1
I’m not sure of this, but I think
it was the seventies in which the word “survivor” became a special part of the
American lingo to describe the victims of horrific childhood abuse – or the
rock and roll singer's experience of a particularly strenuous global tour.
Gloria Gayner's glorious anthem burned the word into our consciousnesses - that
is, those of us dancing at The Florentine in 1979. Since then, the word is
everywhere, and it is softly lit with connotations of being, somehow,
admirable.
Survivor was a term of art for
Elias Canetti, too: Crowds and Power is, among other things, about victims who
went under and those who survived. In the background was the monde
concentrationaire, and in the foreground was Canetti’s readings from anthropology
and history. His chapter on the survivor begins: “The moment of survival is the
moment of power. Horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it
is someone else who is dead. The dead man lies on the ground while the survivor
stands.”
The term, with its “sur-“ prefix
(which it shares with surrealism) points to a puzzling, even illogical level of
duplication. Logically, realism should stand for what is real, just as being
living – vivant – should stand for being alive. But both reality and living,
which present themselves as natural givens, share a certain secret – they are
fabricated as well.
One of the most famous and fabulous
of survivors is Gulliver, the man of common sense whose English prudence and
sense of entitlement is cast into a world – a rather Irish world – where prudence
and sense of entitlement are a doubtful guide to monstrosity and disfiguration.
Doubtful, but in the end triumphant. It is in this register – the register of
the vicar explaining how to grow orchids in the garden – that Gulliver explains
how he managed to sail away from the island of his beloved, super rational Houyhnhnms
– horses – who banished him as a Yahoo – the human beings of the
island, who shit and fucked and babbled. The explanation comes into one of
those neatly tucked in paragraphs, something out of the abundant literature of the
voyage in Swift’s day, that contains an amazing amount of shock:
“I returned home, and consulting with the sorrel nag, we went into
a copse at some distance, where I with my knife, and he with a sharp flint,
fastened very artificially after their manner, to a wooden handle, cut down
several oak wattles, about the thickness of a walking-staff, and some larger
pieces. But I shall not trouble the reader with a particular description of my
own mechanics; let it suffice to say, that in six weeks time with the help of
the sorrel nag, who performed the parts that required most labour, I finished a
sort of Indian canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched together with hempen threads of my own
making. My sail was likewise composed of the skins of the same animal; but I
made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick; and
I likewise provided myself with four paddles. I laid in a stock of boiled
flesh, of rabbits and fowls, and took with me two vessels, one filled with milk
and the other with water.”
This is survival at its very nadir.
Orwell, in his famous essay on Swift, makes several points against Swift’s
reactionary politics that prove, at least to me, how English Orwell is – it never
seems to occur to him that Swift was very conscious of the colonial status of
Ireland, and that the writing, here, is all the more English for including the
ultimate shock that the English, when all is said and done, will use the skin
of the colonized any way they want to. Orwell’s blindness, here, is all the
more interesting in that he intellectually knew, from his own experience, what
the English colonial mindset was really about.
2.
Skin, human skin, is distinguished
from hide, which is bovine skin, once it has been stripped off the bovine, and
before it has been processed by the tanner. That human skin could also be
processed by the tanner has been noticed in the great popular mind, but when
the word “hide” is substituted for skin, we know we are in the realm of jokes,
those products of anxiety. Human skin, in the anglosphere, is bounded in by its
color – the poles being black and white – and associated with the great
polarities: the sacred and the abject, the beautiful and the aged, the healthy
and the sick. Our pocket mythology is full of skin.
For skin to become hide, it must
be flayed – stripped from the body. The knife must come out. To flay, in the
dreamlife of English, is to do something powerful and unclean. We dream of connections between ourselves and
the beast, and we found our socius on the denial of that connection, which is
as much at the root of our living together as any social contract. What, after
all, is the social contract written on but skin? The cleverest of all images of
the social contract – the philosophical parable about how it undermines itself –
was written by Balzac: Le peau de chagrin. Here’s a contract that shrinks every
time it is used. Here’s a capsule allegory of the history of every
constitutional republic.
Swift was a churchman, and a great
reader and giver of sermons. So it would surprise me if he was not acquainted
with Hugh Latimer’s sermons. And, in particular, the third sermon to King
Edward VI, given on March 22, 1549. A crucial seedtime for the installation of Protestantism,
and the undermining of Catholicism in the Kingdom. The
sermon is an interesting religio-political document. The theme is gainsaying,
that is, contradicting the false concord
that can result from an enforced but wicked orthodoxy. Latimer, here, is a
pioneer of what Walter Bagehot, in the 19th century, called "conservative innovation - the matching of new
institutions with old ones," although Bagehot’s
Victorianism was illmatched, affectively, with Latimer’s sense of prophecy.
Latimer’s point is that the Lord sends the preacher for a “first visitation” to
warn a wicked people – and if they do not heed, the Lord makes a second
visitation through epidemic, war, revolution, the throwing down of cities and
riot in the countryside. Speaking before
the king, he had to thread a very narrow eye: that in which the past Christian
order, under the devil’s rule by the Pope, was still, somehow, continuous with
the new Christian order, in which the devil’s rule was overthrown. The King’s
right to his throne, after all, was founded on a family continuity that
traversed the wicked time. As a popular preacher, he had to speak bluntly, but
as the first visitation to the King, he had to speak trickily. In other words, he had recourse to parables. This
is one of them:
“Cambyses was a great emperor,
such another as our master is. He had many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and
lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago since I read the history. It
chanced he had under him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a
gratifier of rich men; he followed gifts as fast as he that followed the
pudding, a hand-maker in his office to make his son a great man, as the old
saying is: Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil. The cry of the
poor widow came to the emperor’s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin
in the chair of judgment, that all judges that should give judgment afterwards
should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a goodly sign, a goodly monument,
the sign of the judge’s skin. I pray God we may once see the skin in England.”
The judge’s skin is a shocking image.
Latimer, it should be said, paid with his own skin for his views, being burned
as a heretic in front of Balliol College in Oxford. He could not bend to the
new twist in English policy when Queen Mary, after Edward, tried to promote a
top-down return to Catholicism. Latimer could not as a prophet countenance the
return to the hand-makers, the sellers of indulgences, the encumbrances to God’s
grace.
However: – the religious message –
the message in a sermon – was, as well, a political one that reached beyond its
ecclesiastical argument. The cry of the poor widow is not to be prayed away or
prayed under in any churchly order. It is to be paid for, eventually. And the
payment – in human skin – is set up for a reminder to the judge. What a
reminder, though! There is a mercilessness in this goodly sign that makes me wonder
how far to follow justice – and, in Swift’s terms, how far to follow reason.
For both require orders, and the social order is rooted in terror. If that is
the way things have to go, I am not sure if I’m not on the outlaw’s side. This
happens: I sometimes watch movies where I can see the murderer’s point of view
very well. As well, I suspect that the law will strangle the poor widow in the
end, or at least sit on her child for his lack of the right skin color and
apply restraints to him until he dies, and then call it a day.
I’m reminded of a song by Otis
Taylor, the House of the Crosses:
I
went down
To
the house of the crosses
I saw my momma
Fall
on her knees
Well
she told me
This
man's your father
He killed two people
And
he raped me
She took her trumpet
She
held it in her hand
She
yelled out: "He's a evil man"
There’s a rational philosophy of
Justice, which we hunger and thirst for; and then there is this dark, this
obscure point, where no resolution is possible. We are up against it, here. This, too, is the sign of the skin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwbRNOI1ZDU
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