If you want to check out the Journals, there’s a sampler here - well worth taking a look at. And here’s a little poetry - some Langley, and some Prynne. More to be said on these two as poets, I think - but not today!

Processing the world

Well, last weekend was very rock’n’roll – Djinn’s fractured Arab rave beats blending with Indokrautprog mayhem from Grok on Saturday, and word / sound crossover on Sunday as M. John Harrison and Erik Davis read with Grok. Here’s the Sunday line up, waiting to groove:

Grok came out of Stoke Newington’s leading boy band, the Stella Maris Drone Orchestra, with whom I play bass. We’re a bit dormant just now, tho’ we’ve got some studio time booked in a couple of weeks and a possible gig in September, so I suspect some interesting times coming up.

We make entirely improvised drone music, more or less chilled depending on our mood. Someone staggered out of one of our gigs once – the 4am ant mating footage abandoned Freemason’s Hall one – and told a friend that we sounded like ‘a jet engine taking off for forty five minutes’, which is as good a description as any of the kind of sound we can make.

I hadn’t really realised how much I’d learned from playing with the Stellas until I read this post on Mark McGuinness’ ‘Wishful Thinking’ blog. He talks about the movie ‘Amadeus’ and creativity, comparing the approaches of Mozart and Salieri in the film:

‘I think we can identify two different approaches to creativity in Salieri and Mozart.… For Salieri, [the temptations of real world success, praise, etc] intrude on the creative process, distracting him from his real work so that he deteriorates into obsession and mediocrity. For Mozart, they are kept at bay - at least during ‘work time’ - by a kind of magic circle, within which the artist is entranced by the art itself, immersed in creative flow.’

He’s very interesting, both on the film itself and on the research that looks at these two different approaches to creativity. In essence, he says that the most productive way to approach creative work is to see the work as an end in itself; a process worth engaging with entirely for the pleasure of that engagement.

That’s what I’ve got from the Stellas. What I loved about being a Stella was the process of playing together – ‘there’s nothing better than making strange noises with your friends’, as vocalist Tim once put it.

Some of my favourite Stella moments were entirely private – all of us, in the studio, making music. At times, it felt like a complex, layered conversation, carried out with instruments rather than voices. Gigs were great fun, but they were very much a by-product of that process of mutual engagement.

That’s fed back into the writing, and into life in general. It’s helped me realise that 99% of what we do is process; end points, moments of achievement, are at best transient little offshoots of those processes.

So now I try to enjoy the process as much as I can, and look at each one’s end point not as a great and glorious conclusion, but as a little marker of the moment where one way of engaging productively with the world ends, and another one begins.

Space is Deep

A.R. Yngve’s comment below set me thinking about the deepness of space, and a writer who’s dealt with its profoundly dislocating emptiness more successfully than most – A. E. Van Vogt.

Van Vogt’s ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ (or ‘Space Bagel’, as it’s known round these parts) couldn’t really exist without that awareness. Its protagonist, Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, is a Nexialist. That is, he uses a variety of disciplines (psychology, hypnosis, etc) to maintain the sanity of a crew faced with an overwhelming external blankness.

The need for Nexialism is established partially by the action of the book itself; Elliott spends much effort managing relationships between different political factions on-board ship, eventually having to stave off disaster by taking it over entirely.

It’s also justified by some disarmingly bleak, off-hand comments about how many spaceships just disappear in the void. Their crews are assumed to have had collective nervous breakdowns, either crippling / destroying their ships as political battles get out of hand and turn into real conflicts, or just vanishing on crackpot, unachievable missions.

For Van Vogt, Nexialism is humanity’s response to the problem of the void. On exposure, he sees us as either dissolving into it or fleeing into cataclysmic claustrophobia. To my knowledge, he’s the only SF writer to not only acknowledge the void issue, but also make its solution a key plot component.

There’s also an interesting broader point to be made. Nexialism is a response to a very real existential shock – there’s nothing out there! It exists as a kind of conscious / subconscious protector and lubricant, forcing spaceship crews to work constructively together rather than collapse into anarchy.

It’s administered by someone who’s effectively an elite priest figure, synthesising all human knowledge for the benefit of the less enlightened. Van Vogt’s description of it points on one level to a politics that despairs of human nature; incapable of dealing constructively with the harsh truths of life, we need to be coerced into ignoring them in order to achieve anything at all by manipulative, all powerful leaders.

That’s unsettlingly close to the Straussian philosophy that – as I understand it – lies behind current Neo-Con thinking. I find that kind of worldview pretty repugnant, and I don’t know anything about Van Vogt’s politics, so perhaps after all I’m being unfair to him.

Maybe he wasn’t trying to do anything more complex than make that point that humanity evolved to live locally on planets – and that stepping out of that into space is such a huge change in scale that we can’t help but risk breakdown by doing it.

Oh, and today’s entry title is a nod to one of my favourite every song titles – ‘Space is Deep’, by the mighty Hawkwind. So, to help you go in search of space, here’s a link to the song, plus a niftily cosmic set of images to go with it.