...Poured Across The Border...

Come and See1 is about blood in the margins, it is about the filth and the great horrible real of unknowable matter in your boots, in your veins and beneath your eyelids so you see it when you sleep. Opening with children ignoring the warnings of elders not to dig the story pushes itself through the dry scrub and into the sand to find the armatures of war, a buried rifle. Sand is the safest kind of matter, dry and easy is trickles off the skin. For the tactile defensive, sand is the first hurdle, a uniform sensation gently clinging to the moisture of fingertips and gone with with the violent flap of anxious revulsion. Sand is safe because it is not even dead, it was never alive forever the silica other of rocks and architecture.
Once Florya has his rifle and bound with it his fate as a partisan, matter ceases to be so safe and will hold on around him as mud and muck and scum. This is the living dirt, the boundary zone of decomposition and enriched growth. Particles freefall in perpetual becoming, forming and loosing bonds, losing life and finding a role within another.  

Come and See lives within this dirt, in a realism that unselfconsciously clings to hair or the corner of a mouth. Our characters find their own edges so shabbily defined as they merge with the landscape. Is this not the very mythos of the resistance? The hand of the land, the mob summoned up golem-like to throw its unprotected weight against the moral outrage of occupation.

The defining scene of Come and See is not the famous barn burning carnival but the tripping rush of denial as Florya leads Glasha to where he insists his massacred family will be hiding.

The prelude to this hysteria is where the two children enter Florya’s family home which is a prelude to the horrific roar of matter. Flies buzz around the cabin while Florya retrieves the still warm soup from the oven, for a second or two it seems that reality might be held back by the cultural relief of the meal. Through the symbolic envelopment by the family, matter might still be tamed. Then Glasha vomits and the real comes crashing in like an umber flood tide, the childhood stability is now irreparably corrupt as boy and girl run away from this break, out into the swamp. This next moment is that which defines the film, the mirror of the earlier sand scene Florya followed by Glasha wade out into water covered in tendrilous algae and biofilm. The rifle is pushed out ahead of the boy and is enveloped just as he is, held close and safe in a parental shroud of living material, the gun rendered useless2, and safe as they now encounter a level of the militia even closer to the land, a group of peasants and sub-Lumpenproletariat for whom the abstraction of politics has been pulled down into the praxis of survival3.

In 1983 Alan Moore is taking over the writing of DC’s Swamp Thing. Originally Swamp Thing belongs to the genre of the mortal turned ubermensch, and their struggle to act responsibly while attempting to regain their own humanity. In the writing of Moore this is changed, Swamp Thing is organic matter which has assimilated the memories of the dead mortal, there is no self to return to. Swamp Thing is organic material made self conscious, Rhizomatic, it realises a fractal structure, all parts contained within all parts forever turning inward. Swamp Thing is the realist dirt of Come and See, the land as Actant. The Soviet film pushes an ideology which pushes one layer deeper than a National Socialist volk spirit. Rather than centralising land-culture it centralises land-matter4, bare foot in the earth forming effigies from clay and spittle and the Hydroxyapatite of a human skull. The dead mortal’s memories shape Swamp Thing, as much as the political agreement we called the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic shapes the landscape of this film. Ultimately, this shaping is just a vehicle for articulation and interpretation and somewhere within it is the pure and filthy real. Central to Swamp Thing is the concept that the protagonist is not a being itself but rather the agency of all plant-life. Once again the hand of the land.

“In my heart/ there’s a place called swamp-land/ nine parts water/ one part sand5”

The early 80s are the days of body horror, the pinnacle of animatronic hard-visual-effect-technology and the entering of HIV/AIDS into the collective Western Consciousness6.

There is an argument that all horror is to some extent fixated on the body and as such there is no such thing as a non-body horror. This would follow from the dual observations that our traditional lineage of horror narratives all feature a corruption of a body (whether ours, or the mirror of the Other) and that horror involves the threat or realisation of the transformation of a body through violence, moving from a familiar and operational thing, to something else all together.

However, this defining branch of popular cinema in the earlier years of the 80s is quite specific. John Carpenter moves from the recent supernatural revenge horror of Halloween and the Fog to the cellular eruption of The Thing. Similarly David Cronenberg shifts the role of the body to one of central reconfiguration and instability with Videodrome7. looking wider there is Re-Animator, The Howling, Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London and on and on. These are films which respond to a fear not of the Communist Other of without but the de-unification of the self (the self as a network which might be re-configured rather than a monad). However, what is also happening here is a change in society's view of the materiality of the body, as we obsess not simply on the threat of viral change, but on an increasingly drawn out look at the change itself. The camera lingers on the splatter of blood and the alteration of form (the monster change...) and this act becomes the distancing catharsis of self administered de-sensitization8.

What has happened is an abuse of matter, an abuse of dirt. Through pushing depiction of the unstable borders of the self into a bloody hyper-real (and despite how the rubber looks to our now jaded eyes, hyper-real is just what The Thing was) representation, a connection with the real of muck was dulled significantly. This is what makes Come and See so shocking in 19849 (in the 70s it would have been fine, nature has mostly been left to it's own existence in this decade, whether by disinterest or respect10) it is true dirt, even-handed and real.

In 1983 Big Black released Bulldozer, Swans released Filth and right at the start of 1984 Einstürzende Neubauten take pneumatic drills to the floor of the ICA to get to the tunnels beneath11.

In 1984 Black Flag release the record My War which is itself a slither between two attitudes to matter and the physical. Side A is the dumb hand-me-down punk of America pushing 1977 London back through rock and roll, side B is something that slows down the moment into 3 6minute plus songs of the lingering touch of distortion. A perfect synthesis of early Sabbath and Funhouse the last half of My War revels in the moment by moment of sound in stark contrast to conservative structures of the tracks which precede it. The guitars have been atonal all along but with the first of the three tracks, Nothing Left Inside, Greg Ginn's playing is so loose as to be rootless, just a huge collapse spilling out over a spasmodic and exhausted12 ruin of the first 4 notes of Peter Gunn played for what feels like forever on three legs.

1984 also sees the airing of Threads on the BBC then in 1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is published.

Like a revisionist return-to-nature both Threads and Blood Meridian offer a doom triumph of matter over ideology. That messy algorithm of rot and growth, that fuzziness at the border of self might cease to just be something on the surface, might infect and get inside, and this is what it would like in that world a handful of years later, no common language and no absolutes at all. That's really the fear of the Easton-Ellis-Eighties, for all the language of utter self control, of dominance of everything through the left right of Will and Capital everyone knows that increasing the grip only provokes a rupture somewhere, something has got to burst out.

However, it that implies some sort of general self-awareness, 1984 is also the year Red Dawn came out. Happy Halloween.

1 I wrote this last month “I've had a sequential dream over the past week where I have been a reluctant member of a partisan militia traipsing through unlit farmland in the manner of the film Come and See, led by the tragically flawed and often depressed (at all times sitting in the pose depicted on the cover DMR's second album) Captain Kevin Rowland. I brought him round to my house at one point in an effort to cheer him up, possibly by cooking him dinner. I then realise to my horror that not only is my copy of Too-Rye-Ay visible but the record itself is on the turntable and something has initiated the automatic start. There is a click as the red light comes on, the arm lifts, swings out over the disk, I drop the piece of salami I'm holding, Kevin looks up just as the needle drops.... and then I wake up.”

2 A realisation of the hippie symbolism, a flower jammed down the barrel. 

3 “Curiously, while Marx thought the final stage of history would amount to a sort of return to humanity's initial state ('primitive communism'), Marx and his successors never supposed that our own era's 'primitive communists' had any place in the transformations about to take place. You can't be an agent of history, the presumption went, if your form of life places you outside of history altogether.” J E H Smith

4 Matter is beyond corruption, it is impossible for a politic to insert itself between a subject and the pure experience of this terrible entity. “Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations… For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority” Bataille, George Base Materialism and Gnosticism in George Bataille Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927 - 1939 University of Minnesota: Minneapolis 1985.

5 Swampland by The Scientists, released as a double A side by Au Go Go in 1982

6 The actual moment of AIDS entering general understanding is attributed to many events, but most relevant to our discussion here is the release of David Lynch’s Dune in 1984 with its disease ridden homosexual Sadean Baron Vladimir Harkonnen personifying the spectre of a collective terror and ignorance made flesh. It is also worth mentioning Dune's Soviet-Afghan War subtext and it's wicked case of TE Lawrence syndrome, which exoticises and objectifying the Other while living out its colonial fantasy of leadership.

7 Cronenberg obsessed on the fuzzy edges of the bodily self from the beginning, perhaps most notably with the vampire-vagina-armpit vehicle Rabid in 1977. However, as with Carpenter these earlier films followed the codes of the slasher genre, with its need for a monstrous antagonist to be escaped. Videodrome, and to a lesser extent The Thing (hamstrung slightly by the conformity of the 1950s source material) display a more Existential quality of examining the nature of the bodily self and the limits of it’s materiality against he limits of its conciousness.

8 Another branch of this enquiry should here look to the sister of the splatter film, the early 80s heavy metal album, specifically the rise of Grindcore and to a lesser extent Thrash and Death Metal. Again, a mass of cathartic abuse against matter by making all anxiety familiar and ineffectual. This will finally find language in Napalm Death's mantra from 1989 "You suffer, but why?"

9  Shocking in the West obviously. Another branch of enquiry would here look to the more pronounced respect of matter in post-war to pre-80s soviet cinema, compared to to the grittier end of 70s Hollywood  and how this managed to survive much later into the decade. 

10 Hackman eats boiled eggs, DeNiro mashes bread into a bowl of milk and 70s Nicholson gesticulates with his mouth like he is forever talking around some dry rye toast. It was a decade which defined tough cinema by the way it played with its dinner.

11 Three bands that through abrasive sonic texture, volume and the physicality of the  means of producing (even amplified) sound attempting to re-connect something lost in the performance that might only be done so through confrontation. Unfortunately the drama (frequently in the lyrics, always in the clothes) often pulled the whole thing back into spectacle time and time again. Incidentally, the most physically engaged records I can think of are probably Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow by Funkadelic and There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly & The Family Stone, where noise and sonic space just lie about like they own the place, both are covered in dirt without any hysteria at all. The mix alone on either record is enough cut all chance of the listeners return to decency and a life of wallowing in music, taking it for granted. Both records grate in their own way, grate against the possibility of a transparent listening experience, one sounds like you've woken up in a grave, the other in some Stan Brakhage Ajax-scarred zoetrope of the storm from Return to Oz and a motown Silver Apples. Also both appear at the dawn of the 70s, right in the spray of Altamont which was arguably a moment when corporeal grit proved it simply had the mass to destroy any ideology, or tea party, or sales pitch or whatever. 

12 [There's an excellent earlier post on here somewhere that discussed the importance of steroids and the self image of muscular 1980s, someone help me out I can't find it again.] The endless reservoir of will is the belief of decade though, and despite the chest beating quest for the fire-in-his-own-tortured-navel of Henry Rollins the thing that Black Flag get right about this Reaganite bootstraps Power of The Will mythology is the sheer exhaustion of it. The drive that the decade promotes, the peck flexing rugged individualist conservatism is actually the delirium of fatigue, it aint a march, it's a stagger.

World Machine

"….in the business of life a man’s disposition and the secret workings of his mind and affections are better discovered when he is in trouble than at other times; so likewise the secrets of nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way."

- Francis Bacon "Novum Organum"

"See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted with folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad."

- Ochwiay Biano to Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections"

"Here it comes again
Chugging like a train
Round and round
An impeccable groove"

- Level 42 "Hot Water"

It is a little-known fact that all our popular culture today owes its existence to Francis Bacon’s philosophical work of 1620, the Novum Organum. This document was instrumental in the development of what we now call the "scientific method" in its empiricist declaration that nature is best understood not from general observation, but by the manipulation of it in artificial settings, by its "vexing" in a laboratory. It was this insight, combined with the insight of Rene Descartes’ Discourse On Method, that mathematics was the purest form of reason, that gave birth to the modern scientific consciousness that both shapes our society today, and provokes the antinomian forces that set themselves up to oppose it.

We may find the world view of the medieval peasant, in which for example an object fell to the ground because it loved the earth which was its home, impossibly quaint, but what we fail to understand is that such a view filled life with an intensity of meaning that we can barely begin to appreciate from our modern atomised viewpoint. Until the Scientific Revolution, man belonged in the world. The adoption of Cartesian dualism, in which we are subjects in a world of objects, and the adoption of Baconian empiricism, in which all of nature exists to be manipulated for numerically quantifiable advantage, are the roots of our deep alienation. Capitalism, far from being a Ding an Sich, a thing in itself, was merely the new scientific rationalism translated into the social sphere, and that in turn is why it has always proven such an elusive foe to those who would oppose it.



The rise of this "new science" in the early 17th Century, was not, as is popularly believed, due to it "disproving" the magical-alchemical world view through rational falsification, but because the established church needed a political tool to counter the proliferating heretical movements that were rising against it. The attack against alchemy was conducted by a Minorite friar, Marin Marsenne, via the Collège Royale in Paris and the Royal Society in London, utilising Cartesian dualism and a philosophy of atomism to posit God not as immanent in all things but as an external director, inaccessible to independent religious or political thought. Hermeticism was so effectively suppressed and discredited that it wasn’t until the investigations of Carl Jung in the middle of the 20th Century that it was tentatively recognised as a systematic psychological worldview rather than merely an abortive, bungled form of early chemistry.

As the historians Christopher Hill and Keith Thomas pointed out, much of the tumult of the English Civil War revolved around sects such as the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Ranters who wanted to maintain their animist and alchemical beliefs against the rationalising forces of the new science, which was seen as the acquisitory ideology of the rising Protestant bourgeoisie, whose credo of elevation through wealth or good works denied salvation to every class below them. It was this linking of alchemical beliefs with communistic sentiments, known at the time as "enthusiasm", that led to its proscription by the governing establishment. The reason why Sir Isaac Newton, who had far less faith in his mechanical conception of the universe than his modern-day apologists, kept his extensive alchemical work secret was more through its explosive political ramifications than through potential professional embarrassment.

Today of course, the rational-scientific world view sits squarely in the middle of our culture, apparently politically neutral, its tenets unquestioned even by those who are most opposed to its social manifestation as Capitalism. And yet for all this, modern Western man, like his 17th Century forebears, still carries with him a nagging sense of emptiness, of the deep alienation that results from a world that has had its meaning deliberately extracted by a rationalising ideology that has sunk itself so deeply into the culture as to be almost invisible. It is no surprise that Britain, perhaps the country that was most deeply rationalised by the Enlightenment, has also been the home to the most magical revolts. These revolts have been almost endlessly diverse in their form, from drug cults and druid revivals to incursions of Eastern mysticism, but perhaps the most visible recent revolts have been those that have been provoked by the arrival of black musical styles from the USA. It is no accident that many of the post-war youth cults have more than a passing similarity to the outbreaks of "enthusiasm" of the Civil War period.



The official myth of the huge impact that jazz, rock’n’roll, soul music and the blues had on post-war Britain is that they somehow offered a sense of release from post-war austerity and a stiff-upper-lip emotional constipation. It’s a convenient myth because it contradicts any idea that there are any deeper issues with how Western society projects its version of reality. It’s an easily contradicted myth as well - the "sexual revolution" of the 1960’s did nothing to meliorate any deeper sense of alienation, and indeed it’s reasonable to argue that the Britain of the 1950’s was in many ways a more socially coherent and balanced society than that of today.

It is also fairly clear that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of young Britons experienced their first encounter with Black American or Jamaican music as an almost religious moment, and ultimately this is because it to all extents and purposes it actually was a religious moment. What they experienced was, perhaps for the first time in their lives, a colossal infusion of mana, of the sense of wholeness that the feeling of the world being inherently full of meaning provides. In essence, they had temporarily become medieval peasants. Filled with "enthusiasm", what could they then do but gather together, open clubs, dress and talk like their heroes, and even try to replicate the music themselves?

However, all British youth cultures, once they became established, would eventually face a moment of schism - between the "trad" purists and those that want "to take the music further". Often characterised as a fission between luddites and progressives, it was really a debate on how best to preserve the mana, the magic, because when British musicians got hold of a black American musical form, they inevitably subjected it to a process of rationalisation. What happens if we make it faster? Slower? Increase the level of amplification? Combine it with another form? Eventually the result would be something like Led Zeppelin. If a blues singer such as Willie Dixon was like a pharoah, a great king who radiated magical mana, then Zeppelin were the great pyramid built around his tomb. The musical relationship between America and Britain in the post-war period was not just between "black" and "white", but between irrationalism and rationalism, and the eventual fully-rationalised final form meant that the mana was exhausted.

The jazz-funk scene that emerged in the UK in the late 1970’s was in many ways an archetypal example of this cultural process. Inspired by the usual canon of revered records imported from the USA, it went through the familiar pattern whereby a small band of "legendary" proselytising enthusiasts started hosting "legendary" one-off events that turned into "legendary" established clubs, and in turn into a thriving subculture. If there was one major difference, it was that many of the initial movers and shakers in the scene were black Britons, and their musical response offered the possibility that Britain could create its own self-sufficient and fruitful dialogue between black and white musicians; between irrational and rationalising aesthetics.

It was within this early scene that Level 42 emerged as an instrumental-only band, and as the original scene faded around them, were to become its great rationalising force throughout the 1980’s. The band, driven by Mark King’s relentless, machine-like slap bass, replaced the original fluidity and trepidation of jazz-funk with an almost grid-like rigidity. Level 42’s records were enormous constructions, and it was no doubt their sheer propulsion, their sense of going somewhere, that made them so appealing to the yuppies and travelling salesmen of Thatcherite Britain.



Nevertheless, despite the vertiginous awe that robo-funk like "Hot Water" and "The Chinese Way" could induce, Level 42’s lyrical concerns were generally humane - boy meets girl, growing pains, childhood memories. Their rather modest subject matter and personal conduct contradicted the kind of wine-bar upward-mobility with which they were often associated. "Something About You", perhaps their best song, was a love song worthy of Barry Gibb in the way that it used plain, simple language to express eternal verities.



Level 42 were one of the most significant British band of the 80’s because they were the last great rationalisers of African-American music, the last great ziggurat-builders. By the mid-80’s the channel of irrationalism that was supplied by black America was closed off by hip-hop, whose hyper-rationalised cut-up structure and atomised worldview were resistant to white appropriation, mainly because it began where white music usually finished up. White British music, its major source of mana closed off, could only decline into the sterile pattern-work of indie. Ultimately though, popular music has only carried us along, and distracted us from our real duty - to find a way to reinvigorate our world with meaning, which for 99% of human history has been the normal condition of existence, but which for us still appears a paradise far beyond our reach.