NOVEMBER
Eighteen visitors; no prospect of any rescue.
Crossing the road, a young woman walked directly towards me, head down, swiping her phone, oblivious. At the last moment, without looking up, she swerved as I swerved, and we collided. She gave me a scowl and went on her way, still swiping. I watched her until she turned the corner; not once did she look away from the phone. Twenty people, more or less, mostly young, were walking down the street from that corner; ten of them, I’d say, were staring into their phones; several had ear-buds rammed in. Downcast eyes, like prisoners in the exercise yard. But had they looked up, what would they have seen? Advertisements on all sides. Perfect young women, bikini-clad in dazzling Caribbean water, or striding along the streets of immaculate cities, hand-in-hand with perfect young men. With their glorious faces, their resplendent hair, their magnificent dentition, their superlative limbs, the superhumans transform the sweatshop clothes into covetable items. On a billboard, a car gleams in white space, as if it were a masterpiece of sculpture. Gorgeous children laugh in a film-set of a bedroom, under the gaze of their strangely youthful mother. Everywhere, false images; generators of money. I recall a moment with Imogen, on Oxford Street. ‘All right, Jeremiah,’ she said, ‘we get the point.’
On the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, Val has thoughts on the topic of getting older. Her body is not what it was. Of a morning, her joints seem to have rusted while she slept. Her eyesight requires ever stronger correction. Her sense of taste has become duller; she is aware that certain frequencies have become inaudible to her. Ageing is indeed no picnic. She has friends who have made use of hormone replacement therapy. It must be said, some of these proponents of medicinal enhancement do look marvellous. They have recovered something of the lustre of their earlier selves. But HRT, for all its benefits, was not the right way for Val. This had nothing to do with whatever risks such treatment might entail – though naturally one must be aware of these risks before making the choice that every woman is entitled to take. No, Val has preferred to let nature takes its course, unobstructed. Body and mind will remain in step, and the latter will be enriched, she believes, by learning to accommodate the changes to which the former is subject. Our culture’s cult of youth is deplorable. To counter it, we should take a lesson from those societies that still maintain a reverence for the wisdom of older people. It is a sign of what we have lost that it is almost impossible to use the word wisdom without embarrassment. Val makes no apologies for using that word. ‘The wisdom of experience’ may be a cliché, she concedes, but clichés become clichés because they are true, she reminds us. The road becomes harder as we grow older, ‘because we are climbing perpetually’. And because we are climbing, ‘with every year we see farther.’
Our society enforces an imperative to preserve oneself at all costs, while at the same time pretending that death is not the end, said Imogen, after the first operation. But death was simply nothing, she said. Just look at a butcher’s counter; look at the insignificant little corpses flattened on the road. There’s nothing to be afraid of, she said; there’s no mystery – flesh is merely stuff, like everything else. And we can all, easily enough, come to terms with the death of anyone, with one exception, said Imogen. Though she had no fear of death, the sorrow of the thought of no longer being in the world was often too much for her, she admitted.
Fireworks had always thrilled her. I can see her face, the grin of wonderment at the geysers of silver light, the huge flowers of coloured fire that bloomed for an instant and vanished above us. We were watching from a road, at a distance from the bonfire. Shrapnel of firework casings – curved segments of thick grey cardboard – clattered on the ground around us. The detonations were as loud as thunder directly overhead. Francesca’s boyfriend stood behind her, with his arms clamped around her waist; he produced a laugh sound, but seemed pained by the pointlessness, the profligacy of it all. ‘Frankie’ was what he called Francesca, which nobody else ever has, to my knowledge. We felt sorry for him, because he knew his time was almost up. Fireworks were an art form, Imogen proposed to Francesca: the display had been crafted with great care, to give delight, and it had no meaning that could be put into words.
But the other year: the parade of pirates and sailors, eighteenth-century yeomen and American Indians, Mongol warriors, Vikings – every one of them with a torch of fire. Belligerent jollity. A bandolier of firecrackers, hanging around the neck of an effigy of Guy Fawkes, detonated with the noise of an ambush. Then we saw, at the top of a tall pole, the words Lest We Forget in letters of fire. Two grim-faced men held up a banner that proclaimed Faithful Unto Death. Another: No Popery. Their demeanour was adamant; the papist hordes might have been massing in the hills.
‘I thought this was just an excuse to dress up and make a racket,’ said Imogen. She had to shout to be heard. ‘These guys don’t seem to be pretending,’ she yelled, making frightened eyes.
Our species took its great leap forward when it stood up and looked around. No longer were we genital-sniffing hominids, scuttling around on all fours. We stood upright, and sight became our primary sense. Now the optic nerve of Homo sapiens has nearly twenty times as many nerve endings as the cochlear nerve, the second most sensitive organ of perception. Conversation at normal volume becomes incomprehensible at a range of less than one hundred feet, but the human eye, unaided, can discern the flame of a single candle at a range of a mile and a half. It can distinguish in the region of ten million different colours, by some calculations.
‘It is time to abandon the world of the civilised and its light,’ wrote Georges Bataille in ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’, published in 1936, in the first issue of Acéphale, a journal founded by Georges Bataille to publish writings from the secret society of the same name, also founded by Georges Bataille. ‘Secretly or not, it is necessary to become other, or else cease to be,’ he declared. ‘WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS,’ he proclaimed, in capitals. ‘What we are undertaking is a war.’ The war was to involve a sacrificial ritual, a sacred game such as Nietzsche had proposed as a means by which humanity, having brought about the death of God, might find it possible to overcome the consequences of God’s removal. The sacrifice was to be conducted at the Egyptian obelisk in the centre of Place de la Concorde. It appears that an animal was to be slaughtered, but precisely what species of animal was to give its life in the cause of spiritual regeneration remains open to question. It might have been a goat, or a rabbit, or a gibbon. A female gibbon, of course. The members of Acéphale seem to have considered performing a human sacrifice, perhaps in the forest of Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, where the group often gathered by a tree that had been riven by lightning. Writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, with whom Bataille and Roger Caillois established the Collège de sociologie in 1937, pronounced this sacrificial project ‘puerile’.
On January 21st, members of the Acéphale group, I have learned, gathered to commemorate the execution of Louis XVI, who on that date, in 1793, had been guillotined on Place de la Concorde.