A Comparative Reading of Two 'Completely Different' Books

 

 

I usually read a few books at the same time, and there is typically some significant differences between them, along with some minor similarities or connections. However, considering the statements of Chicago police officers in the early 90s and the articles of faith of a 16th century Friulian heretic, I don't think I've ever read two books quite as different as these.

What Cops Know was recommended to me by my crime fiction tutor Dr Steve Somethingorother pretty much twenty years ago. The Cheese and the Worms was the subject of episode 458 of the History of Philosophy podcast, an extensive and truly world-class education on its subject.

On similarities, they both provide verbatim accounts, and they both deal with the delegation of the right to violence by the state. In the 90s, a conviction for murder in Chicago carried the death penalty, while poor Menocchio was eventually burned at the stake for heresy at the age of 67.

On differences, reading The Cheese and the Worms teaches you that a careful examination of a person's ideas along with their available reading materials (unusually for a 16th century miller, Menocchio was literate) can yield the definite identification of the influences on those ideas and the individual's particular way of understanding what they perceive.

As such, The Cheese and the Worms unintentionally provides the frame for reading What Cops Know. As I read the statements, I listen for the voices of their trainers, and the filters they apply to their experiences. The extent that What Cops Know provides a frame for The Cheese and The Worms is most probably that it provides an insight into the minds of the priestly interrogators who compelled Menocchio to detail his extraordinary theological cosmogony.

I can almost hear them speaking in the voice of a Chicago police officer, 'The most unbelievable thing I ever saw on the streets was this guy. He'd got together a bunch of books and cooked up this whole religion about the world being made of cheese, and angels springing out of it like worms. I think about that a lot sometimes.'

Individually, as a writer, Menocchio has provided a wonderful real-life model for a working class rebel whom I can see taking centre stage in a sequel to my debut novel Glassworld: Out of the Darkness (2024), while the paradoxes inherent in the multiple perspectives of What Cops Know are particularly fertile for writing.

For example, Chicago police officers blame victims. They blame them for being in their own homes and for not being in their own homes, provocative of the violence committed against them in either case, and they accuse murderers of blaming their victims too. Such self-contradictions have provided a basis - at least in thought - for a wonderfully creepy piece of true crime existentialism, which I have added to the stack of short stories I will write one day.

In conclusion, reading is one of the most immense pleasures of my life, not only for the works themselves but for the curious and unanticipated interplays that occur between them.

tuutuuk and problem foton-ru

i have friend one time live down by jivolat, name tuutuuk, when i down at jivolat rinse glut of extra-being from tulablong, yes, i go into tuutuuk abode and sit it tuutuuk on new-light rug of circle made fur of gretenv, there we talk long time, one time tuutuuk it tell i, parsap up in kel great dificult for tuutuuk, it say parsap drain greatly of nekkel and tuutuuk, it no able tag all foton-ru 

i think well problem, foton-ru no tag it fur it no curl and fur foton-ru no curl it jangle bad it put it tobing machine, i say tuutuuk, it make grow jolibop of low of moving shab and a foton-ru it like go jolibop and it consume and fill it foton-ru nogon of jolibop, here it parsap no drain nekkel of it tuutuuk, tuutuuk it thank i with podon of a sniveg, i warm of it podon of sniveg of tuutuuk and i go

happen many task, i get extra-being pull hard it tulalblong so go i jivolat, yes, i go into tuutuuk abode, and new-light rug of circle made fur of gretenv it no have tuutuuk on or near, i go rinse glut of extra-being good and feel more good and go walk by low of moving shab and, yes, bowing come to i hear, bowing of loss and bowing of death-come-near, i fast now and hot and burn in shom, fear i death of tuutuuk

i find tuutuuk it clutched in jolibop, jolibop snarl so hard i never see and tuutuuk it not can run and moving shab it tuutuuk almost below, i go back tuutuuk abode, take slom it under new-light rug of circle made fur of gretenv, i go back where tuutuuk, i put slom of snarl of jolibop, it jolibop it die-go-down, now tuutuuk it below of moving shab i put slom more of snarl of jolibop, it jolibop die-go-down in a wind and pull i tuutuuk by it maggon, tuutuuk it out it moving shab and tuutuuk it no give i fear death of tuutuuk, it tuutuuk look i old-light of eye and it tuutuuk go

again happen many task and glut of extra-being of i pull like rock long of maggon, pass i abode of tuutuuk and go in it tuutuuk abode and not i see tuutuuk and not also see i rug, think i well and know i it tuutuuk it go and see in picture-in-nekkel that i not find tuutuuk in abode of tuutuuk in moment-to-do for until moment-to-die and small moving shab i touch on face and go back i abode for find wisdom

Speak for Thyself!

I.

There in the drafty, darkened hall,
limbs and jaws and bones withal,
a row of bodies, nude as sin,
knee by hip, and jaw by chin.

Pale were they, and eyes asunken,
lips were puckered, and mouths were shrunken,
and there amid the mangy throng,
was one I knew, and knew him strong.

Yes, eyes; yes, ears; yes, flaxen hair;
the features that I knew were there.
But not the knowledge of his parts,
what gave him to me was his heart.

His heart, that is to say his whole,
his composite, his living soul,
but sight thereof led not to sigh
of cheer, for he - that ghoul - was I.

But I were me, then who were him?
And how had mind been stripped from limb?
Once one is rent in pieces two,
How can the wit be threaded through?

I have been told 'Speak for thyself!'
by those who witness not this gulf
between the wick that flicks and flits
and the combe that keeps the wits.

II.

A moaning and a twitching gave me start,
And shiftingly those figures broke apart.
Sight of self was lost amid the throng,
trespassed by their eerie, keening song.

Worse yet, their shrouded eyes began to peel,
the sight of all those sightless eyes unreal.
And worser still within that song of bone,
the voice I heard the loudest was my own.

Whence from, this voice that issued from my lips?
Who would to mind perform such censorship?
Oh, clamour and the blabbing of the horde!
I tried to think and could not, so I roared!

"Be silent, beasts; allow me to conjecture!"
and, in response to efforts at prefecture,
my own white face began to twist and gurn,
and spit and scream, and that was how I learned,

as all the fiends took up their cries anew,
my bruit was my articulation true,
that when I turned my thoughts toward my tongue,
resultant din was how my words were sung.

So what, my friends, is poet made to do,
when all their words are rendered cry and hue?
Should I above my brawl try to be heard,
or beauty that I shape be e'er deferred?

The Spoiling of Beauty

Have you wished
for beauty,
that loveliness kissed
with lips of ruby
your brow?

Let us imagine
it happened,
and all with passion
were maddened
by you.

You could go nowhere
to breathe.
You were the flower
to bees
in the field.

When you were present
you gratified
and acquiescent
you catalysed
their need.

Your charm defrayed
those charges
that were raised
through largess
by want.

Now show your face,
its flaws and boons.
Does it pay
to grace a room?
No, it doesn't.

We could be free
not once but doubly
Let's make a plea
to be ugly
as sin.

We'd walk this land
tall as giants
with faces bland
in defiance
of man.

The Good, the Bad and the Inefficient

"All good writers have some bad in them." -- Philip Larkin

I believe he's right because, if you want to make art, you have to really believe 'This thing should exist' and 'It has to be like this', but nobody can be so self-oriented only when they make art; they must be that kind of person all the time.

My next point will broaden the stage of this intrapersonal story quite dramatically, so to speak.

I think there is too great a concern with being good and being perfectly good. I think it's okay to be bad. The universe is fundamentally good (take 'good' to mean something like 'unified' if the word 'good' is losing its meaning at this point). The goodness or unity in the universe is strong enough to carry the weight of badness or disunity, and that may even be what it's for.

Let us take the politician as a case apart from artists. All politicians are at least partly bad because they all want to control the monopoly on violence. They all desire the right to apply force, to compel their fellow citizens to do things they would not otherwise do. (Authority in my view is a form of disunity or 'badness' because the only people who can represent that people is that same people themselves).

But, for one, this 'badness' of political actors may in the end achieve some good, suggesting that their badness may have been part of a goodness so great that it was difficult to perceive.

(As an analogy here, consider the inefficient but surviving business. It is inefficient because some of its activities do not convert investment into profit as efficiently as possible. But some of that inefficiency may yield an insight that increases the business's profitably. In that case, what was thought to be inefficiency was in fact an efficiency that could not be identified using the available methods. So it is with the good and the bad.)

And secondly, the necessary badness of individual politicians is tolerable because there is enough good to carry it.

But what if there is not? Shouldn't we say 'Badness is okay *as long as* there is enough good to carry it'? Let's try it. If a government becomes so subsumed by badness that its goodness collapses under the weight, much more suffering will radiate outwards from it to the rest of the people. But those people, being largely good, will carry the weight until a better time and better decisions. And if they are not, and they destroy themselves, humanity will live on around them to that better time. And if humanity is destroyed, the considerable remainder of the world will live on. And if the world is destroyed? The galaxy? The universe? Ah, the universe cannot be destroyed. There cannot be no universe. As long as the potential for existence exists, there will be.

And so, it is not necessary to say 'as long as' because there will always be enough good to carry the bad. It is just that there may not be enough good to carry the bad within a given identified container.

Having established this, we can now work backwards. If Earth doesn't need to be ripped apart as part of some powerful disunity (or some greater good so large it looks like tragedy to the human eye), it shouldn't be. The nation, the community, the individual should not be consumed by badness if there is an alternative.

I think identity exists so that we will struggle for it, but we have innumerable concentric identities: self, family, profession, sex, class, background, political outlook, society, nation, continent, planet, galaxy. A person who could align all of their identities and struggle towards unity in all of them would be the most powerfully good person. But because we cannot do that - none is sufficiently strong - and so each of us is necessarily somewhat bad, somewhat disunified.

As Plato had Socrates say in the Protagoras, "No one errs willingly". They who know right will do right. But knowing, for example, that it is right to give food to a person who is starving is not enough. We would also have to align our identities sufficiently to understand that we and the suffering person are of the same kind. Then we would automatically help them.

When we know how to preserve, how to be the good and carry the bad, we do so. And when we don't know how to be good, we must necessarily be bad and be carried.

This provides no assurance against personal destruction or that of our kind but, because the greatest reality is indestructible, even if our collective badness leads to the end of any good we recognise, some small part of us will live on until the end.