Oh dear, it seems we must dredge up bits of debris from the past, venture into that febrile world of childhood: those long lost (or not!) days before Dr Spock came along in an excited and post-Freudian age of progress and improvement. The infamous sixties – the watershed between the b/w world of the fifties from which a vertiginous drop led down and down through the dark ages, flashing past the classical empires until we land on our backsides, hairy and grunting, eating and grooming and lying back in the branches – also known as history and pre-history – and our current consumerist dreamworld in which we lie back on our recliners by the pool, getting drunk and fat. Sorry? Did you say crisis? Banks? Markets spiralling out of control? Nonsense, please would you get out of my light.
In those far gone days the gods were as plentiful as mosquitoes, angels lounged about not knowing the meaning of the word work. And trousers were a long way into a future which our imaginations hadn’t invented. We dribbled in perfect unblemished happiness. Not one of the babies had to fear his father’s violent wrath; the belts that were not needed for the absent trousers. No, those dads chuckled at their off-springs’ endless mischief.
Oh, they were happy days. The lineaments of the happiness archetype were laid down during this timeless time. Yahweh was resting after the monumental efforts of creation. He (he?) saw no reason to start improving things. Progress not being thought of until after the Fall. There are other stories, of course, like evolution, but could I fit in all of that, here, in a few hundred words? No certainly not. But there is the tricky issue of gender and power: the patriarchal domination, the gendering of gods leading to the gendering of the one, the highest of the high gods, with an inclination to make rules, to lay down laws . . . and progress became about who had the biggest empire. My dad’s bigger than your dad: stronger, richer, got a bigger car and other things like that.
Talking of evolution do you remember Desmond Morris and his Naked Ape? And then Dawkins come along a bit later with his Selfish Gene. Stories that my great-great-grandmother told me as we huddled round the flickering candle.
Anyway evolutionary progress eventually comes up with the famous Murdoch Belt, bloodstained and hardened by much use – as well as that right arm, the left holding down the squealing Rupie.
And come to think of it, doesn’t Jimmy look startlingly like the angel in your picture. I think history must be an alien concept to angels. It is only humanity that must bear the weight of history and time, of what is endlessly false consciousness.
By the way what happened to that blackbird of Wallace Stevens?
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.