Here is a piece I wrote for a fanzine called ALASICANNOTSWIM.
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Machiavelli & Me.
There is no necessary or predictable relationship between what happens to us and what we deserve.
Sitting here in this dingy, damp, cellar; a blunt pencil and few scraps of paper are the only things staving off complete insanity. My captor, a lanky 15 year old with a flick knife and an unfathomably disproportionate grudge, switched off the light before he locked me in here. Thankfully, there is enough moonlight seeping through the ventilation cover to allow me to commit my story to paper.
It was a Friday morning much like any other. I dragged myself out of bed, showered and made my way across town to my first lecture. I was all but sleepwalking, until a guy nearly got hit by a bus about 3 feet ahead of me. That woke me up a little; seeing someone come within inches of their death tends to do that. I made sure that he was OK. He seemed shaken up but appreciative.
I arrived at my lecture to find that it had been postponed until 2 O’clock that afternoon. This was most annoying as I had nothing to do for the next four hours. I reversed 180 degrees and set off to walk home; I needed to make the best possible use of my time, so I thought I’d go home and work on a philosophy essay.
I got back to my flat and switched on my laptop. My housemates weren’t in, but my essay was already a week late so the fewer distractions the better. I’d decided that to make up for the lateness of the submission, I’d spice it up a bit, with an elaborate analogy. Machiavelli & Human Psychology understood through the nuclear family.
Here is a segment of the essay:
In this paragraph we will consider an analogy in order to elucidate our understanding of Machiavelli’s theory of Human Psychology.
Jane’s parents are flying to Florence for a short break; they tell her that she is in charge for the weekend. She has the unenviable task of forcing her mischievous twin brothers to behave. Jane is 18, her brothers are 15.
How can she get them to behave? Unlike her parents she does not have the protection of tradition or custom? She is playing the power-game under the most naked and unfavourable conditions. Therefore she must be ruthless. She decides that fear is that best means with which to rule. After bidding farewell to her parents, she informs her brothers that she has acquired an x-rated magazine from the local corner shop.
“If you take one step out of line”, she tells them calmly, “I will hand this to mum and dad and tell them I caught you reading it together!”
The boys are horrified. They each react differently. One screams at her, tells her that it is unfair. He is deeply distressed by the situation he finds himself in. She banishes him to his bedroom for the night.
The other, more astute brother immediately becomes sycophantic, promising to be on his best behaviour. She rewards him by letting him play on his Xbox and they share a tub of ice cream.
This analogy highlights the four emotions identified by Machiavelli as being central to humanity. Machiavelli identifies the ease with which feelings of hate, love, fear and contempt can be activated as the reason humans are easy to control. The first brother feels fear, hatred and contempt; he is harder to control and will eventually become uncontrollable. The second brother feels fear and love; the ideal combination of emotions with which one can rule according to Machiavelli. In the following section we will discuss Machiavelli’s view on the relationship between morality and politics…
What with working for a few hours, it was almost time to go to my rescheduled lecture. My housemate returned, he’d decided to come home and watch a DVD. We chatted for a while and I left.
Knowing that time was not on my side I decided to take a shortcut, past the old swimming baths. The path was narrow and secluded, but it took 10 minutes off the journey. As I progressed up the hill, I noticed a tall figure making their way towards me from up ahead. As I got nearer I could make out more of the character, but still not enough.
“It’s you” he said, accusingly.
“Er, yes. It is me…” I laughed nervously and tried to brush aside his assertion, but deep down I could tell that this guy was pretty angry.
“You’re the one who wrote the story. You’re the bastard who ruined my weekend”. He could have only been about 15.
“Which story do you mean?”
“The story. The bloody story with the porno-mag! Who do you think you are trying to embarrass me like that? You didn’t even give me a name! You left me in that bedroom to rot, now I’m going to do the same to you”
I didn’t know what was happening but I knew I wanted to leave. I tried to push my way past him and muttered “leave me alone”. It was dawning on me who this person was and I didn’t like it.
“Oh, no you don’t mate” He said, and brandished a small but intimidating knife that he had been concealing up his sleeve. I made a run for it, but didn’t get far before feeling a blunt thump on the back of my head and blacking out.
When I awoke I was in this cellar and he was standing there in front of me. I pleaded my innocence. He was unrelenting in his anger.
“What? So you think you can just go around writing stories without fully fleshing out the characters.” I tried to explain to him that it was just a little metaphor in a silly formative essay. He told me that it didn’t matter, I needed to learn. He was teaching me a lesson.
“You can’t put people through that sort of thing if you aren’t even going to put a few posters on their bedroom walls. You failed to include the smallest amount of character development before putting my brother and I through that embarrassing ordeal. You didn’t even give us names, for Christ’s sake.”
He switched the light off and it was a few minutes before my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It must have been late. I could see Gilesgate roundabout through a small hole in the ventilation cover, and there were barely any cars on it.
I had the eerie sense that he was still silently standing outside the door, so I pleaded with him and told him I was sorry, but he did didn’t reply. I knew that he was giving me time to think about things. I had no time for thoughts, only feelings.
Hatred. Fear. Contempt.
In the end I will be rescued by Joseph David Webster. Born in Rotherham on the 26th of February 1984, Joseph considers mountain biking and non-mainstream indie-rock to be his two primary interests. He rarely wears the colour red as he thinks it makes him look pale. He has short brown hair and has a birthmark resembling a bird on his right thigh. Earlier today he was almost hit by a bus.
“There is no necessary or predictable relationship between what happens to us and what we deserve”.
Now apparently a youth hostel is a place where teenagers go on holiday if, for some reason, their parents can’t afford to send them to the nearest Hilton. When you’re there you cook and clean and do all the shit that you’d ordinarily pay people to do at home in Kensington. I had never heard of such a strange ‘holiday’ but seeing as I’m on the payroll, I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Naturally I phoned my friend Big Dan and asked him to come with me, (he’d been involved in a pretty grim altercation in a bar called the Greyhound a few nights prior and we decided it was probably best if he kept a low profile around West London for the time being). So we set off together early that Friday morning and after a pretty long drive up the M1 to Hexham, across the A69 and along some minor back roads, we found the place.
It really was a castle, standing alone in green and hilly landscape, and appearing greyish brown against the clear blue sky. The only other landmark in the visible distance was a small wooden bridge on the horizon which crossed a river into an area of hilly woodland.
The thing that really struck me about the countryside was the lack of cash points. I needed money and I had no idea where to get it from. We asked a group of ramblers who were standing in the courtyard of the castle whether they had any idea where we could get some cash and they told us to head towards Haltwhistle. We got back in the car but a man exhibiting a large beard protested.
“Why don’t you forget the car and come with us?” he said. “We’re heading that way and the walk would do you fellows some good.”
At first I was reluctant, but I had a job to do; walking seemed to be very important to these people, so we agreed and soldiered on towards Haltwhistle. Big Dan had never been out of Central London, and found the whole thing extremely confusing. Prior to our trip he thought Hyde Park was the countryside. At one point we encountered a cow. Having never seen a real one, Big Dan was most perplexed. From the look on his face I inferred that a combination of children’s television and shoddy advertisements had deluded him into expecting a cow to walk on its hind legs and sing catchy milk related jingles. I could see the experience was very upsetting for Big Dan so I took him to one side and gently whistled the theme from the laughing cow adverts into his ear. He was suitably settled.
The walk was all at once tiring and invigorating. I could feel my chest cavity opening and my nasal passages expanding. The mild gusts of manure being blown in by the breeze as we crossed the fields weren’t nearly as unpleasant as I would have predicted. I had no signal on my mobile phone, which was a little disconcerting, but this soon became a strong feeling of emancipation; I wasn’t expecting a call, nor did I need to make one.
We walked for around three quarters of an hour before arriving in Haltwhistle. The signpost read “Welcome to Haltwhistle: The Centre of Britain”. This claim made me sceptical but I suspended my disbelief for long enough to enjoy the quaint back alley we found ourselves wandering along. I popped my head into a little green grocers shop and shouted to the cashier.
“Excuse me, could you tell me the way to the town centre?”
The old man behind the cash register, looked at me confusedly for a few seconds before giving a laughter-filled response.
“The town centre mate? You’re in it!”
At that point London could have been a million miles away. I got my bearings and we bid farewell to the ramblers, (who it seemed regarded Haltwhistle as the starting point of their days walk.) I sent Big Dan into the local newsagents to buy some cigarettes and if possible a couple of bottles of red wine. While he did that I scoped out the rest of the so called ‘town’.
At first I thought there must be a doppelganger of myself residing in rural Northumberland. Every person I walked past seemed to say hello to me and smile. It was only after a few minutes it occurred to me that these people were just being friendly. I was clearly a stranger in their town and rather than treat me like an intruder, they were greeting me like they would a friend who’d come to visit. I soon got into the swing of things, but probably took it a bit too far when I tried to ‘high-five’ an 80 year old woman walking with a stick.
I apologised, helped her to her feet and quickly shot into what turned out to be a ‘railway café and bookshop’. The place was empty at first, and I found myself drawn to a table which had a map of Northumberland imprinted onto it. The shopkeeper strolled back in after having left his establishment completely empty for at least 5 minutes and said something along the lines of “I bet you thought you’d found the Marie Celeste”.
We exchanged pleasantries and he gave me a map of “the best walk in the region”. I tired to pay him, but he insisted that it was a gift. He told me to enjoy my stay and I smiled and made my way back towards the newsagents.
When I got there I saw Big Dan crouching in the corner waving a French loaf and shouting angrily at the shopkeeper. It turns out that upon being asked if he’d tasted the real ale at the Fox and Firkin, Big Dan had misunderstood the local accent and presumed he was under attack.
Thankfully my father owned Sunderland AFC during their 1970s F.A. Cup Glory era, and as a result I can speak fluently in a North East accent. I translated what was being said, and Big Dan made his apologies and left. I gave my best apology to the traumatised shopkeeper, who was extremely tolerant and understanding of Big Dan’s appalling behaviour. I bought the fags and booze and Big Dan and I set off on our walk back to the castle.
Our walk back was punctuated with ‘rests’ in which we drank wine and talked about the events of the day. Prior to that morning Big Dan had no idea that Cows were actually used to produce meat, and the fact made him feel somewhat uneasy. He described his discussion with the local butcher repeatedly.
“They kill them and cook them” he kept saying.
I have to confess that much of the rest of that night was a blur, including the actual castle itself. I seem to remember an AGA, an open fire indoors around which young people were sat singing, and a bed room in which one had to make ones own bed. Thankfully I was so paralytic that the ordeal escaped me. I don’t remember sleeping much and I certainly don’t know why my bed was covered in leaves.
I woke up feeling a little off, and as a result I could not quite gauge just how little sleep I had gotten. Big Dan had quite kindly left me a cup of coffee by my bed with a note reading “this will make it better, mate”.
I drank it, and assumed that the tanginess was just a bi-product of my hangover breath. As I sat in the dormitory drinking my coffee and looking out of the window at acres of green land, trees and wildlife I felt quite overwhelmed. I felt welcome here. I felt immense gratitude to the people of Haltwhistle who had done nothing but help us all of yesterday. I felt guilty that I did not live my life by the same high standards. Where I live there is no sense of community, I do not even know, let alone trust my neighbours. An empty shop in London is an open invitation to robbery. In Haltwhistle a crime against one person is a crime against everyone. All these feelings were building up inside of me at once. It all became too much and I had to get out.
I stormed out of the main entrance, through the courtyard and over a fence. The scenery was a green and blue blur and my eyes were welling with the force of the wind on my face. I crossed a rickety bridge and began to climb the steep, wooded incline ahead of me. As I reached the peak I took the biggest, deepest breath of my whole life and continued on my way. With every step I felt cleansed; every breath was a new lease of life. Things were going to be so much better now. I walked until I couldn’t walk any longer, where, in the centre of a forest I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I lay there for maybe an hour, watching the white clouds float across the blue sky through the cracks in the green leaves over head.
Now maybe it was a lack of sleep, or maybe it was the gram of mescaline that Big Dan had slipped into my coffee that morning, but suddenly there appeared to be 10 or 11 zombies staggering towards me from deep within the forest. I was ripped from my personal Nirvana and in a panicked frenzy I screamed and legged-it face first into a tree. Some time passed before I eventually realised that it was not zombies seeking to eat my brains, but a friendly posse of ramblers who had accidentally happened upon my woodland den. It was, in fact, that very same posse who had been so kind to Big Dan and I a day prior.
They could see that all was not well and helped me to my feet. We made our way back to the castle and chatted about a variety of things, ranging from bird-spotting to the ‘Oyster Card™’ system of the London underground. We arrived to find Big Dan in quite a state. He had taken himself on a walk through the surrounding area and had enjoyed himself so much that he was desperate to pay someone for the experience he’d had.
“Surely this can’t be free, it was at least as fun as the Oblivion at Alton Towers if not more so!”
I explained to him that not every human action needs to culminate in a cash transaction, and that things were different here. He just couldn’t grasp the concept so I eventually just told him that Saturdays were free. It will take him a while to truly understand what it means to experience joy without the need for a receipt, but I’m sure he’s taken a big step in the right direction.
We collected our things and got back in the car. I wanted to stay, but the longer I stayed I knew the harder it would get to leave. I was also very aware of Big Dan’s growing confusion and felt it necessary to get him back to Marble Arch, where things were polluted and familiar. Off we went, waving goodbye to Northumberland, and all that goes with it. I’ll never forget it.
I came out of a toilet cubicle freshly-watered, and saw him drying his hands. He saw me and competed with the drone of the noisy hand dryer to ask me how I was.
I said ‘I’m good, how are you?’
He said ‘sorry?’
Assuming he’d misheard me because English is his second language and I talk with a broad North Eastern accent, I said, slightly louder ‘I’m good, how are you?’
He made his face into a squinting-smile, tilted his head and said ‘sorry, what did you say?’
The noise of the now automatically flushing urinals coupled with the hand dryer was somehow echoing in the centre of my brain. ‘I’M GOOD, HOW ARE YOU?’ – I was now practically bawling at him.
He shook his head and replied confusedly ‘YOU’RE COLD?!?’
At a loss for words I just silently agreed. To the soundtrack of pissing piss-pots and hot air I left the gents finally, returning to screen 3 to watch the movie with my buddies.
As I showed my ticket to the usher (‘favourite film: the matrix:reloaded’), I contemplated the ordeal I’d just gone through. I wasn’t cold at all. I was perfectly fine, I’m usually very fussy about temperature, but this place was just right and yet I’d lied to Professor Whelpdale. I took the easy route.
“He must think I’m a cold blooded freak” I absent-mindedly muttered under my breath, as I struggled to find my friends in the auditorium. Aldous Huxley once wrote: “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”. But to Professor Whelpdale, I would forever be the strange kid from his Thursday Tutorial, who was cold in a perfectly well heated and comfortably seated cinema complex. On second thoughts, I think it was a rom-com staring Hugh Grant alongside Julia Roberts or Matthew McConaughey alongside Jennifer Lopez or John Cusack alongside Kate Beckinsale or Billy Crystal alongside Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks alongside Meg Ryan. It was that one where there are the two people who love one another and then they encounter some difficulties related to this, but eventually get together at the end. Anyway, after the film, we went into Newcastle to go round a few bars. It was a frosty night, and my genuine feelings of chilliness were making me most uncomfortable on both a physical and meta-physical level. It was slowly dawning on me that the lie I had told was not part of a one way process. The relationship was symbiotic; in choosing to lie, I had accepted that lie into existence. The fact that he had first suggested the premise of the lie wasn’t an excuse, in fact it made it worse. I had told him what he wanted to hear. The white noise filled my head and I gave in and took the easy route.
We got to a club called The Basement, the taller doorman was very friendly, the short one was completely unreasonable. We got downstairs and my friends all ordered ‘Skittles’ (a brightly coloured vodka based cocktail). I was driving, so naturally I didn’t buy anything. This was probably for the best given my mental anguish.
At some point I got talking to my friend about the band Murder By Death. He told me that he’d read in Kerrang magazine that their new album would be based on the first book from Dante’s ‘Inferno’. For whatever reason I knew that Dante’s ‘Inferno’ wasn’t strictly speaking a book in its own right but was the first of three chapters in his Divine Comedy. I would have corrected him, but given the loud music and the fact that he appeared to have procured the grand sum of his knowledge of 12th Century Italian literature from a glossy weekly alternative music publication, I let it be. To be honest I was just glad to be able to think about something other than the filthy liar that I had mutated into in the Odean™ bogs.
Poor Whelpdale.
When I got home I really needed to sit and think about things. I needed to really sit and think about things. I needed to sit and really think about things. I really needed to really sit and really think. I flicked through the channels and through the pages of the magazines and through the pages of Myspace. I just kept seeing the same show over and over again, the same band with the same 6 guys in black T-Shirts, playing the same songs, (yet parting their floppy black hair in a variety of different ways). I heard the same jokes. The same set-ups and the same pay-offs. At one point I was literally watching a repeat. This pseudo-individualism pacifies me.
The distinction between the truth and lies, if ignored, becomes meaningless. The more passive I get, the more likely I am to accept lies, of any kind. I don’t question authority, because I know it won’t achieve anything. In a world where only the ends matter, the means mean nothing.
Even when I feel inspired, the feeling soon passes. I get a text and lose my strand of thought. Everything blends into everything else. Since beginning writing this article I have already watered all the plants in my house, raced my friend’s dog up the stairs, and alphabetised my socks (first by colour and then by thickness). My attention span is… Where the hell was I?
The ideas formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School provide me with hope for my own sanity. As a Jew who lived in Germany in the 1930s, Adorno was well aware of the devastatingly manipulative power of mass-media propaganda. To him the mainstream media was a Culture Industry – ‘bread and circuses’ for the industrial generation – in which all the commodities are ‘unique’ on the surface and yet comfortingly familiar. This pseudo-individualism pacifies us. The Culture Industry has the power to flatten the potential of those things out there which do present us with a challenge.
Kerrang does Dante, The Muppets do Dickens, Anti-Flag do Chomsky. Dante -flattened, Dickens -flattened, Chosky -flattened. In merging high and low culture for commercial gain, we may destroy that which is valuable in each.
I am rarely challenged or taken out of my comfort zone. I become passive, and learn to accept more and more; after all what is the point in protesting when it never achieves anything anyway? With my eyes focused solely on the destination, the beautiful journey passes me by. I know it doesn’t have to be like this, Adorno knew this too.
I had all but repressed any memories of that trip to the cinema until just the other day when, on a warm March morning, I glimpsed Professor Whelpdale in the distance, merrily striding through the centre of Durham… In shorts. It hit me like a sack full of door knobs. I dropped everything, threw my head back and fell to my knees. The tears streamed down my face and joined the oranges rolling out of my shopping bags and together they let gravity take them on a one way tour of the cobbled streets of Durham, only to be trampled by mindless consumers. With their eyes fixed solely on the destination (Topshop™), the journey was passing them by (to the extent that they didn’t even notice several satsumas bobbling towards them at high speeds).
It wasn’t a cold day, it was probably the warmest day of 2007 so far, yet there I was, face in hands, weeping on saddler street in a giant padded coat and wooly hat. The lie had won. Professor Whelpdale stopped in front of me and asked me how I was.
I lifted my head and peered through my fingers with teary, bloodshot eyes. I could see his almost messaic silhouette there in front of me, hand outstretched.
I sniffed, took his hand and whispered delicately, ‘I’m cold. How are you?’
* * * * *
I’ve had a few days to think about things and I feel a lot better now. I really feel like my life is back on track. I don’t let the TV get to me as much, because I put my foot through it yesterday and then hurled it out of an –albeit very slow- moving car. On the way home from the cemetery my housemate told me he was almost definitely going to get ‘MARX’ tattooed on his arm and in place of the ‘M’, he’ll almost definitely be getting the McDonalds™ Golden Arches™. I told him that ‘ADORNO’ was good enough for me. Hopefully, now you might take an interest in Culture Industry theory too (in spite of the cheap ‘attention span’ gag I used earlier).
But please don’t take my word for it, make up your own goddamn mind.
NB. William does Adorno. Adorno- flattened.
