Thoughts, literary experiments, photography
Cold air in your teeth and your eyes and your hands. Cold air through your hair. Air to breathe and the coldness clenches your lungs and rips through your bronchi and you think you might leave, die, fly, run. Like fine wine or chaotic music the cold air stimulates your senses and prevents you from forgetting you are alive. But not yet. Not yet. Cold air feels like typeface on paper or a piano note struck.
Since Mengele, figures like Moreau — the book horrified the Victorians — seem almost quaint; you don’t get the same mad scientist characters now, really.
The monologue at the end seems to prophesy the catastrophe to come (and also segues nicely into The War of the Worlds). So too does Moreau’s attitude towards his subjects.
Ruminations on the animal within/beneath civilization parallel those in J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise. As well as the closing monologue, the moment where the human characters hunt the leopard-man with the other creatures (where man and beast are indistinguishable), and brief allusions to the abandonment of monogamy (the description of which Wells refuses to give).
A typical reading of this would examine the public’s fears about science, progress, and the crisis of morality after the death of God (Moreau’s attitude to pain) — but I think the constitution of society itself would have to figure, within which science as a specialized sphere, separate to the goal of human happiness, actually takes place, its operations rendering its subjects objects. In other words, the separation of ‘science’ and ‘the public’ itself has to be dealt with.
If art today has become impossible while being more necessary then ever, if indeed it falsifies itself by its very existence, then perhaps the only recourse is silence. Silence in the midst of chaos, cultural detritus, sub-farcical offerings, already-dead works, screams louder than any depiction, representation, any self-conscious falsification of form and content.
And yet, to mistake the silencing of art itself for a solution, to mistake it as the ‘right’ thing to do, would be yet more catastrophic than the continued, empty hustle and bustle that today passes for ‘art’. For the affirmation of silence – worse, its inheritance – however legitimately it expresses suffering that cannot be expressed, would result only in the eventual silencing of that which keeps such faculties alive, in however degraded a form.
To silence ourselves for the sake of what is silenced is ultimately to accede to its impossibility, to cease bearing even its rotted corpse in the hope of conveying a cure, to resign in spite of ourselves. But, if continuing the farce is also a form of resignation, also a form of giving up, giving in, then the dead ends that are really the same blind alley must instead point beyond mere art as the solution to the ills from which it suffers. These ills are not contained within art alone; art’s very existence is but a symptom of them.
In the residues of thought I scramble. I can never stay in one place long; the pull from elsewhere is too great. If I find myself in one meagre corner that, while approaching, I expect too much from, I am left reflecting on my own ineptitude as I leave it behind untrammelled. But even this reflection is a waste of time; still I continue. Why worry about wasting time when time itself is left to waste? My expectations are too great only because my own abilities are left wanting. And still the dust collects, and my feet leave less and less of an imprint, and through a musty window I can see an identical structure and I realise that I cannot touch what is not ultimately mine. I feel that, were I more assiduous, I could push my way into corners I had never even contemplated the existence of. I could shift the dust and press through and leap, buoyed up by the most microscopic force, into my neighbour’s garden. I could look over my shoulder and with that slight turn of the neck I would find myself back home. I could collect experience and leave it there and catalogue it and grow, if only. If only I were not left to skulk in corners I will never know. Their shapes refuse me. I can press in only so far before blood begins to clot in my compressed veins and I once again feel the need to abandon my cause lest I suffer something fatal.
And the personal pronouns jut out and become insults. They are like a wall of knives closing in and give the lie to the whole charade; still I continue.
Releasing pressure, I find that my blood has ceased to flow.