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The Turl | Turl Street Arts Magazine Oxford

The Turl is an arts magazine for and by students at Oxford University, centred around Jesus College, Exeter College, and Lincoln College.

Decay, Destruction, Distortion: Tramp in Flames

Paul Farley’s poetry collection Tramp in Flames is a stellar example of a hideous state of flux. It celebrates corruption—particularly noticeable are the sudden distortions from beautiful imagery to utter destruction.

One of his poems, The Lapse, swiftly distorts itself and fixates on morbid events in a semi-fanatical manner. This rapid warping of time and focus is found throughout Farley, and he uses this state of flux as a looking glass into the dystopian undercurrents running rampant below the surface. As the poem progresses, a decline to decay occurs; it seems almost inevitable. It feels as contemporary as ever in this way, representing the way a single negative thought seems to rush up around us and consume us. As Farley examines a film in detail, his focus changes to rot and loss in the third and final stanza—he starts to talk about “the dead sheep’s seconds-long journey to nothing”. This is very similar to the end of Tramp in Flames, in which a tramp is described  burning with a “smell… like a foot-and-mouth pyre”. The endings are gruesome: they reveal what is almost an obsession with death, disaster and decay. Farley’s language really brings it alive: he heightens the gruesome “smell” of a burning tramp by comparing it to a modern event—the mass slaughter of diseased cattle. All paths lead to death.

Similar ideas can be found throughout the collection, with one of his poems even being entitled “Ruin”, despite being about his own newfound clarity in the world after first receiving glasses. Change is no positive force here; rather, it’s a harbinger of destruction. No doubt this chimes with the reader in 2020 as much as it did in 2006. The structure reflects this too: the first stanza changes mid-line, disintegrating the line structure. What follows is an utterly corrupted second stanza, which is essentially one over-subordinated sentence. Farley is really emphasising corruption in his language and in his structure. If this weren’t enough, conceptual decay runs through the poem to a profoundly negative ending in Duel when he “use[s] my thumbs to blow my fucking brains out.” What started off with a child’s imaginative use of pictures for a gunfight quickly descends into a dark and graphic description of killing oneself.

I find this morbid fascination with corruption and destruction mesmerising yet eerie. What starts out so well begins to lose its positive tone and then instantly descends into complete darkness. This same childhood poem makes use of cursing: “bullshitter”, “fucking”. A distinct sense of warped time pervades his poetry; here, we’re instantly transported from childhood to the adulthood whence he reminisces. Similarly, The Lapse: Farley examines closely each snapshot of the film “Jason and the Argonauts”, noting that the four months of hard work put into the skeletons only received five minutes screen time. He laments “Edgerton’s milk splash”, which takes just seconds on screen, but took significantly longer to create. Having noticed this warping of time, Farley is immediately drawn to another use of the same, time-consuming effect—the “seconds-long journey to nothing”. A rapid, inevitable acceleration to obliteration. It’s certainly not cheery.

Similarly, in Tramp in Flames, “the bin bags melt and fuse him to the pavement”, creating an image of deformation. This immediately leads to Farley’s distortion of time, reminiscing about “forty years before” and how the tramp “wet himself”, which parallels The Lapse’s lamentation “Give us back what is ours.”, moving quickly into the past. Farley continuously uses time imagery, and the movement from warped time to decay to destruction is characteristic of his poetry collection. He laments change, and celebrates the past.

Nevertheless, the events are described beautifully. On the burning tramp: his “layers / burn brightly” and “give off the colours of a Roman candle”. It’s as though this event is a spectacle. The vivid imagery contrasts starkly with the dark subject matter. His simile acts as a “heat-shield… for re-entry / to reality”, cushioning such a horrific incident and making it easier for us to discuss. Again, Farley’s work faces up to difficult realities we try to cover up. But underneath this façade—behind this beautified treatment—the contrast makes it all the more abhorrent. Farley writes poetry that is visibly and structurally beautiful—but the meaning is corrupted, as sentences spread over lines, valuing beauty over content. Farley’s “maggots [work] like a ball of fire”—and ourselves, the readers, grab onto the beauty of fire over the disgust we feel about the maggots. We are moths to a flame, willingly accepting what we want to believe. As changes burn the world around us, we sit down, enjoying the warmth of the flames and bathing in the spectacle before us—and we gloss over everything else.

Farley loves word play; particularly, mentioning a method and then, soon after, adopting it for his own. In Pantoum of Emergency, Farley mentions how “My genome has found itself put to the sword” moving to talking about “the broad steeled parang of the tropical wood” which “filmed itself chopping…”, distorting the focus of the poem, thus making the poem seem particularly violent. As with all his poetry, every idea is twisted; here a violent tone descends as fast as a thrust of a sword.

Farley’s poetry considers the dazzling portrayal of terrible events—an easy way to gloss over problems in society. And yet the alternative seems to be an obsession with distortion and destruction—an alternative where all roads lead to oblivion. In a time where half the world is pretending climate change doesn’t exist, and the other half has been besieged by eco-anxiety, Farley’s poetry represents the choice we have today—a choice which has no pleasant answer. For those of us who recognise the death and destruction which lies behind everything, Farley seems to leave us a rousing anthem: “Give us back what is ours.”

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The Turl | Turl Street Arts Magazine Oxford

The Turl is an arts magazine for and by students at Oxford University, centred around Jesus College, Exeter College, and Lincoln College.

The Untold Story of Fahrenheit 451

Those who know me know I’m a little obsessed with dystopian fiction. Yet I often find people are surprised when I say Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favourite books of all time. For many this book was either a little boring or not that great. The biggest complaint is one that, in my opinion, is highly reductive: ‘the only message of the book is that censorship is wrong’. 

So many of Fahrenheit 451’s messages sadly remain untold stories. It’s rich in astute observations and couched in a beautiful language that sprawls across what is actually a rather enthralling plot. There’s so much more than simply burning books. 

If 1984 warns against militant jingoism, Fahrenheit 451 warns against that one might call ‘jingleism’. There’s no better way to convey what I mean than with the ending of a speech from our antagonist, Captain Beatty: 

“‘Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.’ 

‘Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded.’” 

The inhabitants of this society have very limited attention spans where all they care about is the snap ending. And as if to prove his point, the wife (Mildred) of our protagonist (Montag) repeats only his last two words. Mildred—along with everyone else in society— lives in a world of jingles: a world of catchy expressions, of short sharp snap endings. 

Beatty acknowledges that boiling everything down to the gag results from the proliferation of entertainment and the population boom. With more people and more entertainment, time pressures squeeze entertainment to a pulp. From the pulped pile of books emerged attention-grabbing, simplistic jingles. What’s disturbing is less the abstract potentialities this represents, but the concrete realities it mirrors: this is hardly an unfamiliar story. In Australia, one immigration policy was simply the three word slogan, “Stop the boats”. What makes this so dangerous is that it is presented without any nuance or rational argumentation.

People often don’t follow leaders or policies because they’re good—but because their jingle rouses up a mob mentality. In an analysis of Trump’s speech, linguists have found a particular prevalence of repetition and polarisation—out with external discussion and nuance, in with forceful catchphrases and divisive black-or-white viewpoints. 

Bradbury warns against a populace cognitively incapable of tuning in for anything longer than the snap ending—for the catchphrases. They haven’t the ability to hear nuanced arguments, they can only hear the jingle. 

Politically, poisoning its inhabitants with jingleism allows the society to be utterly repressed. As Beatty goes on to explain in his characteristically wonderful way, one need only “whirl man’s mind around so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought”. And with thought out of the way, Beatty and the rest of the leadership becomes unaccountable— people are not only unable to think for themselves, but they’re incapable of engaging with anything which isn’t catchy.

Everyone in the society becomes reduced to the mental capacity of an infant, and the rulers can do what they want. The extremely stupid population simply don’t engage with politics—they have no awareness, never mind any say. 

It’s tempting, as with much dystopian fiction, to frame this in Orwellian terms—the big bad oppressive authorities reduce the population to shrivelled wrecks to cement their power. But there’s no explicit authoritarian or morally flawed goal underlying all of this. Bradbury himself claims it’s “less about Big Brother and more about Little Sister”. Contrary to the reductionist claims I so often hear, this isn’t really a story of the political elite exploiting the masses via censorship. In fact, this is a story where the masses subjugate themselves in the name of happiness— something we, as much as they, value. And that is the real reason this is so scary.

Bradbury’s society is full of people who have corroded their own mental capacities, stopped thinking, and thrown themselves into chains. This regression, of course, is symbolised by the banning and burning of books; books, after all, are a symbol of thought and of patience. Most disturbingly of all, we learn that “‘the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.’” Authoritarian oppression is not required—society represses itself. 

Total annihilation is the ending to this particular tale. Sadly, such an ending doesn’t seem so far from reality. Lockdown is our own dystopia and has shown us how dangerous ignorance can be. But again, people wrongly appropriate the military themes of 1984 to Fahrenheit 451. In 1984, war was a constant, purposefully forced upon the cultural consciousness. But in Fahrenheit 451, we barely see the war. The people are like pacified babies—incapable of thought and emotion, they are utterly ignorant of the threat. 

The most powerful message is the problem with jingleism on a personal scale. What is humanity worth if not for thought and emotion? The characters of Fahrenheit 451—with the exception of the charming Clarisse, discerning Beatty and a few others—are utterly vapid. When presented with poetry, Mildred’s wife and her friends burst into tears. They sit all day in a room with 4 massive TV screens for walls, and at night they use “little Seashells” in their ears. Bradbury would be rolling in his grave at the development of earphones, iPhones, and virtual reality. 

Television, for Bradbury, represented the short-term anaesthetic pleasure that leads to an inescapable unhappiness. It’s the easy way out; the choice not to love. Partially from a fear of pain and partially from the evolutionary need to pay attention to the loud and the bright, we choose to bury ourselves in click-bait YouTube, mind-numbing TV series, and attention-grabbing headlines. Beatty—as we’ve come to expect— summarises nicely: “‘Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!’” 

Soon, people lose the ability to sit down for a few hours to read a good book. As we fill our lives with more and more ostentatious entertainment, we neurologically lose the ability to engage in less stimulating activities—our brain either wants brazen vulgarity, or it goes to sleep. 

For me, Fahrenheit 451 cautions us not to lose our humanity in the name of happiness. It cautions us not to subjugate ourselves by becoming intellectually infantile. There’s an underlying smugness to the allegation that the book is just about censorship—'we don’t censor, we don’t burn books’. Even many who claim to love it “fail to notice it’s we TV watchers who are the villains”, as Steve West notes. Maybe my fear is confirmed by the fact that so many have such a superficial reading of Fahrenheit 451. That’s why I think it’s a story worth telling 

[freelance-philosopher]

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

— Anaïs Nin

[philosophybits]

“We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.”

— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

[philosophybits]

“I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.”

— John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

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