I have been trying something new today to get me out of my old routines. It has been clear to me for some time that I need a radical change in my life to enable me to write the novels that are creating such a pressure in my head, and which are making me so unhappy. I still believe in them, so much, but I’m not ready for them yet, already they are too late to be topical and so it is better to wait until they can at least be considered and honed, better for me to work on myself and come back to them when I am good and ready. I have written already of my attempts to refocus, to downsize my ambition and downscale my productive efforts. Some of these attempts are undoubtedly cul de sacs, but I need more than anything a change in routine since my efforts to constantly work on that first novel, and even to trudge through the classics, are wearing me down, and will only destroy my love of literature.
I think I was washing up one time, something I invariably do with much resentment of the time I am wasting, and listening to First Row on Radio 4. It was a review of Mark Haddon’s latest work in which Mark Whatsisname interviewed the author and discussed his technique of decimating (did he call it that?) novels, that is, scratching out most of the words but leaving some in order, to make a poem.
It was some time ago that I decided that I would take some of the unread books from the shelves that surround me in my abandoned study, and do something similar by taking words at random and constructing poems from them in a kind of revenge/catharsis. I thought at the time that it would be one of those things I would never get round to, but then On Sunday, with M leaving me to my own devices after a big blow up, I took First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn off the shelf and a die from upstairs, and started picking it apart, choosing 22 words for 22 lines of the poem to be. If you read this, you could try to work out which words they are. I suppose that if I have done it even remotely well, you should not be able to guess all of the words (some will likely be clear enough from even a vague knowledge of the novel). I would appreciate any comments both on the poem itself, on the method of composition and the rationale behind it, and offering any guesses on the randomly-selected words.
The First Circle
*
Prisoners, a diapered, sedated, dead weight “freight”
Can do little to harm, still less elevate
as they descend into the frost of Stare Kiejkuty,
or the luckless horseshoe of Diego Garcia, trusted allies
Since this new World order of the old Hobbesian Anarchy
Told ten years before it all. That youth still swallow the lies
is an insult to those who struggled to create
a freer world: this slack lot couldn’t make a molehill of a Watergate.
* * *
Purchase power’s half the fault. Rudi need only descend
from his ill-fated bunker and declaim “shop”
(internal contradiction was more yielding than this infernal logic)
they salute like iron filings to a magnet. The moon landing was no end
But a means. Some believe it was actors against a studio backdrop
But ask yourself who did Sorel better serve? It’s a smarter trick
that millions worked overtime in the service of a patriotic dream that fit.
Strauss knew we need to believe. We’re mortals all and there is no magic bullet
* * *
Mill thought the truth outs, but in the ineluctable shape of a seminar
it keeps a contained few engaged over the myth
the nineteen twentieths and tabloid outrage, ubiquitous at the huddle at the bar
It’s the silence stifles us, buffered by a Brownian motion of men hunting someone to sleep with
seen as precious at best we hunker half-broken in the Leviathan’s cities
politics flows like Heraclitus’ river in flood, taking time, taking chances, taking liberties
* * *
I have little experience of writing poetry. It is unfortunate that I have to be in the right mood for it to feel unforced, and I don’t want to force it above all for fear of feeling pretentious and insincere. Those few times recently that I have attempted to write, usually in those stereotypically filmic moments of mental anguish, I found that the act of writing in verse forces me to think about exactly what I believe, exactly what I feel, more than any other medium I have been involved in writing. It must be the compression that does it.
I’ll explore this by trying to going over my thinking process as I wrote the poem. It has been perhaps two weeks now. The time keeps on flying by, and it depresses me still that I haven’t since that Sunday had such a stretch of time (M was at work from 7:00 to 10:30 and I had the day to myself). I can remember many of the problems and decisions along the way though.
First of all was the question of how far I should try to maintain the theme of these novels I would be purging myself of. This was by no means an easy question since treating them with what would seem to be the utmost disrespect, stripping them of their content, would be an expression of my anger and frustration about these invidious tomes that surround me and which I keep compulsively collecting. On the other hand, keeping the theme, though it might seem at first sight like these books that tell you how to bluff your way through the classics, would not only give me the practice in the form of poetry that I want, forcing me to work in particular words, but also force me to take on a theme that may not come naturally but which has been the subject of world literature. I decided to maintain the theme. Doing otherwise, I decided, would make the writing too much of an exercise. It would make it inauthentic somehow.
It may have been the theme itself that made my mind up. I read about the book on Wikipedia and was taken by the theme, about which I had known nothing. I have perhaps four or five books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in my library, from Invisible Allies to Cancer Ward, but I have only ever read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a short work detailing a day in a soviet labour camp. (I chose the book well, I think, because Solzhenitsyn is such an imposing literary figure, because I purport to have an interest in the soviet union and the region and yet know so so little about it, because it is a sizeable dry book such that I would never get through in a month of Sundays.) The book concerns a relatively privileged group of prisoners who are guaranteed decent food and have reasonable working conditions. They are still shoring up the system with their work, but they are aware that they have it pretty good.
It’s unfortunate, but I can’t recall exactly now on what basis I made the decision to keep the theme, but on reading over the poem (who’s arse end at the very least remains provisional), I think it must have been a decision that made itself. In explaining why I will inevitably… [My writing was curtailed here. It seems so long now since I had those few hours to write, and even in writing about them I ran out of time, as I will do again. I have a stack of drafts now saved in this blog, and it pains me yet again that I cannot finish them, and that each will be the less for not having the time.]
Maybe in that sentence above I was about to go into how in Family Fortunes I began to obsess with the theme of 9/11 and the security state apparatus that has built up in its wake. There is so much material I wanted to read on that, and this material too became the subject of the poem, all the research I have not managed to do since that novel died.
Ah, but I see now, more likely I was going to discuss how in writing about how I decided to keep the theme, and the decisions I made in writing the poem, I will inevitably give numerous clues as to the words that I selected from the novel.
It may have been the first two words that forced my hand. The first was a serendipitous distilation of the theme of the novel, whilst the second forced me to make a choice about the setting, or one of them at least.
It is now five years on from the start of the war in Iraq. Five years on from the time I was obsessively writing notes on envelopes, watching the news and current affairs programmes, reading as much commentary as I could, and writing an essay, called Finite Injustice, I intended to post to the newspapers so hopelessly desperate was I to have some influence on events which were so morally, and logically wrong. it is longer since late 2001 which led me to obsess, too, on everything that was happening, and which put that final nail in the coffin of my dream of being a writer of short fiction in the mould of Raymond Carver, the man who once saved me and empowered me to read literature: the first few months of university saw me fail utterly in my attempts at English and Philosophy, and my switch to politics, something which had always interested me, had me drifting further away from writing fiction of the purest form, with character, plot and setting taking precedence over political commentary, but after I watched those planes hit the towers, politics could no longer be a backdrop.
The pure politics I veered towards at the end of that degree, with an interest in fascism and a dream of being a war correspondent, for one, a dissident expert on the aftermath of 9/11, for another, was a path that petered out in the same way as all the others. Of course I couldn’t keep up. The demonic entropy of the direction that America had taken, with us in its slipstream was as complex and destructive as some of the projections those in Robert J Oppenheimer’s circle had sketched out for how that first nuclear bomb could ignite the atmosphere and even an intelligent and diligent neurotypical couldn’t have kept up. I moved away from here, back to my university town, Scab City, where I accumulated even more piles of unread books around me than I had throughout my degree, where I struggled to read Christopher Isherwood’s diaries and fretted over the stance of pacifism he had taken with Auden, struggled through Isherwood’s Berlin novels a friend of mine who disappointed me more and more, had breezed through, and struggled, too, to find time for writing (in the basement, and in my car, dictating to tapes I would never manage to type up), and where I struggled, too, to read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It was in trying one day to read this that I cracked, that this political bent came to an end like every other time I had overreached myself and my levels of concentration. I began to write one of the most despairing, sardonic, alienated pieces, I have yet set down on paper (as ever, inconclusively), in the parody of Palast’s style and self-image as the lone voice investigative journalist, in a story called Sweetcorn Teeth, an obvious echo of yet another novel I resented, though I had read this one.
This political bent stalled then and never really came back but in fits and dribbles, such as the one I embarked on towards the end of the gestation of Family Fortunes, that other inevitable stage of the development of one of my novels when it grows too much, takes on too much excrescence and passes the stage at which I can even convince myself in optimistic moments that I could ever write it. On this occasion it was the point at which my horror at the realisation that the 9/11 “conspiracy theorists” indeed had a logically consistent and compelling take on the events which made a great deal more sense to me than the story we had been sold from the off forced this horror into the novel itself, and when Chris, sickened by the world that had failed him in trying to do his best by a young girl raped on Eddie’s stag do, took to doing his own research, as I was myself.
Here was a lot of baggage to work around this theme. Because if we are all in the dark over what happened on that day, and if the mainstream media is keeping everyone misinformed, shoring up the state in its efforts to forge a security state that monitors everything we do and lends us freedom only insofar as we adhere to the ruling ideology and live within its agreed, tacit, boundaries, then we ourselves are in this favoured first circle of hell. Those outside of it? Those individuals who are being shunted around the world in secret CIA flights. And so:
Prisoners, a diapered, sedated, dead weight “freight”
Can do little to harm, still less elevate
I had my opening. These prisoners are indeed sedated, and fitted with diapers (an intentional Americanism, of course). Elevate, I suppose it is giving little away to reveal, is the second word (I was wrong above, it is the first and third word which pincered me into keeping the theme, and provided me with a setting), and I defend it here, since this second line makes my position clear - and a position which was held, too, by the New Scientist article and leader on torture which may indeed have aided me in this theme - that torture can never lead to truth and can never be justified even on the grounds that it leads to results (which would in no way itself justify the practice if more is lost in moral authority than can be gained in intelligence).
Stare Kiejkuty and Diego Garcia are airports where the Special Rendition flights have been documented to land. The latter is an island in the shape of a horse shoe, and one look at its history will tell you why it is luckless.
The reference to Hobbesian Anarchy is a description of the theory which holds that foreign relations are an anarchy. Alas, this remains the most plausible take on international affairs, since there is no organisation or power which can in any meaningful way regulate relations between states and pull them back from power play and the use of force (intelligence and information wars are one form in which power is wielded, and this too is as real, if not as visible, a form of power as weaponry). The “ten years before” is one of the most opaque passages, and refers to the fact that George Bush Senior, the former head of the CIA made a keynote speech where the first mention of a “New World Order” was made on 11 September, 1991.
The second stanza (which begins, should the formatting above not make this clear - I am having problems inserting two line breaks and may have to resort to a less than ideal row of asterisks - with “purchase power’s half the fault”) took me into uncharted territory. The first half is straightforward enough. Rudi’s bunker is “ill-fated” because, though it was so woefully underreported that it is difficult not to detect a concerted effort to keep it off our screens and out of our newspapers, World Trade Centre building number 7 was destroyed on the evening of September 11th, taking sensitive financial documents and Rudi’s Office of Emergency Management, as well as CIA offices with it. The purchase power passage and offhand parenthetical comparison of communism and capitalism set up the stanza’s import that we (in the first circle) are too easily bought by material comforts, and that, just because something has a logic and a drive, it does not make it right.
I forget now how the moon landings came into it all. It may well have been because of the link I go on to make between 9/11 and Sorelian myth (the man who wrote the 9/11 commission report - the replacement, that is, for Henry Kissinger, who resigned from the commission due to the apparent conflict of interest with his many clients from Saudi Arabia, was an expert on political myth!), or it may equally be because moon may have been the word the dice landed upon.
The thrust of the stanza is that both 9/11 and the Moon Landings served a purpose for politicians in America for whom foreign policy is an invitation to struggle not only within the various branches of the government, but also with the American people themselves. It is more or less self-evident that the Moon Landings served a purpose in the ideological battle of the Cold War, and many people consider it wholly appropriate that it should. The soviet system was a tyranny led in its formative years by a sociopath and it is one entirely reasonable and logical perspective, I think, to see the moon landings, more or less however they came to be and in whatever way they were spun before reaching our television sets, as at least as legitimate a form of propaganda as Laurence Olivier’s turn in Henry V. It is certain that we need not agree with everything the most virulent anti-communists uttered to say that these methods are likely to have been a great deal less underhand than any that would have been used by the Communist authorities.
[I have just lost a block of text that I have been working on for some hours now and I am feeling pretty low. I was flitting back and forth along different tabs and stopped a script when navigating away from a Guardian site, mistakenly thinking I was stopping the Guardian script. Of course, it was the WordPress script I had stopped, and though it allowed me to continue editing, it soon locked up and the text was lost. This is the kind of thing that depresses me more than ever when finally I get a week to myself to write and then, quite aside from the usual demands on my time, it seems to be sabotaged by such ill-fortune. I have just built up a couple of logically-weighty paragraphs with numerous links and sources, only to have it all disappear into the ether. It’s 17:55 now and already I would be fretting about another day wasting away, but now I’m going to have to go out for a run to get away from it all for a while, and I don’t know that I will have the strength inside of me to write it all again. Writing is my life, but it destroys me again and again.]
It was in writing this passage that I came to question my own beliefs the most, in the way that I now recognise to be characteristic of my writing poems, and it was in setting up a comparison between the moon landings and 9/11 that I did this.
Of course I loved the moon landings as a kid, and had reason to agree with my father at times when he told me I would have loved the sixties not least for this event. But in the last few years if I thought of it at all, I thought of it perhaps in a different light.
Sometimes, this was along the lines of what is suggested by Gil Scott Heron in a song titled Whitey on the Moon:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Essentially, I questioned whether science was sufficiently advanced by the Moon Landings to justify the expense when so much in the way of necessary societal change had not happened.
Sometimes, it was more in line with Auden’s take on the events:
A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness…
…Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Wondering here if the event in and of itself was indeed little more than a “phallic triumph.”
My scepticism did not go further than that. I had heard of theories in which the Moon Landings were dismissed as a hoax and indeed heard it discussed by reasonable people, but I tended to dismiss people who really believed in it as the kind of cranks who believed in flying saucers.
I was writing in the dining room in my Parents’ house, being back there with M for a month or so after she decamped there on finding out about my indiscretion in our house, indeed, in our bed. That’s where the computer is kept, and I kept on referring to it, sometimes out of a genuine need to know something, such as with the precise theme of Solzhenitsyn’s book, and sometimes for clarification of some subtle point, yes, but more for the purposes of procrastination. In going over to look into the Moon Landings Hoax theory I may well have been motivated by a need to know precisely what kind of comparison I was drawing between the use of mobilising myths in 9/11 and beyond and with the Moon Landings, or I may have been motivated by restlessness, essentially, procrastinating.
Either way, I do recall a thought at the back of the mind reminding me that I had once and for a long time essentially repressed the suspicion that something untoward had happened on 9/11 and that we had been lied to about it ever since, and that this was a similar instinct to the one that had informed my dismissal of Moon Landing Hoax theories. Whilst I did not believe that the evidence for the Moon Landings being faked could be anything like so compelling as the evidence of some level of official complicity in 9/11, still, I thought, I do not like to be uninformed and to hold an opinion as strongly as tabloid leader writers on so little evidence.
It was a couple of years back that I came across a letter in the Observer Review which discussed 9/11 and gave a couple of credible websites for follow up research. One of these was, I think, Scholars for 9/11 Truth. I could no longer repress the suspicions I had had about the events of September 11th, 2001 since I watched the live CNN reports and saw how the reporting of Flight 93 changed, veering abruptly away from the rolling news feed and its two impact zones. (Ever since I had refused to believe the story of all-American heroism on board the plane*, and yet I had refused too to go deeper into this scepticism for fear of where it might take me.) There I found a great deal of evidence relating to the collapse of those two totemic buildings and the phenomenally improbably manner in which they both fell down into themselves, into nothing, their floors and contents pulverised to dust (and indeed, human remains found years later on the roofs of surrounding buildings); relating to the various planes, their flight paths and the possibility of making high altitude mobile phone calls; and relating to the network of individuals who stood to gain from the attacks and who were in a position to be able to influence the outcomes of the day. I came to a conclusion about the attacks, that they were organised by US government operatives as a mobilising myth for the steps that the political classes believed would have to be carried out if the US was not to be in danger of losing its position in the world.
No such moment came about with my reading of the few sites I clicked through which offered a sceptical approach to the Moon Landings. Nevertheless, I came to see that I had no reason to believe what I had previously believed. This is a subtle distinction which in no way relies on me having some epiphany in which I come to doubt the moon landings, it is rather a case of my coming to doubt the justification I had held in my mind for a belief I would once have considered to be firm, indeed, to be knowledge.
In that long gone era few of us can now remember, at the end, that is of 1999, I turned to a seminar entitled “Descartes: Mind and Body.” It was one of the few I managed to turn out to, given that it was a bi-weekly seminar, and that threw my organisational skills for a long time. There I learned about a three page paper, published in 1963, in which the whole of epistemology was thrown into chaos. What its writer, Edmund Gettier, did, was challenge the prevailing concept of knowledge as justified true belief
Through a number of counter-examples, Gettier demonstrated that it was possible to hold a true belief, justified in ways most people would accept as being valid, but still in a very real sense not know, because the justification was in some ways not truth-tracking.
Even if my belief that men walked on the moon were true, I would still not have known that men had walked on the moon, I would still have been wrong to dismiss the alternative theories so strongly. This is an important distinction to make in these times where we have so much information and see and read so much that is filtered by so many people before it reaches us: it may percolate down very very quickly sometimes, but percolate it does. I want to stress this moral and take it away entirely from the particular case of the moon landings. We need to question our justifications more, and hold certain of our beliefs less firmly.
To take this whole question away from abstruse philosophical debates and place it on firmer ground, indeed in a way that does not solve the Gettier problem but merely doffs its hat to the complexities regarding justification that it raises, I could compare my justification for believing in the Moon Landings with my justification for believing in the second Gulf War, and compare this, once again, with my justification for believing in the first Gulf War.
Bringing this question back to Iraq is relevant not merely because it is Iraq that the myth of 9/11 helped to support, but also because of the issues Baudrillard raised about the first Gulf war, which are certainly relevant to the second, and additionally because the statements he made about the war are likely as not for many readers to illustrate too the point about beliefs and justifications, since many people believe (based in part perhaps on the premise that French philosophers are overpaid prima donnas who make absurd statements about the world) that he literally believed the war did not take place. His actual statement, of course, was more subtle, though I myself have not yet experienced it and may yet have no reason to consider myself any more qualified to hold beliefs about it now that I have revised my understanding of it in my mind with an article written by a largely self-selected group of who claim knowledge on the subject (because this is, of course, how Wikipedia works). The gap between this belief about Baudrillard’s statement and his actual statement is, I think, representative of the gap between the truth and our belief about it on many subjects.
I had a flip book when I was a child on the moon landings. I have watched the same short televised clips on the events countless times. I have visited Kennedy space centre and seen a great deal of equipment, much of which dates back to the time. I have listened in science classes in which astronaut Michael Collins, whose task, we are led to believe was to stay in lunar orbit, was described as the loneliest man in the universe. All of this informs a short illustrated encyclopedia kind of entry in my brain such that might have inspired animated discussion at a pub quiz question relating to the year of the first Appollo missions, but which doesn’t in fact hold a great deal of substance.
For most of the time I held these beliefs, I overlooked entirely Michael Collins’ role. Now one could ask whether the very nature of my beliefs, indeed, can be questioned before we even come to the justification for them, since if I didn’t even know such a fundamental fact about how two men came to walk on the moon and return, how could I claim to know that they did so?
Each of the justifications I had for the belief, though, also seem now to be very distant from the event itself. Certainly, they are very different from the majority of justifications shoring up the beliefs upon which I base the decisions I make in my day to day life. For example, if I advise a new student not to drink a highly coloured caffeinated drink with aspartame because it might make him hyperactive, then this is based on reading studies I have in turn good reason to believe were peer reviewed, on the observations of people I have good reasons to believe are placed to know about such a connection; it is based too on witnessing many such reactions over and over again.
But as I have already stated (and it does gall me that this statement will provoke so much logical oversteer in certain readers trying to follow my lead) I do not know that the Moon Landings occurred. How would I know such a thing? The number of steps from the event to my understanding of it are so many and the capacity for corruption, for a kind of Chinese whispers is so great in so many of them, and then there is the fact that actually, despite the many times I have heard of this event, I still know relatively little about it, that this is not something I can consider myself justified in believing.
The arguments of some of the people promoting the hoax theory seem plausible after all (and please note my emphasis: not compelling, not forceful, but plausible.) Let’s look at some of these:
The stills photographs. These were taken by the astronauts while being held against their torso, and yet they are very well framed and shot. They have all come out well. But quite aside from this, other irregularities are noted. It is said that the crosshairs on the camera have been overlaid in some of the shots.
The flag, which is flapping in the film footage, despite there being no atmosphere on the moon.
The radiation, which is said to be too high for humans to tolerate with the type of suits they had on the moon.
All of which is plausible to me with my lack of knowledge of these fields, which is to say that I am as unfit to make my mind up about the hoax theories as I am about the moon landing itself, which is as it should be. The only logical conclusion is that I do not know either that the moon landings occurred, or that they were staged and to profess to know either is too strong a word.
As against this, I can see very clearly the reasons why the American Government would want to stage the moon landings. Indeed, many of the reasons are the same as those for wanting to set foot on the moon for real, and so all of the reasons are equally consistent with the US government deciding half way into an overly ambitious program that a hoax would be the preferable alternative to a failure (even if it may have been better not to have tried at all).
There are many types of propaganda, and there is at the very least scope for argument that many of the arguments in support of certain types of propaganda are virtuous. Lawrence Olivier’s turn in Henry V certainly strengthened the British war effort and raised morale, for example. And this is invariably what governments seek in times of war. If the government believes the war is just, then many types of propaganda that will have an effect on public morale and support will inevitably themselves seem desireable. Even if the war is not considered just - if it has become a burden - then low morale and potential civic unrest are never desireable. These are the more virtuous arguments for a form of propaganda, there are, of course, others.
In the case of the Moon Landings, nobody can deny that the following premises were shared by a great number of powerful politicians:
Communism is an evil which must be defeated
Defeat in the space race would break the public’s morale, an, perhaps worse, give communists within the country and the Soviets themselves reason to believe that the Soviet system was the more modern.
Winning by fair means or foul be justified. As justified as, say, telling a desperately ill man that he has a great chance of pulling through so that his natural healing mechanisms can be given a chance
A possible further idea which may have occurred to some, would be that Sand bagging, that is, the Russians might bankrupt themselves in trying to do it themselves (but I don’t know enough about this and think that perhaps at the time it was believed that the Russians were technologically very advanced and economically superior). Doing something which was technologically too advanced for the times would certainly wrong foot the Soviets.
There was, too, a feeling developing in the Cold War Era that reminds me of a poem by Rudyard Kipling in which he lists things that are not done, worried that since the English are brought up to behave correctly and fairly, they get undercut by more underhanded ways of going about things. The poem had apparently truncated lines, that is, missing a word the rhyme scheme suggested, words like pict and, perhaps, jew (I haven’t got a copy to hand but know that there was a reference to the jews in the poem, which is discussed in Christopher Rickin’s T S Eliot and prejudice.) If the Soviets were using dirty tricks and they were working, then realpolitik would dictate that they should be looked into and perhaps used, even if they must be adapted first to American values.
Because of these reasons I can easily imagine an situation whereby the Americans either decided to lower the impossible target which was set by Kennedy (who knows who had advised it) of getting a man on the moon, or, after some work on this goal, it was stepped back. If the moon landings were a hoax it may well have been that the men who are said to have set foot on the moon initially volunteered and trained to do exactly that, before either it was decided to simply go into space (and what an achievement that was on its own), not to risk what would be the inevitably high possibility of catastrophic failure if they went further.
Let’s compare it to the style of Soviet propaganda.
When my girlfriend’s mother was little, she went into the fields to collect beetles. The government had ran a televised campaign claiming that the Americans had sent clouds carrying beetles to destroy the potato crop. People believed it and huge numbers went out to destroy this creature which was destroying the crops.
Clearly, the campaign worked to some degree. Now, it was of course a very unsophisticated campaign and watching it now we are incredulous, but the people were living in a very particular context, one which
The Americans are putting beetles the size of the first joint of an adult’s thumb in the clouds!
I feel qualified to make a judgement on that. If it was aeroplanes I would have said with some degree of certainy that the Americans did not do it. With beetles being shipped out in clouds, I can say that the Americans definitely didn’t do it.
Which goes to show once again just how monumentally stupid the Commuists were. But there again they knew the context in which they were operating, perhaps almost as well as the people writing the mobilising myths of today.
So, I believe the Moon Landings may not have taken place, and I’m not remotely scandalised by it. Quite the reverse. In some ways, that would still, in exactly the same way, be a triumph of American can-do spirit just as the British [deception campaign of WWII was a triumph of British grit].
And so, the stanza still falls, more or less, on the side of the Moon Landings, or at least on the side of indifference to whether they were staged.
…It’s a smarter trick
That millions worked overtime in the service of a patriotic dream that fit
That’s a shrug to the question that precedes it: “Some say it was actors against a studio backdrop/but ask yourself who did Sorel better serve.” It doesn’t matter if it was staged or not, it worked. It was smarter to get so many people to work so hard in the service of America than to get people on the moon. The fact that it did work I took from the first chapter of Stiffed by Susan Faludi which details this very myth and its effect.[]
Looking into Apollo missions more than I have. I had never read the ‘conspiracy theories’ in this regard and was surprised to see that some of the arguments seem plausible. This does not mean that I have changed my mind, but certainly there was motive, there was capacity. Not for the first time I found I may have to change my poem since I have changed my thinking.
To dismiss it out of hand is illogical. The allies deception campaign. If you believe that the enemy is singularly iniquitous then you do what you can, and on that basis fooling your own people is by no means the worst crime.
I find that the puzzle-solving aspect of poetry keeps me at it better than is the case with prose. It is almost like solving an equation, though that,sadly, is not something I have the capacity to do at all.
The criticism of Haddon is harsh, and it does seem to me that he turned off his powers of self-criticism for a while after the success of The Curious Incident, but I am a fan of his (for the moment only on the strength of his Curious incident, which I have read in Czech and English, and plan to read in French, and which makes me cry, but also on his willingness to try new things, such as his A-Levels in Greek and Latin a few years ago, certainly this takes him to a mere fraction of the level of those more fortunate who received a good education and may then snear down at him, but he is trying his hand). It is in the sincere spirit of amateurism that I hope to offer these poems, and my drawings perhaps, though I hope one day to offer novels and short stories in a rather different spirit.
My logic proceeds rather too quickly for the form for the moment. I have found this before, in the poems I have tried to write about my personal situation, which I wish to copy out with a similar commentary.
I would like to post some old poems like one I tried to write in relation to an Iranian communist who sewed his eyes and mouth together around the corner from where I was living one time.
I don’t know that I’m ready to defend it as a poem except in this: it is sincere.
Sometimes that’s all that matters.
* The story was too much the motif of muscular American values. And indeed too many ideas were compressed into the story, such as the pacific German passenger disgracefully shoehorned into Paul Greengrass’s United 93. This was textbook myth.