Marx’s opening sentence carries the indelible traces of metastoicheiosis, (5) the orthodox tradition of trans-elementation that understands where the icon’s power comes from and opens the gates to material relationships with the spirit world. The spectral body of Christianity hovers over Europe and in its death throes it births a socialist child. The law is the law of God. The Ten Commandments brought down from the mountain by Moses, their form of solid carved, graspable but invisible edicts a text in God’s words, a reminder that we are all people of the book. (6)
Derrida speaks of the body without flesh, as if he desires to provide an answer to the Doubting Thomas amongst us who cannot accept that Communism still lives and who wants to poke fingers into its wounds to check and verify its health.
“I am my father’s spirit” an echo of the Holy Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed being his name, waiting for his kingdom to come, the language of the Bible and Shakespeare Desert Island reading for Marx, the man who grew up in a Jewish household, was the son of a lawyer and father of a belief system.
Lanark like (7) the body can develop a carapace of hard, scaly skin that can grow to encase itself until a point is reached when all feeling is gone. Its contact with the outside world eventually ceases, this armour its protection, inuring it from harm, ensuring that as a spectator it is not contaminated by the disease of feeling.
In the dominion of the dead all acts are acts of mourning, disembodied voices occupying the space of silence, which is itself shaped by the death of speech acts talking to the deaf. Only in work are we vital and alive. All there is, is work. (8) The labour of the working class a fond memory, the Earl of Dudley’s steelworks (9) long mothballed and mythologised in Black Country hearts, twinned in Heaven with the Ruhr, the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine.
A small dog whines in the dark, it is lost and cold.
5 Paraskos, M (2010) Regeneration Mitcham: Orage Press (Part 9)
6 In Islam, a phrase used to describe non-Muslim adherents to faiths that use a book of prayer, these are described in the Qur’an as; Jews, Christians, and Sabians and at other times as also followers of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Muslims themselves have also been described as ‘the people of the book’ because of their relationship with the Qur’an.
7 Grey, A (1981) Lanark: a life in four books London: Canongate
8 Cale, J and Reed, L(1990) Songs for Drella New York: Sire Records Track 4 'Work'
9 The Earl of Dudley Steelworks. One of the earliest Black Country steelworks founded in the 18th century and visited by German and French industrialists during this time when they were importing models taken from the British Industrial Revolution.
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