From the Land of Cockaigne to the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Land of Cockaigne (1567) 

Oil on panel (52 x 78 cm) 

First conceived in the imagination of medieval peasants and poets, Cockaigne is an immanent utopia wherein all desires are realised, sensual pleasures of every description readily available, and the daily restrictions placed upon one's freedom by priests and feudal masters are abolished - whilst they get their comeuppance at last.

Heaven might await the virtuous in some posthumous future, but Cockaigne was the collective dream of an earthly paradise - now/here, rather than nowhere - that encouraged the cardinal sins of lust, gluttony and idleness, thereby challenging the teaching that the good life had to involve constant toil on the one hand and abstinence on the other.       

At it's most carnivalesque, Cockaigne was said to be a topsy-turvy place in which the weather was always mild and even when it did rain, it rained custard; there were rivers of the finest wine flowing freely and ready-roasted pigs wandered about with carving knives conveniently placed in their back. According to some accounts, there was even a fountain of youth. Nobody works and yet nobody ever goes hungry.   

This idea of Cockaigne spread throughout Europe, with some interesting national variations; central to the Italian version, for example, which can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), is a mountain made of Parmesan cheese - which was handy for the people who lived there and spent the entire day preparing and eating pasta dishes.  

Of course, as with the appropriation of anarchic and amoral folk tales and their literary reworking as so-called fairy tales, eventually the myth of Cockaigne was taken up by the prigs and pedagogues of the emerging bourgeoisie and they turned it a fable condemning gluttony and sloth. Bruegel's depiction of Luilekkerland and its hedonistic inhabitants seen above, is intended as a warning against the spiritual emptiness that follows when we fall into a life of sin; whilst comic, it certainly isn't intended as a celebration of Cockaigne.

However, every now and again the idea resurfaces. In Haywire Mac's hobo-punk classic The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928), for example, which beautifully sets out an American bum's vision of Cockaigne:

A far away land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you can sleep out every night; a land where the cops all have wooden legs, the bulldogs have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs; a land where you never need change your socks and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks; there's a lake of stew, and of whiskey too - you can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe - a land where there ain't no short-handled shovels, axes, saws or picks and they hung the jerk who invented work. 

One might ask if a dream of a better life in a land of plenty isn't the primary factor at work within the ongoing migrant crisis; they cross the seas in little boats having mistaken Europe for Cockaigne ...

See: Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb, (Columbia University Press, 2001). 

For an earlier post on The Big Rock Candy Mountains, click here. 

On the Practical Idealism and Pan-Europeanism of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Count Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi 

(1894-1972)

One of the reasons that I dislike crackpot conspiracy theories in which nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected and invariably involves either the Jews or extraterrestrials, is that they serve to distract from and disguise what is really going on in the world.

What's more - and worse - they discredit the very notion of orchestrated acts, planned and carried out in secret, by elite groups, with sinister or subversive aims. One is almost tempted to say that all the popular conspiracy theories are themselves part of a wider conspiracy and that people like David Icke are essentially useful idiots, rewarded with fame and fortune for the work they do.     

So it is that people know all about Icke himself, for example, and his shape-shifting reptilians, but very few have ever heard of Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his vision of a future Europe composed of a racially-mixed population ruled over by a politico-spiritual elite.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the key early advocates of European integration and served as the founding president of the Pan-European Union for almost fifty years; a body that served as a prototype and ideological foundation for the EU as we know it today.     

Aristocratic by birth and temperament, Coudenhove-Kalergi nevertheless favoured social democracy over feudalism. His ambition, however, shaped by readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler and detailed in his own extensive writings from the 1920s onwards, was to oversee the creation an ultra-conservative, post-democratic Europe, in which the nation state was dissolved, but the continent united by a common cultural ideal.

Not surprisingly, his Pan-Europa project was despised by Hitler, who characterized Coudenhove-Kalergi as a rootless, cosmopolitan half-breed, supported by Jewish finance and under the influence of Freemasonry. And, indeed, Coudenhove-Kalergi continues to serve as a hate figure today for those on the far-right opposed to globalism and who understand the European migrant crisis as an attempt to destroy the racial foundations of Europe and eventually replace the native peoples with a new population made up of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Who understand the migrant crisis, in other words, as a crucial stage of the Kalergi Plan, as set out in Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and which predicts:

"Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

Obviously, depending on one's politics, this can be viewed as either a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare. But it's maybe something worth discussing seriously - and not quickly dismissed as just another mad conspiracy theory put forward by racist neo-Nazis et al ...

Waiting for the Migrants (After Cavafy)

Portrait of C. P. Cavafy: the Onassis Cultural Centre

www.sgt.gr

More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe by sea in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx. And, according to new figures published this week, the situation is only getting more desperate as the number of people seeking safety, shelter, and opportunity continues to rise ...

I don't know what can be done or what should be done about this. But, as a poet, I feel myself entitled to comment on events and express all kinds of thoughts and feelings which others might repudiate (though whether anyone should pay the slightest attention to the musings of a poet in a time of social and political upheaval is of course debatable).

And so here's a few lines of verse in relation to the above chaos of peoples; lines which rely upon (and play with) Cavafy's famous poem, Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους.

I am grateful to Dr Maria Thanassa for providing me with a new translation of the original Greek text.


What are we waiting for gathered on the beach
and looking nervously out to sea?

Haven't you heard? The migrants are arriving today …

Why is nothing being done to stop them?
Why are the politicians arguing about quotas and not acting?

Because it’s already too late: what laws are they to pass now?
Besides, when the migrants arrive, they’ll legislate anew.

Why did Frau Merkel throw open the gates to Europe?
Who gave her the right to lecture others on their Christian duty?

I don’t know. But the migrants are arriving today  
and we must receive them with smiles and open purses.
We must bestow universal rights upon them.

Why have so many news crews arrived on the scene,
with solemn reporters pushing cameras into the faces
of crying women and children?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and journalists have a moral obligation to bring us their story ... 

Why are so many celebrities holding signs that read:  
Refugees Welcome?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and bleeding hearts have never looked better
than when stitched onto designer sleeves ...

Why all of a sudden is there such restlessness and such confusion?
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so fast, people heading
home in horror?

Because darkness has fallen.   

What shall become of us in a land occupied by immigrants?
We were told they'd provide a solution ...

Think of the Children

Helen Lovejoy: The Simpsons 

Throughout the European migrant crisis, the Helen Lovejoys and Corbynistas of this world have continually beseeched us to think of the children in an attempt to negate all serious discussion of what is an urgent political problem without any easy solution. 

Via the use of distressing images and necro-emotive language, powerfully compelling in its stereotypic consistency, campaigners who wish to welcome all refugees into Europe have transformed a complex question into a simplistic moral issue about which right-minded people everywhere must surely be in agreement. 

Bereft of any argument as to how Europe might accommodate (never mind assimilate) millions of people from very different cultural backgrounds - many of whom are fundamentally opposed to the values (or lack of values) of the West - humanitarians have simply pointed to the suffering and demanded Europeans share in it and, indeed, accept a large part of the blame for it; we are expected to feel not only pity and compassion, but guilt.     

The strategic use, however, of sentiment and stereotype to fill the void in thought is always suspect and all forms of logical fallacy and opportunism should surely be exposed as such.

Ultimately, we should think of the children - though not in that sticky, ideal manner in which perceived vulnerability is equated with innocence. But this should also include children who are native Europeans and not just young migrants. For presumably they too have the right to a secure and prosperous future on a continent that has its own distinctive history, culture, and destiny.

One really doesn't want to fall back into the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil - and Europe is, I think, more than an ethno-geographical space - but current events force one to think about race, demographics, territory, borders, identity and notions of otherness, etc. That is to say, all those politically contentious subjects that seem to come to the fore in times of crisis and Völkerchaos.  

Godwin's law is, it appears, far wider in its application (and has far greater explanatory power) than some people imagine. And, somewhat paradoxically, fascism marks not only the end of all serious debate, but the beginning too. It's certainly fair to say that most of the really provocative political thinking today is carried out by those on the far right.

And this, says Baudrillard, is precisely because everything moral, orthodox and conformist - everything which was traditionally associated with the right - has now passed to the once radical left, stripping the latter of its political and intellectual energy. You only pathetically think of the children when you have nothing better to do.  

Simon Schama Versus Rod Liddle

A furious Simon Schama finger-points at Rod Liddle on BBC's Question Time 

(15 Oct 2015) and tells him to stick to writing his hack journalism 

and turn his "suburban face from the plight of the miserable". 

I've no reason to dislike the historian and art critic Simon Schama: he's clever, good-looking, cosmopolitan, and compassionate; he's even born on the same day as me (13 Feb). But in his recent clash on the BBC's Question Time with Rod Liddle, Schama did reveal a side of himself that is perhaps not quite so admirable or attractive; a proneness to dismiss those who don't share his moral and sentimental humanism on the subject of Syrian refugees as suburban.  

It is, of course, a term of disparagement with a long and unedifying history amongst English intellectuals; one that is loaded with class contempt for those upon whom they look down and regard as crude, common, and narrow-minded.

And so, whilst I'm perfectly happy for Schama to discuss the European migrant crisis with feeling, he's wrong (and disingenuous) to characterize those who prefer to address the issue as an urgent political problem that requires a practical solution which considers the needs not only of the displaced, but of the native populations asked to absorb a huge influx of people foreign in language, culture and tradition, as provincial and uncaring, or in some way prejudiced. 

Indeed, one is tempted to remind Professor Schama of what he said a few years ago when defending Israel's right to take military action against Hezbollah (including the bombing of cities in Lebanon): "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand."

- This Week, BBC One, 24 July 2006

Precisely! And that requires a cool head and what might seem to those who can afford to enjoy the indulgence of tears, a certain hardness of heart.              

Note: those interested in seeing the Question Time clash between Mssrs. Schama and Liddle (as well as reading the latter's take on it in his blog for The Spectator) should click here.

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]

We're All Austrians Now (Reflections Beneath a Black Sun)

No one knows for sure how the current migrant crisis in Europe will unfold or what consequences it might entail; as I have said elsewhere, it's a wicked problem and a real mess. However, it seems to me that one of the things that might result is the recreation of the social and political conditions in Europe as a whole that were last witnessed in Austria in the 19th century and that the potential for a new form of völkisch nationalism (or fascism) is thus a very real possibility. 

Such a desperate and virulent reaction might not be welcome or prove to be very helpful, but it is perhaps understandable when mass immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world results in what Jean Baudrillard once described as the internal exile of the European citizen in their own society. 

This sense of alienation and the perceived threat to the future of Europeans as an ethnically and culturally distinct group with their own history and traditions is almost certain to grow and, far from being a paranoid and pessimistic fantasy on behalf of a small number of individuals, there is clear evidence from the maternity wards that the continent is undergoing a rapid and major demographic change. As one critic notes:

"In 1900 the white European races constituted some thirty-five percent  of world population. Owing to declining birth rates among whites in advanced industrial nations, coupled with the explosion of the Third World population ... the figure is now just under ten percent in global terms." [1]

What is more, these same nations are accommodating ever larger numbers of immigrants, having committed themselves with ideological fervour to their own fantasy of multiculturalism no matter what the cost. For those Europeans concerned about their own identity - whether that's primarily based on racial, national, cultural, or religious grounds (and regardless of the fact that those grounds might be entirely spurious) - this places them in much the same position as the German-speaking Austrians during the final years of the Habsburg Empire; i.e., one of perceived disadvantage and ever-decreasing influence.

This, as Al Gore might say, is an inconvenient truth that is rarely addressed or even acknowledged within the dominant and self-legitimating forms of political discourse. To even raise the issue not only offends the sensibilities of the age, but risks legal action under the highly dubious law of incitement to hatred. As Martin Amis writes, any acknowledgement of white anxiety about becoming a numerical minority within Europe invariably results in accusations of racism. But this isn't simply about race, it's also about political values and ethics:

"If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are; but if some of them believe in sharia ... then the numbers are clearly crucial." [2]

What has become clear, is that commentators on the far right have a much more radical and astute understanding of what's going on and what's at stake; they might arrive at deeply troubling solutions, but they identify genuine problems and concerns. Baudrillard offers a painfully revisionist explanation of why the left have failed us and why the right today possess the last remnants of political interest:

"The right once embodied moral values and the left, in opposition, embodied a certain historical and political urgency. Today, however, stripped of its political energy, the left has become a pure moral injunction, the embodiment of universal values, the champion of the reign of virtue and the keeper of the antiquated values of the Good and the True ..." [3]

In short, the left has become ... boring! Political correctness, on which the left now prides itself, has reduced politics to a zero-point of moral and intellectual banality. This has resulted not only in the abject surrender of the left, but also in a defeat for critical thinking.

And so, today, in this transpolitcal era, if politics can be said to exist at all, it has slid over to the far right. Rather shamefully, it's Europe's neo-conservatives and neo-fascists who still have something to say worth hearing; all other discourses are moral or pedagogical, says Baudrillard, and made by a mixture of lesson-givers, aid workers, and bleeding heart celebrities who believe in peace and love and a universal humanity.

This doesn't mean you should all rush out and vote for those on the far right, but it does mean that if you really want to hear a wild analysis of the times in which we live, there's little point in listening to those on the left - including its more colourful figures, such as Russell Brand - who always speak with a tremor in their voice either of righteous anger, or full of pity for the suffering of the world. If these idiots fail to see things clearly it's partly due to the permanent presence of tears in their eyes.

Unfortunately, globalization doesn't merely unleash massive flows of capital, information, and skills across borders, but also disease, crime, and barbarism. Nation states are compromised and traditional cultures are confronted with unfamiliar customs and values that many find threatening and unwelcome. Thus defensive and reactionary ideologies begin to emerge based on notions of identity and in violent opposition to pretty much everything that is going on around them.

"We cannot know", writes Goodrick-Clarke, "what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary ..." [4]


Notes:

[1] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, (New York University Press, 2003), p. 2.
[2] Martin Amis, 'Demographics', in The Second Plane, (Jonathan cape, 2008), p. 157.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'A Conjuration of Imbeciles', in The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext[e], 2005), p. 31. 
[4] Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, p. 306. 

This post is a revised version of the opening remarks to an essay I wrote in 2008 entitled 'On the Spirit of Terrorism', in Reflections beneath a Black Sun, Volume IV of The Treadwell's Papers, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).

The Second Coming (Notes on the European Migrant Crisis)

Those politicians and commentators who insist that the European migrant crisis is a moral dilemma are naively mistaken, for there really is no right or wrong solution to this influx of people. And this is precisely why it's known philosophically as a wicked problem. That is to say, a problem which seems obvious to everyone, but for which there is no definitive formulation or answer.

A crisis such as the one unfolding in Europe today, involving millions of people, is, by its very nature, a fast-moving, wild and unpredictable situation, with numerous causes and constantly shifting parameters, thus making it resistant to resolution - no matter how hard Angela Merkel stamps her foot and demands that more must be done by her European partners to tackle the problem and share the burden.

Those who ask themselves when will it all end have also failed to grasp the true nature of what's happening; it won't end - wicked events have no internal stopping mechanism. Likewise, it's a laughable fantasy to believe there's a historical reset button. The fact is, Europe has irrevocably been changed this summer (demographically, socially, and culturally).       

It is - to use another technical term - a real mess. All problems interact with one another in an endless cycle and no one knows what's going on, or what's going to happen next. Those who are supposed to be in charge appear clueless and incapable of acting; or, if they do act, they invariably make things worse. 

And so it seems that Yeats was right and his poetic prophecy is finally coming true:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

Notes: 

Those interested in reading in full Yeats's magnificent verse, 'The Second Coming' (1920), should click here. 

Those interested in knowing more about wicked problems are advised to read Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', in Developments in Design Methodology, ed. N. Cross, (J. Wiley and Sons, 1984), pp. 135-44. 

This post is dedicated to Dr Maria Thanassa; my favourite Yeats scholar. 

On the New Barbarians

Riot police try to maintain order during a registration procedure on Kos. 

Photo: Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters

From where will come the new barbarians, asked Nietzsche, rather wistfully. And it was a question that also troubled Lawrence. For despite the modern world being very full of people, there were no longer, he said, "any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life", as in the ancient world. 

At one time, I also shared this romantic fascination for those who roamed outside the gates of Western civilization; peoples full of violent discontent and savage enthusiasm; cultured, but untamed. Men who still believed in their own gods, because they still believed in themselves.

But when one turns on the news and sees what is happening on the Greek islands, and in Sicily, or at the French port of Calais ... One can't help being disconcerted by these hundreds-of-thousands of refugees and asylum seekers - these new barbarians.

It would help, I think, if - despite their obvious desperation - they behaved in a rather more respectable fashion: would it kill them, for example, to queue in an orderly manner and to show at least a modicum of gratitude towards those among whom they would live and prosper?

Having escaped from war, persecution, and sectarian stupidity and made it to European shores, they need now to display the greatest degree of civility and overcome their own terrible and violent origins; not threaten to recreate the very conditions they have fled by importing chaos and resentment. 


Note: the line quoted from Lawrence is taken from Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004), p. 189.