The sixth night
Austin (12) was concerned to read our speech as acts, acts that could be pretence or real, authentic communication being suspect, the meaning being the use and how reality was changed.
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house. (13)
There is no point in trying to straighten this out. An embedded memory, its crookedness a rightness, that if eradicated erases what it is it be human.
We should not fight against our nature. The tragedy of birth is its sweet optimism in those short days before future voices rage against that blackest night of blood stained sheets and dark conception. Even the newly born have a past, a past cursed by the living when life is unendurable and swift death a blessed blasphemy.
The language of passion cannot be measured by reason, in wishing suicide we also end those other lives extended through our own, so easily extinguished when we die.
The son who wants to better himself leaves his small hometown behind, forgetting the responsibility of blood. This the origionary wrong, only made right by prodigal return. If the ties are severed a cancer is born, eating slowly at the bowels, a hidden spectre of regret, the hell waiting for every son who goes against his father. The renown we seek a poor replacement for a father’s blessing and recognition of our worth.
A text we loved in youth can seem a foolish verse in later years, but if excommunicated will still continue living in a neighbouring domain. If an idea is strong it can survive translation. In our bodies we carry the ghosts of our parents and in our voices we reconcile and harmonise their forgotten dialects. The ideas of the past have stood the test of time, they appear carved in stone and immovable. Any complaint about this is either useful or not, an awareness of possibility as frightening as a confrontation with reality. Whatever happens a change will come.
Ooh it's been so long
It's been so long, a little too long
But a change has gotta come
I'm so tired, so tired of suffering
And standing by myself
And standing up alone
But a change has gotta come
You know and I know
You know that I know
That I know that you know, honey
That a change is gonne come (14)
My bones are rocks, my blood flows in the open as a stream, my hairs prick through the earth like grass, my fingers rooted into the ground. The moment of my planting is the time of my release, the oath that drives now given to those others who will carry on the vengence of history. The son could in this new play love the father. The howls of anguish at our parents’ deaths are not because of love, we cry over missed opportunities, the acceptance of something that should never have been accepted, the loss of familiarity and the inheritance of a total responsibility that will not unshackle itself until senility sets in. Acceptance is the hardest skill to learn, once learned a virtue but if not an ache of loneliness sets in.
Making sense of long dead texts, can be the same as holding a microphone up to the lips of statues, the silence of the stone is deafening. Now deaf to Marx and closed to his nineteenth century reason, we are left with only his spectre to guide us through the shadowy underworld of capital. But we cannot abandon him here, in a hollow place between a vanished world and a world not yet come into being. If you look again you will notice the messiah’s mouth is open, a black hole gapes beneath his nose, no light escapes from here, we must adjust our vision if we are to listen to this speech.
The three Marx are swearing in unison, “Bollocks, bugger, bugger, shit”.
12 J. L. Austin developed the concept that speech is itself a form of action, language being not just the passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular activity that can be used to invent and affect realities.
13 The crooked man is reputed to be the Scottish General Sir Alexander Leslie, his signature is on a covenant securing religious and political freedom for Scotland. ‘They all lived together in a little crooked house' refers to the fact that the English and Scots had at last come to an agreement, but like most compromises it felt crooked.
14 The refrain in the head is: A Change is Gonna Come Written by Sam Cooke (1963) and sung by Otis Reading as the third track on the album Otis Blue, 1965 Stax Records
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