The Bodies and the Lucky Ones

 You know, for a queer lapsed Catholic heretic I sure like a lot of movies about priests. 

John Michael McDonagh's Calvary makes a good companion piece to First Reformed in a lot of ways: both follow a lonely Good Priest who grapples with the moral context of his times and whose sincere ethical engagement with their religion is contrasted with that of their fellow Christians. Both turn on a challenging encounter between that priest and one of his parishioners: in First Reformed Reverend Toller argues the merits of bringing a child into a world on the brink of climate apocalypse with his eco-activist congregant Michael; in Calvary Brendan Gleeson's Father James Lavelle hears the confession of a parishioner who calmly informs him that he will kill him in a week, as an act of retaliatory terror against the Church whose priests repeatedly violated him as a child (importantly, this unrepentant penitent chooses to kill Lavelle precisely because he is not one of the clerics who hurt him: killing a good priest, he thinks, will cause people to sit up and pay attention). 

At the climax of the film, as the priest and his killer confront one another on a beautiful County Sligo beach, the killer/victim rages that 'We were the lucky ones! There's bodies buried back there! Buried like dogs!' And this reminded me of a film I saw for the first time this week, and which I will probably be thinking about as much as I think about Calvary and First Reformed, RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, which shows us life literally through the eyes of its two protagonists, Elwood and Turner, two black teens who find themselves incarcerated at a segregated reform school during the sixties. The brutal new reality the idealistic Elwood and the more streetwise Turner find themselves confined in is also divided between the lucky ones and those who are not so lucky. Indeed, as such places often do, Nickel Academy operates a kind of hierarchy of luck: the white students are incarcerated in nicer premises, and not subject to the harsher conditions of the black students, who are further stratified based not just on the Academy's overt system of four ranks (beginning at 'Bug'), but by what kinds of punishment they find themselves subjected to: brutal beatings in a room with a fan that drowns the sound of screaming for those who are a little less lucky; confinement to a rooftop sweatbox for those unluckier still; and, for those whose luck is worst of all, being taken 'out back', murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in the part of the school all the students know to call 'Boot Hill'. 

I am using the word luck because that is the word that the killer in Calvary uses, but it is of course not quite the right word. Luck is an impersonal force, a random factor which cannot be controlled for: but every child who died at the hands of the Church in Ireland, every child murdered at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the real life inspiration for Nickel Academy, every child buried in the grounds of the Canadian Residential Schools, is there because of decisions made by adults, who calculated that they could get away with murdering those children because those deaths would never be discovered, because any children who spoke out would not be believed, because those children did not matter. And that goes too for the 'lucky ones' - the kids who were only shoved in the sweatbox, only sexually abused, only taken away from families and cultures the authorities wished to wipe out, only forced to wear a different name and kneel before a cross. These were not just things that happened. They were things that were done to children, by adults. 

And they are things that are being done again now, with the full knowledge and connivance of our oh-so-moral authorities. In the US, depending on what state they are unlucky enough to live in, trans children are already potentially subject to judicial kidnap and fostering out to 'good Christian families', with all the horror those three words usually entail. In the UK our Health Secretary cheerfully restricted access to puberty blockers for trans kids, a wilful and sadistic act of mass child abuse which will leave those children feeling under attack from their own bodies. Like the pious facade of the Catholic Church or the Nickel Academy, these actions are taken under the cover of morality, but they are really about creating and maintaining a population of children who can be abused with impunity, and they will result, just as they did then, in the bodies of dead children and, in a decade or more when, as the saying goes, everyone will have always been against this, in a generation of traumatised adults who will have the burning cold comfort of knowing that they were the lucky ones. 

Woke's Not Dead

An example of the genre

 

Lately, it seems as if every left-wing media outlet big enough to worry about maintaining its visibility on social media, and every nominally left-wing figure with a book deal, has been opining about the so-called 'death of woke'. The Young Turks have pivoted to full transphobia, and over at Novara Michael Walker has just about fully come out of the closet as a tervert, and Aaron Bastani is hot on his heels as he tries, with pitiably obvious desperation, to impress the big skinhead lads at his gym. It's probably a little unfair of me to use Ash Sarkar in the above screenshot, to be honest, as her new book, Minority Rule, is more about how anti-woke talking points are used as a distraction by the real minority that controls everything (the rich, obviously), but the video's title was too good to resist. 

The inconvenient fact in all this is that the only actual sense in which 'woke is dead' is that all the right-wing paedophiles who complained about it have started saying 'DEI' instead, because their grift requires them to cycle their buzzwords every five years or so. 'Woke' in the sense that the likes of GB News or the Daily Mail decry it never really existed - like a lot of terms that suddenly gain widespread popular usage it was ripped off from black culture and repurposed by white people to mean something else, to the point where it became a free-floating signifier which could be made to stand in for anything that the particular white person using it was getting upset about - which was usually the fact that media was acknowledging the existence of people who weren't exactly like them. 

In its original usage, however, 'woke' simply meant exactly what it sounds like - awake. To be woke was to be aware of what was going on, to no longer be lulled into a false sense of security by the lies of a racist, ableist, queerphobic system of control. And that system hasn't gone away just because the people who profit from it have found a new buzzword to use to complain about the fact that people keep trying to resist those systems. Right and wrong don't switch places just because a slightly different flavour of senile white man sits pissing himself in the Oval Office. La lutta continua - the struggle today is the same one it was yesterday and the same one it probably will be tomorrow, and anyone with even the slightest amount of genuine intellectual seriousness knows that. 

Of course, our midcult media are entirely lacking in intellectual seriousness, which is why we see spectacles like that soi-disant 'serious' journal, The Atlantic using the 'death of woke' as an excuse to hire a nonentity called Thomas Chatterton Williams because he is a black man who has made a tidy career out of being willing to say 'anti-woke' things, and can thus be relied on to launder their racism. I came across some of Mr Williams' self-important sermonising on Bluesky yesterday evening and was entirely unsurprised to learn where he had found employment - unsurprised because he seems, in his Chomskyan understanding of why he has been hired and what he is permitted to say, to be a quintessential example of the 'omniscient gentlemen' whose number Maureen Tkacic had back in 2012 in her piece for The Baffler which remains the only thing you will ever need to read about Mr Williams' new employers. 

I understand that Mr Williams divides his time between the US and France, and that prior to his recent putting about of himself on social media he was most well-known for having someone ejected from his chateau for being beastly about Bari Weiss. This provoked in me a strong desire to watch, once again, the documentary Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris, a great example of an engaged intellectual refusing to play along with a documentary director who wants to draw a neat and tidy dividing line between his writing and his activism; refusing, indeed, to do what Mr Williams and those I talked about at the beginning of this piece have chosen to do, which is to allow themselves to be turned into products which are to the liking of the ruling powers. What makes Meeting the Man such an instructive film, especially in times like our own, is the way Baldwin resists. The film itself is currently only available on MUBI, but you can get a feeling of what he has to say in this clip: 

The great thing about seeing someone else resist is that it reminds you that you can, too. You don't have to pander to bigots because you're afraid of losing views or book deals. You can be better than that. Indeed, as Baldwin observes, you have to be. 

The Disorder and the Shame

 Today I did something I have been meaning to do for weeks: I handed in some forms to my GP. These forms were self-assessment questionnaires used in the diagnosis of autism and Attention Deficit Disorder. I was advised to fill them out by a professional I've been working with as part of my ongoing attempt to try and find my way into some kind of employment which won't be sabotaged by my tendency to have violent meltdowns and damage company property in noisy work environments. As I had expected (see the last clause of the preceding sentence) I scored a positive, though only a mild one, on the questionnaire for autism. What surprised me, however, was that I scored very high on the measure for ADD. 

Of course, the very fact it took me weeks to complete the simple act of handing these forms in to my GP is itself a pretty good indicator that I have some problems with my executive function. And not the only one. I have had, I am now seeing, a tendency to not address things that other people would have dealt with almost instantly. When the heating in my flat went out two years ago it seemed, somehow, easier to buy a small portable heater, put it in my bedroom, and stay in there when things got too cold, rather than report the problems with the heating to my letting agents. It is only recently - again, with some prompting from the person who urged me to fill out the forms I handed in today - that I have addressed this problem. Just as it is only in recent weeks, again thanks to outside intervention, that my flat has ceased to be a minefield of clutter resembling the floor of Francis Bacon's studio. 

Why did I let things get this bad? To say it was because it just seemed easier is to undersell the situation. Say, rather, that to do otherwise seemed impossible. I felt as if in some way I would not survive handing in the forms, or telling the letting agents about the heating, or seeking help to get the untidiness of my flat sorted out. They were things I might one day be up to addressing, but today was not the day. And so it seemed better to deploy my resources towards something that could be accomplished, and to tackle these issues another day. 

But every day these things went unaddressed they seemed to only gain in power while I grew less capable of accomplishing them, not least because now the sense of the futility of doing these things was joined by a sense of shame in not having accomplished them yet. A shame which I also didn't want to have to face. Here is a shame that I have not wanted to face for years now: my passport has been out of date for a decade, and I have not updated it because doing so, as a trans woman, is a complicated process involving getting letters from psychology professionals and then presenting these alongside the original expired passport and one's deed of change of name. Only by providing all these ingredients in the correct combination can one be assured of both the name on the passport and the relevant gender marker being updated. 

And at one point I had all of these, yet still delayed because of this fear that I would in some way be found to have somehow completed the process wrongly, fear that in some way I would be questioned or undermined or have to have an encounter I did not feel comfortable having, and in doing so, somewhere, along the line, while I still have my old passport and I still have my deed poll and they, together, are enough for most things, at some point, due to having had to move house so much in the years during which I came out and due to my chronic inability to remain organised and tidy I, shame of all shames, lost the letter, and I cannot find it and even if I could I do not know if the psychologist who wrote it is still practising and what effect this would have, and at the same time I fear starting the process again because of the shame of not having got it done properly the first time. And because, in today's much more hostile environment towards trans people, I fear that the process will be much harder this time around, and that my failure to see to it quickly the first time will go, in some obscure way, against me. 

And really, it doesn't need to be said that this is not a great time to be a trans woman whose papers aren't in order. My inability to see things like this through really could get me killed. 

Decision to Rot

 

I watched Sebastian Silva's Rotting in the Sun primarily because the preview image on Mubi showed Silva (who plays himself in the movie) reading E.M. Cioran's The Trouble With Being Born, which I had read last year. In fact, perversely, I had bought the book to read with some money I had been given for my birthday. Cioran was a Romanian philosopher of the pessimist school, perhaps most famous for his aphorism that 'it is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.' We see Silva reading the book in the film's opening scene, and we also see him googling effective and painless suicide methods on his mobile phone, so I found myself expecting his arc to be one of those movies where a suicidal protagonist gradually discovers the will to live again. Sort of like It's A Wonderful Life, but with more cocks and ketamine. 

In fact, the film does not go down that road. I'm not going to say much more about the plot, because it depends to a great degree on a sudden, utterly unexpected event which sends the story off in a very different direction, but it is not a finding-a-reason-to-live movie, and I respect that a lot. 

Set in Mexico City, Rotting is a bilingual movie which makes bilingualism part of its plot - we see several scenes in which Jonathan Firstman, a gay influencer who also plays a version of himself in the film, has to talk with Silva's housekeeper, Vero (Catalina Saavedra) via the medium of the translation software on his mobile phone. This detail of the plot reminded me of Park Chan-Wook's Decision to Leave, in which Park Hae-il and Tang Wei's Korean cop and Chinese murder suspect have to do the same thing, and in which the presence or absence of a mobile phone plays a key role in the plot - a plot which, like Rotting in the Sun, revolves around suicide. 

I watched Decision to Leave again earlier this week, having first seen it around this time last year. It's another film I think about a lot. The final sequence is genuinely heartbreaking, almost operatically so (again, I'm trying not to give a lot of the plot away, because Decision, like Rotting, has a big twist roughly halfway through which drastically changes things), and it gets a lot of its power from the way the story leading up to that point asks a lot of questions about why we live, what we live for, and what we do when what we live for is suddenly taken away. Do you make a dramatic exit or plod on as a shadow of what you used to be, nodding along meekly as others suggest daily sunbathing sessions or softshell turtle extract, but knowing deep down that you're just Xing days off a calendar? Some shots at the end of Rotting in the Sun suggest that film's characters, too, are going to have to discover their own answer to that question. As, I suppose, are we all. 

A Practice in Difficult Times

 'I have decided to keep a journal...To set down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything. When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy.' Reverend Ernst Toller, First Reformed

Paul Schrader's First Reformed is a film I think about a lot. Probably more than I think about The Card Counter, even though I have written about that on this blog before whereas I haven't said much about the film which preceded it. I think about it a lot for a number of reasons. Ethan Hawke's Reverend Ernst Toller is a Lutheran pastor and I am a Catholic - well, a Catholic of sorts,  I ceased going to church a long time ago, and have been kept away by everything I have learned since about the corruption of the Holy See, (and that was before the current Pope started comparing people like me to nuclear weapons), but the training, the sincere engagement with the ideas of God and morality and the accounting of one's own conduct, never really leaves you, and these are the same ideas we see Toller engage with in the film. It could be said that he is a very Catholic Lutheran, or it could perhaps be said that everyone who engages seriously with Christianity or maybe even any religion at all shares these qualities. But they are certainly not shared by many of the other 'Christians' Toller meets in this movie, and that is another reason I love it - the way it shows the stark difference between a person who engages seriously with Christianity as a philosophy and those for whom it is a business or a tribal affiliation. There are far too many of the latter in our world, and they are far too loud, and their intellectual laziness and loudness is why we have been hearing lately about grotesque notions like 'the sin of empathy.' 

If empathy is indeed a sin, then Toller certainly commits it. And his willingness to do so, to extend his empathy to not just his congregation but to the natural world and generations yet unborn, is another reason this film is often in my thoughts. 

And let's be honest - it is rare that a day goes by on which I do not think of pulling on a suicide vest and walking into a location where its deployment could do a substantial amount of good. 

The reason I am writing about First Reformed right now, though, is writing - Toller's practice of keeping a journal. And it occurs to me that this is not something I have done on this blog for quite some time. I have done a lot of other things: promoted my gigs and videos, published fiction, written essays (and indeed this post, too, is in a lot of ways an essay, as much as it is, as some of you may already have guessed, an announcement), but 'set[ting] down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything' is an aspect of blogging I have long paid little attention to. 

I think, in the year to come, that I am going to change this, to some extent. I will certainly not record every 'simple event of my day' in the sense of logging every burp, sneeze and bowel movement, but I will try, as often as I can, if not every day, to set down here what has struck me on that particular day, in thought or action. Perhaps I will reflect on some piece of visual art I have produced during the day, or some other activity, but these reflections will be, usually, less polished than the longer essays. Not that those will disappear completely from this blog - I have been working, since last year, on an essay about Todd Field's movie Tàr, a film I think about even more than First Reformed, and that will show up here when I finally have my ideas down in a way that I consider satisfying. But there will probably be other, briefer, less organised reflections on movies, books and other media that I encounter on here too, as the year progresses. And we will likewise return to what is going on in the Albian timeline with those mysterious orbs, but again, that piece of work will be spaced out with more mundane matter. 

Why do this? Well, on one level, simply to get the blog going again after I took a longer than planned Christmas break from it. But there is another, deeper reason, and it is here that we return again to First Reformed, and to Toller. It is the duty, and in some ways the privilege, of bearing witness to the end. 

'The bad times, they will begin, and from that point everything moves very quickly. You know, this social structure can't bear the stress of multiple crises. Opportunistic diseases, anarchy, martial law, the tipping point. And this isn't in some like distant future. You will live to see this.' - Michael Mensana, First Reformed

'This journal is a form of speaking...It is a form of prayer.' - Reverend Ernst Toller, First Reformed

You do not have to look very hard for signs that things are not looking good out here. The climate crisis continues to get worse, and at exactly the point when drastic action on climate is most needed, the current global hegemon is ruled by some of the most immoral, stupid and short-sighted people on Earth. So stupid and short-sighted are they, indeed, that it seems almost certain that they will bring about the end of their period as the global hegemon, and that is in some ways a mercy, but it remains to be seen whether or not the power that will succeed them can do enough to avert the worst of the calamity. And in the meantime those same immoral, idiotic scum, and those figures in other countries who pander to them and seek their favour, seem Hellbent on doing everything they can to make life difficult for people like me. There are times when it feels almost comical how much every new pronouncement from our Prime Minister, a man who is such a moral vacuum that he made a perfect physical host for the spectral body of Jimmy Savile, seems to be almost directly targeted at me. I suppose I shouldn't take it personally. He just hates women, trannies, queers, cripples, the unemployed and people of colour, and when you happen to fit five of those six categories it's hard not to feel targeted. Which, unsurprisingly, has taken its toll on my mental health.

All of which is to say, one reason I want to treat this blog more like a journal again is the fact that, for reasons both political and personal, I quite simply do not know how many more entries I have left. And I want to leave a record: of what I witnessed, of what was done to me and people like me, of how it felt to live through. Maybe such a record will be useful to people who come after me. Maybe it can, in some way, provide hope to those who are also witnessing these times, even if that is just the comfort of knowing they are not alone. But beyond its utility or inutility as historical record or morale-booster, it will also be, as Toller's journal is in First Reformed, a form of prayer. 

A Hard Climb from the Womb: a story

 

'Shit!' she cried as the yolk broke and began seeping into the albumen, the cigarette-burn of its orange fading to insipid yellow as the oil bubbled around it. The phone rang. 

'Are you still cooped up in that place like an anchoress?' He chuckled. (Jack Common, the author of The Ampersand and, more famously, Kiddar's Luck, had once lived in the house she was alone in now) 'Come on out to the old place. I've acquired the most amazing heifer. We can pasteurise its milk together.' 

As she drove she remembered the billboards in lockdown, stripped of adverts, looking like rough, pitted abstract canvases. 

He had grown the sort of dangling goatee she had always associated with the wrestler Jim 'The Anvil' Neidhart. 'Do you remember how Mr G tried to teach us the concept of a war of attrition?' He asked. 'Standing on top of our desks playing wink-murder? Probably get fired for that now.'

She remembered, as a child, rubbing her fingers down the ridges in a plaster cast of a fossilised ammonite. The feeling of touching something utterly alien, remote from her in consciousness and time. 

'I just don't understand. You move where the action is, then sit alone in a tatty old flat reading. You could do that here.'

'I couldn't,' she said quietly. 'I really couldn't.'

'I'm thinking of investing in artificial intelligence,' he told her. 'It's the future apparently. Old Durham chum's got a startup. Very clever little machine apparently. Works out which words to use based on amplitude, or something. Instant Shakespeare, as easy as that!' She did not point out that he meant to say frequency. 'It'd give your Phil an aneurysm really. You know, maybe it's...I mean...in a way...well...' he trailed off. 

'AI. Of course.' She laughed. 'Hard work really is anathema to you, Bunny.'

'I resent this characterisation of me as one of the idle rich. The fact is I worked for every acre of this land.' He smirked at her over the lip of his hipflask. 'It was an absolutely punishing climb out of that womb, you know.'

It was then that he came in close, as he had once before. He never saw what she was holding in the arm that dangled by her side. Her abdominal muscles tensed. He looked at her like an ant tasting alcohol. As his breaths became moist sucking sounds he continued to look in her eyes with almost embarrassed incomprehension, as if he were apologising for dropping a messy dessert on a good linen tablecloth.

Once, a smug little rapist had tried to pull her up on her incorrect use of the singular form of alumni. She tied him spreadeagle on a wooden classroom chair and smashed both his testicles into mush with a 20oz hammer. 

As he sank to the ground she forced herself to breathe slowly. Antimony, she mouthed. Bismuth. Chromium. Deuterium. When she finished sounding out the final consonant of zinc she looked left and right, raised the knife to her lips, and licked it. 

After removing his clothes for burning she looked down at Bunny's already-discolouring flesh and was struck by the similarity of the scene to the rightmost panel of Bacon's Sweeney Agonistes triptych. Looking up, she saw that the cow, Bunny's heifer, had been watching for some time, chewing cud with the indifference of an angel. As it turned away she lit a cigarette and smoked it, never taking her eyes off the cow as it receded in the distance. The ash formed first into a long, uneven cone, then fell, sifting away from itself, into the whiskey-wet grass. 

Love Song for a Moderate

But we had to Get The Tories Out, right? Right?

How can they call you a fascist 

when you're such a moderate soul?

You never voted for Brexit,

you send your kids to a state school

(a good one, that you moved for, it's true,

but why make your kids pay for your                                                                   principles?

Besides, you still followed the rules.)

You campaigned for a new referendum,

but we can't ignore the Red Wall: 

some people's concerns are legitimate.

2019 was a real wake-up call.

We can't be beholden to activists,

have to sacrifice some for the good of the                                                                      whole.

It's not fair that they call you a fascist: 

you're simply a moderate soul,

and when the time comes you will grass on your neighbours;

and, when this is over, 

claim you never noticed

the smell from the camp down the road.