t h e h a u n t o l o g i c a l s o c i e t y

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[thehauntologicalsociety]

The Breakthrough — A Story by Daphne du Maurier — A Teleplay by Graham Evans and Clive Exton

Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere?

On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself.

There are very audible echoes of Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx and even Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape, scripted by Nigel Kneale in The Breakthrough, though it’s actually based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story that predates both of them. Written in 1964 as a favour to Kingsley Amis who was looking to put together an anthology of science fiction stories that was never published, the short story turned up in Du Maurier’s 1971 collection Not After Midnight, and Other Stories. Graham Evans’ television play, adapted by Clive Exton, is faithful to the story but possibly as a consequence it’s far too leisurely for its own good.

Computer specialist Stephen Saunders (Simon Ward) is sent by a government minister, Sir John Fowler (Anthony Nicholls), to a laboratory, Saxmere, situated on the salt marshes of the East Suffolk Coast, ostensibly to help maintain it’s fantastically clunky and oh-so-70s computer – all oscilloscopes, huge reels of tape and inexplicable banks of flashing lights. It turns out that the Saxmere team, made up of “Mac” Maclean (Brewster Mason), Robbie (Clive Swift), Janus (Roy Boyd), Ken (Thomas Ellice, here credited as Martin C. Thurley) and Cerberus the dog are trying to use the computer to help them capture human psychic energy (or “Force 6” as Mac dubs it) at the very moment of death. The terminally ill Ken is chosen as the test subject and a developmentally challenged young local girl, Niki (Rosalind McCabe), who shows some talent as a medium and seems to have caused poltergeist activity in the past, is drafted in to act as a conduit to him after he dies. The experiment seems to be a success but Niki reports back that Ken wants his life force released and the researchers realise with horror that their process captures more than just psychic energy.

— Kevin Lyons — EOFFTV - The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Paperhouse is a 1988 British dark fantasy film directed by Bernard Rose. It was based on the 1958 novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. The film stars Ben Cross, Glenne Headly and Gemma Jones. The original novel was the basis of a six-episode British TV series for children in the early 1970s which was titled Escape Into Night.

While suffering from glandular fever, 11-year-old Anna Madden draws a house. When she falls asleep, she has disturbing dreams in which she finds herself inside the house she has drawn. After she draws a face at the window, in her next dream she finds Marc, a boy who suffers with muscular dystrophy, living in the house. She learns from her doctor that Marc is a real person.

Anna sketches her father into the drawing so that he can help carry Marc away, but she inadvertently gives him an angry expression which she then crosses out, and the father (who has been away a lot and has a drinking problem, putting a strain on his marriage) appears in the dream as a furious, blinded ogre. Anna and Marc defeat the monster and shortly afterward Anna recovers, although the doctor reveals that Marc's condition is deteriorating.

Anna's father returns home and both parents seem determined to get over their marital difficulties. The family goes on holiday by the sea, where Anna finds an epilogue to her dream.

Charlotte Burke - Anna Madden, Ben Cross - Dad, Glenne Headly - Kate Madden, Elliott Spiers - Marc, Gemma Jones - Dr. Sarah Nichols, Jane Bertish - Miss Vanstone, Samantha Cahill - Sharon, Sarah Newbold - Karen.

Marianne Dreams is a children's fantasy novel by Catherine Storr. It was illustrated with drawings by Marjorie-Ann Watts and published by Faber and Faber in 1958. The first paperback edition, from Puffin Books in 1964, is catalogued by the Library of Congress as revised.

Marianne is a young girl who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She draws a picture to fill her time and finds that she spends her dreams within the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker, and starts to spend more and more time trapped within her fantasy world, and her attempts to make things better by adding to and crossing out things in the drawing make things progressively worse. Her only companion in her dreamworld is a boy called Mark, who is also a long-term invalid in the real world.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Francis Fukuyama — The End of History and the Last Man

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. He is best-known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

By way of an Introduction:

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government”, and as such constituted the “end of history”. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today’s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

The original article excited an extraordinary amount of commentary and controversy, first in the United States, and then in a series of countries as different as England, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea. Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument. Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word “history”. Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing”, and that I was ipso facto proven wrong.

And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our daily intellectual atmosphere by Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is implicit in our use of words like “primitive” or “advanced,” “traditional” or “modern”, when referring to different types of human societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical “progress”.

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article’s many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the “struggle for recognition”.

It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel, Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote, their intellectual legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century – two destructive world wars, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences of the victims of this past century’s political violence – from the survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot – would deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognising good news when it comes.

And yet, good news has come. The most remarkable development of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous weaknesses at the core of the world’s seemingly strong dictatorships, whether they be of the military-authoritarian Right, or the communist-totalitarian Left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have been failing over the last two decades. And while they have not given way in all cases to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics – the “free market” – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe.

All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time because of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented here will stand on their own.

This volume immodestly presents not one but two separate efforts to outline such a Universal History. After establishing in Part I why we need to raise once again the possibility of Universal History, I propose an initial answer in Part II by attempting to use modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of History. Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous. The progressive conquest of nature made possible with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proceeded according to certain definite rules laid down not by man, but by nature and nature’s laws.

The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place, technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the international system of states, no state that values its independence can ignore the need for defensive modernisation. Second, modern natural science establishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralised state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organisation like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralised economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialisation represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in creating what have been termed complex “post-industrial” economies in which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.

But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical change and the growing uniformity of modern societies, it is not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no question but that the world’s most developed countries are also its most successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialisation should produce political liberty. Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial societies, as it did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism from Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.

Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is thus only partly successful. What we have called the “logic of modern natural science” is in effect an economic interpretation of historical change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional organisations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, why we are literate and speak a common national language.

But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying, because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is, proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason that the book turns to a second, parallel account of the historical process in Part III, an account that seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his economic side. To do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel’s non-materialist account of History, based on the “struggle for recognition”.

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognised.” In particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts – chief among them his instinct for self-preservation – for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognise” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or “spiritedness.” Much of human behaviour can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

Hegel believed that the “contradiction” inherent in the relationship of lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognises the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognised in turn by the state through the granting of rights.

This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest – desire combined with reason – and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process – the struggle for recognition – has now been satisfied in a society characterised by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.

The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics that was missing from the economic account of History in Part II. Desire and reason are together sufficient to explain the process of industrialisation, and a large part of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving for liberal democracy, which ultimately arises out of thymos, the part of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany advanced industrialisation, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people were nothing more than desire and reason, they would be content to live in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco’s Spain, or a South Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.

An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war. Part IV is an attempt to do precisely this, and to project into the future some of the different ways that the desire for recognition will be manifest. A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural, or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a people’s complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly “culture”) have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.

But the truth is considerably more complicated, for the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the “art of associating,” which rests on prideful attachment to small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion, ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European capitalism, or of the elites who modernised Japan after the Meiji restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms of thymos as well.

The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of this century’s most intense conflicts. This is the world of “power politics,” described by such foreign policy “realists” as Henry Kissinger.

But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states. Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognised as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognised as equal. A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world’s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.

The fifth and final part of this book addresses the question of the “end of history,” and the creature who emerges at the end, the “last man.” In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of Liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel’s great interpreter, Alexandre Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the “universal and homogeneous state” – what we can understand as liberal democracy – definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history – what had driven the prior “stages of history” – was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was “completely satisfied.” This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously the psychological ground for political virtues like courage, public-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional government has indeed found a formula whereby all are recognised in a way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes that have emerged on earth.

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies “completely satisfying?” The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation’s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution’s commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

Following Nietzsche’s line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a “last man” with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the “peace and prosperity” of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible “last men” not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial “first men” engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?

This books seeks to address these questions. They arise naturally once we ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind. Totalitarianisms of the Right and Left have kept us too busy to consider the latter question seriously for the better part of this century. But the fading of these totalitarianisms, as the century comes to an end, invites us to raise this old question one more time.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Home movie — The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe.

I THINK THAT MY CHIEF SURPRISE is that it's all happening, as they say. The preliminaries have been so protracted and the idea so threatened by various aspects of the malaise affecting the film industry generally, that Peter Hall and my-self, glancing at each other across the farmyard, often find it amazing that we are actually shooting Akenfield. Initially I had great reservations about filming the book at all. In the first place, the tendency of film companies or television to want to turn every successful book into a picture is questionable. Writers are often mangled in the process. Anthony Burgess continues to protest about what occurred to his novel A Clockwork Orange when the film-makers got hold of it. My book presented unique difficulties inasmuch as it involved many friends and neighbours as well as deeply personal experiences drawn from a whole lifetime in the Suffolk countryside. Also, there was the problem of continuity; how did one film three generations in terms of work, belief, education and climate. For this is what Akenfield is really concerned with.

I met Peter Hall in London a few weeks after the book had been published and he told me of his Suffolk home; how my work had touched a deeply personal element in his life, and how, like all creative people, he felt a great need to express important things concerning himself and his family in artistic terms. He thought that a film based on Akenfield might achieve this. There would be no actors and as little as necessary of the general elaborations which accompany the making of a big film. That autumn I wrote a script based on the ideas in the book, on what people said and did. Roughly speaking, the pattern of this script involves a day in the past and a day in the present, a day of life and a day of death, and a day of summer and a day of winter. Within this pattern a century of Suffolk life works itself to a present-day conclusion.

It is a feature film and not a documentary, although every-body in it would be ploughing, shoeing, praying, marrying, harvesting, teaching, rook-scaring, factory-farming, digging up the past or concealing the present with all the actuality which the camera could catch. Peter Hall and I talked of Robert Bresson and his remarkable films of French country life. I even mentioned Man of Aran. A Suffolk friend of mine, Hugh Barrett, had accompanied Flaherty when he was making this classic. The script written, the agreements settled as to how we would resolve things generally, it took the super-human tact and imagination of a young producer named Rex Pyke to get our film financially and practically into motion. Then suddenly, after two years of negotiation—we started.

For myself it has meant starting off in hundreds of directions, returning, on the whole triumphantly, with the necessary spoils. Permissions to use old schools, fields, churches and chapels. Advice or artefacts from everybody within a thirty-mile radius and, most important of all, people. We auditioned scores of East Anglians for the little group of main roles and then literally went out into the highways and byways to collect country children, men and women for the large scenes. Many of the results deriving from this spontaneous casting have been a revelation to us all. I 'shall never forget seeing the first rushes of the 1900 village school scene and the forty or so local children miraculously slipping back in time (under the influence of hob-nailed boots, slate-rags, pinafores and thunderous iron desks) until they had become, by some mysterious chemistry better known to themselves than our costume department, the distant children in the sepia photographs which I had brought from our splendid Rural Industries Museum at Stowmarket.

The school building itself was fascinating. It lies just across the meadows from my house and was built in 1858, but has not been used for over thirty years. It was the little building which Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, used to visit when he felt like instructing the children. Several of the old people in my book were educated there and after we had re-furnished it with all the things discovered in the East Suffolk Education Department's store at Ipswich, swept the chimney—full of jackdaws' nests—lit the fire in the massive Victorian grate and chalked 'Tuesday 3rd January 1900' on the blackboard, I thought of those neighbours of mine who had actually sat in this tall room and heard about the Boer War.

It was foolhardy, we realised later, to have begun filming Akenfield with a particularly elaborate and subtle scene involving seventy people, if one included such kind assistants as the Vicar's wife and the headmistress of the nearby primary school, but when we saw the results on a vast screen in a little cinema in Wardour Street, we were delighted that we took so bold a plunge. I think it was John Constable who said that 'a big canvas will tell you what you cannot do' and this first weekend of shooting, appropriately enough in Debach school, was a real education for everybody working on Akenfield. It did indeed tell us what we could not do in the circumstances of this unusual film, and this was never to go beyond the reality of what existed before our very eyes. The reality was the fun, the sadness, the poetry and the truth. And thus all the drama that we required.

The fun certainly came over in a big way—and accompanied by big-band music—when we held a 1943 village dance. Mr Arbon, who had blacked-out the hall for Hitler's war, blacked it out all over again for us. People of all ages, the Young Farmers' Club, farm workers and their families, teachers, every kind of person, danced to Glen Miller and the Inkspots, while the bombers from the nearby aerodrome (now the site of a vast mushroom factory) boomed overhead. Searchlights, sandbags, uniforms of the Suffolk Regiment, free beer from the Ipswich brewers whose wartime ads were mixed up with posters which said, 'Be like Dad, Keep Mum', and some drastic haircuts created the kind of nostalgia you could cut with a knife.

But the real test of filming Akenfield has been re-creating the old horse economy of Suffolk for the early scenes, finding those small fields of heavy clay, with their dense hedges, discovering workable forges which have not progressed from leather bellows to acetylene welding and, above all, searching out young farm workers who are able to do the old traditional crafts. We soon found out that the best way to do anything of this nature was not by appeals in the local press or on local television, although each of these mediums have given us the most generous help, but by good old bush telegraph. Not the least disturbance to my normally extremely quiet existence is the unknown voice on the telephone, full of Suffolk diffidence, saying, 'I hear you're looking for a man who can use a reaper...' Or giving me invaluable advice on costume, weather, hymns, pigs, stone-picking, battery chickens or just life itself as we aim to show it.

Perhaps our best scene, and certainly the one which most excites us, is the great harvest scene of about 1911, with the magnificent Suffolk waggons, the biggest in England, in the field and with heroic punches to draw them. We intend to cut two fields according to the old manner and have even arranged for them to be delightfully, if inefficiently, starred with poppies and scabious. We are praying for traditional harvest sun and moonshine so that we can capture something of those toiling idylls reflected in the Suffolk Photographic Survey, a wonderful collection of old pictures showing every facet of rural life in the county since the 1870s. The survey is the basis of our authority in such matters and I find it deeply moving to see these glimpses of Suffolk long ago brought into the present, as it were--principally by local faces. 'Hands last', said the blacksmith in my book. So do faces, of course. The youngster climbing out of his car, a bit awkwardly, for the old clothes are massive compared with jersey and jeans, takes the plough-reins and plunges off to the horizon behind delicately stepping shires, and, certainly for all the intents and purposes of our film, is his grandfather.

We have to shoot across the seasons, of course, so the making of the film is abnormally protracted. It is an enormous film, maybe two hours long and full of time and music, as well as work. Also love and death. Peter Hall calls it his home movie, thinking of his special involvement and of the weekend shooting schedules. In between filming, we all rush back to our 'normal' tasks, Peter to the National Theatre, the camera crew to various studios, the producer to cutting Pinter's The Home-coming, the designer, the make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses, and so on to a variety of professional quarters and myself to writing a book called The Art of the English Diary which makes a change. And our cast hurries back to keep half a dozen surrounding villages running.

If we succeed, we shall have challenged a lot of myths connected with the orthodox film industry, particularly those dealing with money. Our company, which we have registered as 'Angle Films', is really a co-operative from which nobody takes his usual professional fee until the film itself makes a profit. If its soul, or whatever, finally emerges into the un-common light of an East Anglian day, it will be due to the marvellous help of the country people themselves, who have been swift to recognise the special nature of the enterprise, and due a bit also to Peter Hall and myself coming from many generations of 'Suffolk'.

Home movie: The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. Reproduced here with the kind permission of both Ronald and The Countryman. First published in The Countryman, summer 1973.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

A Field in England — A Film by Ben Wheatley

A Field In England is almost like an unofficial prequel to Kill List anyway. We started thinking of it in those terms. So the grass in the field and the straw masks of the cult in Kill List are linked together – and the unseen “master” character who’s controlling all the events behind the scenes in Field is a sort of mirror of The Client character in Kill List.

Q: Where did the idea for the film come from?

I’ve had the idea for a long time. I was shooting documentary footage in the early 90’s and I’d read that Paul Verhoeven started his directing career by making films for the Dutch military. He’d get to shoot these huge battle scenes during troop manoeuvres so I started shooting living history re-enactments and eventually came across The Sealed Knot. They’re a re-enactment group centred around the English Civil War. I think it’s a very interesting and admirable thing – and I guess a very English thing - but it’s unique and keeps the history alive. English people tend to be quite anti-history or at least not very adept at dealing with the past and these people have found a way to do that which isn’t musty and academic. It's fun! I’ve always been interested in that time period and the idea that it was an attempt by the people to kill the King – or effectively kill God. It’s radical thought and lots of people were radicalised at that moment in history. It was also a time when “magic” became “science”, where paganism and Christianity were confused, so it felt like a rich kind of magical world where any possibility could happen.

Q: So how did this interest translate into the film A Field In England?

I shot a lot of footage of the Sealed Knot and even started writing a script based in that time period but never finished it – but the idea never went away. Laurie Rose, our cinematographer, had done a shoot at a historical village. We went down and took a look and it brought the whole idea back to life. With my first film Down Terrace we built the whole film around the house location because that was something we knew we could get. The village was the catalyst to start the Civil War script but when Amy Jump and I started to write it we realised we’d done the woods in Kill List so decided to move the location. I do a lot of travelling and a lot of looking out of train windows at fields. We started thinking about how two groups would fight in a very small space – something like Alan Clarke’s Contact for example. Again – a pragmatic decision that would work with our budget. Once we had the scenario we started researching the folklore and mythologies of the time and Amy wrote the script from that point.

Q: What’s the reason for the tableaus in the film?

The tableaus came out of looking at woodcuts that reflect that time period, obviously flat and two dimensional. It was a way to reference those but also a way of using a film language that wasn’t traditional. There’s nothing in the film that specifically dates it and no explanation of the world we’re in – so the tableaus help frame that.

Q: The field is a magical place. Time and space don’t have conventional meanings do they?

That’s part of the mushroom circle folk lore. Within it time moves at a different speed. The lore is that if you go into a circle it takes four men and a rope to pull you out and although you feel that weeks may have past – it could be minutes in real time.

Q: What happens in the tent?

Something appalling! It’s like Orwell’s Room 101 – Tent 101! Reece Shearsmith surprised us all when he emerged from the tent doing what he did. We were all horrified - for real! Reece has a very deep understanding of horror cinema and that scene is a great example of how he’s able to change into these characters. I always found characters like Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen very very scary but there’s echo’s of Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera in there for example. When we first watched the slomo shot back we realised that we were going to have to use it in one shot because to cut away spoiled it.

Q: You and DP Laurie Rose built lenses for the film?

I’d been intrigued by these cheap plastic lenses that were for sale on the internet. Because they’re so badly made they create a lot of artefacts, flares and misting that gives a really interesting – almost antique feel that really worked for the film. We shot with the RED EPIC camera too so there’s a constant shifting of quality throughout the film which felt like it reflected the constant shifting of the characters perspective after they’ve taken the mushrooms. We made other lenses from cheap children’s toys – gluing them together to see what would happen. There’s something about the “handmade” nature of the lenses that reflects the time period when obviously everything was hand made.

Q: Why shoot in black & white?

We started wanting to make a black and white film and in the most basic sense it fits the time period. It also shifted the emphasis to textures rather than colours which make the field and the grass for example work in a completely different way.

Q: Can you tell us about how the film was cast?

I’d worked with everyone apart from Reece Shearsmith, but I was a huge fan of his. We’d wanted Michael Smiley for O’Neil from very early on and he’d worked with Reece on John Landis’ Burke & Hare. He took Reece to see Down Terrace so we got to meet. He said he was interested in doing something so Amy wrote the part for him. Ryan Pope I knew from Ideal – a UK TV series that I directed. It has amazing casting and we’ve used a lot of people from that show over the films. Ben Crompton & Emma Fryer from Kill List for example were on it. Peter Ferdinando we’d met at Sundance where his film Tony was screening. It was such an amazing performance that we didn’t even realise the person we were talking too was the guy on screen! Richard Glover was of course in Sightseers so Amy & I had spent a lot of time watching his performance during the editing and Julian Barratt – well we asked and he said yes, which was a really nice surprise.

Q: One of the common themes in your films is mysticism and folklore. Where does that come from?

I don’t really know where it comes from. It wasn’t in the script of Down Terrace but I guess the music reflected that to an extent and the idea of the family line. In Kill list it made sense because that film came from nightmares I’d had as a kid. Sightseers again had elements in it. A Field In England is almost like an unofficial prequel to Kill List anyway. We started thinking of it in those terms. So the grass in the field and the straw masks of the cult in Kill List are linked together – and the unseen “master” character who’s controlling all the events behind the scenes in Field is a sort of mirror of The Client character in Kill List. I like the idea of continuity across the films but I think this is the end of that now.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Mooreeffoc

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalise some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, "of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with 'COFFEE ROOM' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood". That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc, "is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.

— Charles Dickens: A Critical Study by G. K. Chesterton. New York, Dodd, Mead & Company (1906).

As a literary critic, Chesterton was without parallel. His biography of Charles Dickens is credited with sparking the Dickens revival in London in the early 20th century. His biography of St. Thomas Aquinas was called the best book on St. Thomas ever written, by no less than Etienne Gilson, the 20th century’s greatest Thomistic scholar. His books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man are considered the 20th century’s finest works of Christian and Catholic apologetics. And audiences still delight in the adventures of Chesterton’s priest sleuth, Father Brown, as well as such timeless novels as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and others.

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of "fantasy" most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. The "fantastic" elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.

— Tree and Leaf by J. R. R. Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin (1975).

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Quintet — A Film by Robert Altman

St. Christopher: "You'll never understand the scheme until you're part of the scheme". Essex: "Are you telling me I will be?" St. Christopher: "Yes, at the exact moment where it will be too late"

Robert Altman's "QUINTET", a Twentieth Century-Fox release, is the thirteenth film the producer-director-writer has done in the last nine years. It also marks Paul Newman's return to the screen after a self-imposed year-and-a-half sabbatical.

Newman heads an international all-star cast including Vittorio Gassman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Brigitte Fossey, Nina van Pallandt and David Langton. The screenplay, by Frank Barhydt, Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick, is based on a story by Robert Altman, Lionel Chetwynd and Patricia Resnick.

These facts, plus production information, are all Altman wants told about "QUINTET", his aim being to give motion picture audiences the rare opportunity to see and experience a film without pre-conceived ideas or advance conditioning.

"Games always fascinated me," says Altman. "They are reflections of their cultures. So I made one up called Quintet, which is at the core of the film. It was also my intention to keep the picture from being tied in with a particular time or place. Therefore the look of it is unusual, and so is the cast with its multiple accents".

"QUINTET" was filmed on location in the environs of Montreal, Canada, and in Frobisher Bay during its Arctic-like winter. Temperatures were always below freezing and often below zero, occasionally as much as forty below. Even the interior scenes were filmed outdoors in sets constructed to maintain a below zero temperature. No other feature film has been done under similar conditions. On several levels, "QUINTET" is a totally unique motion picture experience.

The distinguished multinational cast of the Lion's Gate film represents a concept Altman had long had in mind. The unique framework of "QUINTET" provided the perfect opportunity to use it.

The screenplay by Frank Barhydt, Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick is based on a story by Robert Altman, Lionel Chetwynd, Patricia Resnick.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

John Griffith Bowen

John Griffith Bowen was born in India, sent "home" to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

I began the Introduction to The Essay Prize, my own first volume of television plays (it did not sell well: there was never a second) with the question, "Why Write For Television?" and the answer I gave was that a television play is the only way by which a writer can "share a kind of insight, a way of looking at life, an enjoyment of the complexity of human motives, the ambivalence of human behaviour ... with those many people who do not have the habit of reading books", far less of going to the theatre.

Well, that is still true, but I was ten years younger then, and more easily swayed by my own rhetoric. The answer ignores the way television plays are sent out to this non-book-reading, non-theatre-going audience, as part of a continuous stew made up of items so diverse that they would be indigestible if anyone ever bothered to digest them. But the audience in general does not digest them. No effort is required of it, hardly even the effort of choice; no response is expected. The stew—your play, bobbing about in it—is received, excreted and forgotten. Nourishment is not a consideration.

Indeed, the stew-givers, both of the BBC and the commercial companies, often try to exclude even the possibility of nourishment. This play, Robin Redbreast, was first commissioned as a "suspense" play by the Series Department of the BBC and rejected. The producer is a kind and intelligent man: he was distressed to have to reject a play he admired, but the "close inter-relation between the fertility rite and the church festivals" would be too much, he wrote, for "the Powers-That-Be". Something taught in school sixth forms all over the country would be "too much" for the BBC Series Department. Luckily Graeme McDonald, who produces Play for Today for the BBC Drama Department, heard of the play, read it and instantly took it on.

Worst is the lack of a continuing life. All my novels except the last are out of print, but they are still borrowed (freely in every sense) from libraries. Dedicated amateurs win prizes at Drama Festivals with plays I wrote years ago. Films are shown throughout the world long after they have been made, and end on that very television which shows a play once, perhaps (but only on the BBC) repeats it, then wipes the tape, and the play, already forgotten by its audience, even ceases to exist as an artefact. Dead. All other forms of art continue to exist after the act of creation and first showing, except the television play. Unless, as Pinter, Peter Nichols, John Mortimer, John Hale, Alun Owen have done and I myself with this play—the writer re-works it for the theatre, and gives it a life after all.

And yet ... and yet. I say that, if I could afford to write only for the theatre I should do so, and certainly no television play could ever give author, actors and audience the real joy which is created when play, performance and audience come together in a theatre and all goes well. But there are ways of writing for television, ways of using images which, however I may free myself from realistic theatrical production, I can't match in the theatre. I admire naturalistic acting, and television can show it more closely than someone in whatever-shaped auditorium can see from six rows back. I say nowadays that I write television plays in order to buy time to write in other ways, but nobody writes only for money, and nobody would fret so about getting it right if money were the only consideration. There is still the possibility of excellence, and even if a television play ends up as a truffle in the stew, to be swallowed unrecognised by most, complained of by some ("What's this bit of coal doing in my stew?"), someone out there may yet know a truffle when he sees it, and savour it, and be glad.

Introduction to Robin Redbreast from The Television Dramatist, Published by Paul Elek Limited in 1973. © John Bowen 1970.

> The Truth Will Not Help Us: Embroidery on an Historical Theme (1956) > After the Rain (1958) > The Centre of the Green (1959) > Storyboard (1960) > The Birdcage (1962) > A World Elsewhere (1965) > Squeak (1983) > The McGuffin (1984) > The Girls: A Story of Village Life (1987) > Fighting Back (1989) > The Precious Gift (1992) > No Retreat (1994) >

> ITV Play of the Week: The Candidate (1961) > ITV Play of the Week: The Truth About Alan (1963) > ITV Play of the Week: A Case of Character (1964) > ITV Play of the Week: The Corsican Brothers (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Mr. Fowlds (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Finders Keepers (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Ivanov (adaptation) (1966) > ITV Play of the Week: The First Thing You Think Of (1966) > After the Rain, Hampstead Theatre (1966) > ITV Play of the Week: ITV Summer Playhouse #9: The Voysey Inheritance (1967) > Thirty-Minute Theatre: Silver Wedding (1967) > ITV Playhouse: I Love You Miss Patterson (1967) > Play For Today: Robin Redbreast (1970) > Thirty-Minute Theatre: The Waiting Room (1971) > The Guardians, 7 episodes (1971), Villains: Belinda, London Weekend Television (1972) > Dead of Night: A Woman Sobbing (1972) > ITV Sunday Night Theatre: Young Guy Seeks Part-Time Work (1973) > ITV Sunday Night Theatre: The Coffee Lace (1973) > Heil Caesar, BBC (1973) > Play For Today: The Emergency Channel (1973) > A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (adaptation) (1974) > Play For Today: A Photograph (1977) > A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ice House (1978) > Wilde Alliance: A Game for Two Players (1978) > ITV Playhouse: The Specialist (1980) > ITV Sunday Night Thriller: Dark Secret (Pts 1 & 2) (1981) > Screen Two: The McGuffin (1986) > Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, with David Cook, BBC (1996 - 1997) >

Image © The British Film Institute, used with kind permission.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Phenomenology

By the act of reflection something is altered in the way in which the fact was originally presented in sensation, perception, or conception.

— Hegel, 1830, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties ... Phenomenology (archaeology), based upon understanding cultural landscapes from a sensory perspective ... Phenomenology (particle physics), a branch of particle physics that deals with the application of theory to high-energy experiments ... Phenomenology (philosophy), a philosophical method and school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) ... Existential phenomenology, in the work of Husserl's student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and his followers ... Phenomenology of Perception, the magnum opus of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty ... Phenomenology of religion, concerning the experiential aspect of religion in terms consistent with the orientation of the worshippers ... The Phenomenology of Spirit, a book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ... Phenomenology (psychology), used in psychology to refer to subjective experiences or their study ... Phenomenology (science), used in science to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other.

Phenomenology; A term used in philosophy to denote enquiry into one's conscious and particularly intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences being excluded. It is a method of investigation into the mind that is associated with the name of Edmund Husserl, as it was he who did most to develop it, although when Husserl's system appeared on the philosophical scene, the word already had a long history and had undergone a conspicuous semantic evolution.

The first use of it goes back to Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), a disciple of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Lambert published in 1764 a treatise on epistemology dealing with the problem of truth and illusion, under the rather pedantic title of Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung des Wahren und der Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein (New Organon, or Thoughts on the Search for Truth and the Distinction between Error and Appearance), in the fourth part of which he outlines a theory of illusion that he calls 'phenomenology or theory of appearance'. Although he belongs to a period in the history of philosophy in which the question of the intuition of essences had not yet been raised, his implicit definition of phenomenology, taken literally, does not sound odd to the post-Husserlian reader, except that to him, Lambert, an appearance (or phenomenon) is necessarily an illusion. More important, Lambert was acquainted with Kant, and Kant in 1770 was writing to him about the need for a 'general phenomenology' which he conceived as a preparatory step to the metaphysical analysis of natural science. According to Spiegelberg (1960), what Kant called phenomenology was in fact synonymous with his idea of the critique of pure reason, though nothing allows us to suppose that he specifically used the term forged by Lambert to qualify phenomena as antithetic to noumena or things in themselves. It is, however, with Hegel's Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind), published in 1807, that the term is used explicitly for the first time to label a philosophical work of fundamental importance.

A significant step in its evolution from Lambert to Hegel may be found in J. G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science), in which its role is to establish the origin of phenomena as they exist for consciousness; and in Hegel's elaborate system, its basic task is primarily historical since it aims at discovering the successive steps of realisation of self-consciousness from elementary individual sensations up to the stage of absolute knowledge through dialectic processes.

The few authors worth mentioning who dealt with phenomenological problems between Hegel and Husserl are William Hamilton (1788–1856), who in fact equates phenomenology with psychology as opposed to logic, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose studies on religious, ethical, and aesthetic consciousness were greatly inspired by Hegel's phenomenology, and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce, though his work on the classification of phenomena belongs more to metaphysics than to an actual phenomenology of subjective experience.

Except in the case of Hegel, phenomenology was not a major field of reflection until Husserl's monumental work. Since Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is discussed in some detail in the entry under his name, it will suffice here to underline its distinctive features. In contrast with pre-existing philosophies, it is no mere, closed, abstract construct that theoretically allows the philosopher to pronounce on the conditions of principles of experience; it is rather an endless attempt to stick to the reality of experienced phenomena in order to exhibit their universal character. In order to succeed in the endeavour, Husserl has to discard the classic dualistic view, according to which the knowing subject reaches the world only through representation — a position typical of rationalistic and idealistic systems. Hence he refers, after Brentano, to the intentional character of consciousness, and condemns psychologism (the theory that psychology is the foundation of philosophy) in view of the contradiction it brings about: that the supposedly universal laws of logic and mathematics would be dependent on the concrete functioning of psychological mechanisms. The Husserlian standpoint is thus a radical one, since it aims at 'going back to the things themselves' by claiming that there is no reason to suppose that phenomenon and being are not identical. In other words, the noema (object content) and the noesis (knowing act) are directly related by the intentionality of consciousness, so that every phenomenon is intuitively present to the subject.

However, phenomena, as they are grasped by the subject, are always given under a particular profile. No object whatsoever is given in its totality as a simultaneous exhaustible whole, but every profile conveys its essence under the form of meaning for consciousness. In order to reach the essence of any object, one is bound to proceed to unceasing variations around the object as thematic reality, i.e. to discover the essence through the multiplicity of possible profiles. This procedure applies to all phenomena, ranging from current perceptual experience to the highly intricate constructs characterising the various fields of knowledge, such as physics and psychology.

Every phenomenon belongs to a regional ontology by virtue of its essence, as revealed by the so-called eidetic intuition, the essence (eidos) being the sum of all possible profiles. In the course of this process, consciousness operates as a constitutive moment, i.e. its activity in grasping the essence of phenomena is, perforce, part of the process of their emergence. Thus Husserl overcomes the classic dualism of subject and object. Reaching the universal essence of an object through eidetic intuition, i.e. discovering the basic structure implied by its very existence, is a process which Husserl calls eidetic reduction. This being granted, the next step consists in referring phenomena to subjectivity without falling back into psychologism, since the empirical subject, as referred to psychology's own regional ontology (or Descartes' res cogitans), belongs to a realm of contingent being, which cannot furnish by itself the necessary foundation for the organisation of the absolute principles governing universal essences. Husserl is therefore bound to exclude belief in the natural world as the ultimate reference of all our intentional acts. This process is termed phenomenological reduction. It presupposes, in Husserl's terms, a provisional 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) of the natural and a description or explication of our intentional acts as referred to pure noematic structures.

The final accomplishment of this process is the transcendental reduction, by which the fundamental conditions of every possible meaningful intentional relation must be elucidated. This is the core of Husserl's theory of transcendental subjectivity or transcendental ego. Thus Husserl's phenomenology reconsidered the philosophical problem of consciousness in a radical fashion and contributed thereby to the placing of psychology — and the human sciences in general — within a new epistemological framework. Criticism of the one-sidedness of both empiricist and idealistic standpoints could be developed so that the shortcomings of dualistic views, with all their derivatives such as mechanicism, parallelism, and phenomenalism, became more apparent.

As a fundamental theory of phenomena ranging from perception to creative thinking, it has provided a firm starting point for the integration of concepts of the subject at different levels: hence phenomenologically inspired hypotheses such as those that guided F. J. J. Buytendijk and V. von Weiszäcker in anthropological physiology. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analyses of the experienced body (1942) and perception (1945) were phenomenological works that contributed to the transforming of the classical standpoints in psychology.

— Georges Thinès, 1987, Oxford Companion to the Mind.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: "Really I must buy a pencil," as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter--rambling the streets of London.

 The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, "Take it!" she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul--as travellers do. All this--Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul--rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. "The man's a devil!" said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

 But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

 How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light--windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars--lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which----She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only--the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists' windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter's night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: "What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?"

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for "this lady" and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was hot afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it--all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf's dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china umbrella handles, and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.  Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone's throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars' heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one's will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out onto a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary's garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter's evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller's wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don't live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind's inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller's wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman's library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how "I said to her quite straight last night . . . if you don't think I'm worth a penny stamp, I said . . ." But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we have come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the curb, a little rod about the length of one's finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life. "Really I must--really I must"--that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames--wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person--and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then--calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a doubt, in the stationer's shop people had been quarrelling. Their anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman--they were husband and wife evidently--retired to a back room; the old man whose rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. "A pencil, a pencil," he repeated, "certainly, certainly." He spoke with the distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife. He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly: "Where d'you keep the pencils?" as if his wife had hidden them. The old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one's choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing. Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson's title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here--let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence--is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Penda’s Fen by David Rudkin — A Davis-Poynter TV Script of a BBC Pebble Mill Production (excerpts) Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked down. First published in 1975 by Davis Poynter Limited. Copyright © 1973 by David Rudkin. All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance or reading should be made before rehearsal to Margaret Ramsay Limited, 14a Goodwin’s Court, St. Martins Lane, London WC2, England. No performance may he given unless a licence has been obtained. ISBN 0 7067 0187 9 Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Limited Guildford Surrey. AUTHOR’S NOTE This represents the finalized shooting-script from which PENDA’S FEN was made. I say ‘represents’ because my very elaborate technical instructions (for camerawork, lighting, soundtrack, etc.) I have removed; instead, I have sought to convey the resultant effects expressively to the reader’s inner eye and ear. I cannot pay tribute enough to the unsparing self-commitment or the crew and actors to what proved an exhausting and at times quite frightening task: the film itself is their best testament. But I must, without being invidious, single out for particular gratitude the producer, David Rose, who, far from being daunted by my first synopsis, virtually insisted PENDA into existence, and quietly removed every administrative and financial barrier that might have fallen in it’s way. I must try to thank also the director, Alan Clarke, for his deep stillness and moral integrity in its realization - a director gifted with that rarest and most significant director’s gift of all, the gift of standing out of his own light. D R STEPHEN Spencer Banks, MRS FRANKLIN Georgine Anderson, THE REVEREND J FRANKLIN John Atkinson, JOEL Ron Smerczak, HEADMASTER John Richmond, ARNE Ian Hogg, MRS ARNE Jennie Heslewood, SIR NICHOLAS POLE John Scott, BROTT Roy Preston, HARRY Ian Gemmell, MRS GISBOURNE Joyce Grundy, COOKE Ivor Roberts, SIXTH FORMER Moray Black, HONEYBONE Christopher Douglas, COUNCIL WORKMAN Frank Veasey, NURSE Elizabeth Reville, JOEL’S GIRL Pat Bowker, SIR EDWARD Graham Leaman, MRS KINGS Helena McCarthy, THE LADY Joan Scott, THE MAN Ray Gatenby, KING PENDA Geoffrey Staines, DEMON Geoffrey Pennells & ANGEL Martin Reynolds. Film Camerman: Michael Williams, Operator: Ken Morgan, Sound Recordist: John Gilbert, Sound Mixer: David Baumber, Film Editor: Henry Fowler, Costume: Joyce Hawkins, Make Up: Jan Nethercott, Special Effects: Clifford Gulley, Animation: Bernard Lodge, Radiophonic Sound: Paddy Kingsland, Design: Michael Edwards, Script Editor: Tara Prem, Producer: David Rose, Director: Alan Clarke. First transmitted on Thursday, 21st March 1974 (as ‘Play for Today’) by BBC Television. A loud crunching chord: strings break out, an ambling soaring open-country tune*. High summer. As though liberated, by his little victory, from the spell of COOKE, STEPHEN now, in shirt and jeans, pedals his old bicycle through the coloured landscapes of the Elgar country. The purple wrinkled hills of Malvern are now somewhat nearer, larger, more physically present than before. Slowly, slowly, as he pedals, handfree, whistling the glorious tune itself, the hills seem to turn towards him as, picture by picture, he crosses the landscape. Now the music breaks up into rapid movement, gathering in excitement towards a climax. STEPHEN’s shadow races along the surface of the lane. He freewheels down a steep tree-lined bank; hurtles wildly round a corner in a village, scuffing the dry road with his feet for a brake. The high hedges, flowered banks, arching treetops, streak past him in lines. The blind-hedged twisting and curving lane leaps towards the jumping racing handlebars. At the peak of the music, the violins leap up to a piercing high note like a shriek of lightning; up from the lane-surface, like an ascending diver from the floor of a pool, swoops the DEMON of STEPHEN’s dream, his eyes, jaw, smile and mouth - The music vanishes; STEPHEN falls; his bicycle clatters riderless to the ground against a steep ditch; STEPHEN rolls onto the grass bank-edge, still, stunned. The bicycle lies, its wheel spinning: we hear its whirr and click. STEPHEN lies, unconscious. * Again, from Elgar 'Introduction and Allegro’: the reprise of the main 'second subject’ theme, towards the principal climax of the piece. Unnatural silence. Unnatural stillness. The light and colours are dry, a little too bright to be real. The bicycle: but it lies in a different posture and position; and not by the steep grass bank, but before a wooden five-bar gate - and on the surface of a road, its rear wheel still, silent. Far from it, and in the 'wrong’ direction - where he could not possibly have landed - lies STEPHEN, stunned, unconscious: again, not by the bank, but on flat grass shoulder of a level road. A soft muttering: voice of JOFFER indistinctly grumbling to himself. STEPHEN is awake. He is raising his head. We are at the junction with the Pinvin road across the fen. There seems to be nothing surprising to STEPHEN in this. Now he sees where the grumbling sound is coming from: the trestles, diversion board blocking the road. JOFFER, his back to us, is with dark deliberate action peeling away the pasted V from PINVIN. STEPHEN glances back over his left shoulder to the signpost. On signpost, no sack: its black letters spell PINFIN. STEPHEN looks toward diversion board again. JOFFER is moving away; board reads PINFIN, just as he had painted it. STEPHEN looks up toward signpost again. Is puzzled by what he sees. Signpost’s white is unnaturally luminously bright. Black letters spell (plain English script) PENDEFEN. STEPHEN has turned toward road again. Trestles, diversion board have gone. Road leads away, unbarred, onto fen landscape, across which strange light-and-shadow plays. Now STEPHEN stands. And suddenly we are that unseen presence again, rising behind him, taller than he; following him onto the open fen. Then we see STEPHEN coming forward, as drawn. His breathing becomes sexually deep, we hear it. Then a new sound: a muted chopping. It is coming from behind him. He turns. Before him now, stone terraced steps lead up between ornamental lawns towards the black-and-white facade of a half-timbered manor house. STEPHEN is going up the steps. The house itself is like an extended version of the smaller half-timbered house before which JOEL’s milkfloat killed the sparrow. STEPHEN finds himself in a wonderland of billiard-table lawns, topiary bushes and dark-green hedges of yew that seem cut velvet-smooth. Everywhere, lyrical gardenbird-song. The chopping sound seems to come from beyond one of these hedges. STEPHEN comes round the hedge. A party of people, fine and healthy, as near to Eden innocence as is consonant with setting, children with them, are grouped in various relaxed poses upon the ancestral lawn, waiting their turn, happy, noisy-looking (yet no human sound), eyes bright as on brink of some redemption. STEPHEN looks where their fond expectant gazes are. In middle of lawn, a large tree stump, sawn table-flat. An impeccably dressed man in middle age, in build and sartorial immaculacy rather like Hitchcock, is waiting for the next person to come to the stump. The stump drips with blood. He has a butcher’s axe. No blood has spattered the AXEMAN at all. A MOTHER with a LITTLE GIRL come to him. AXEMAN gestures, with courtesy, a gentle little patient smile, 'Little girl first, please’. LITTLE GIRL obediently places hands on stump. MOTHER looks at her, proud, privileged. AXEMAN wields axe. STEPHEN watches. He shows no emotion. Chop. Chop. Muted sound of little girl laughing. He watches, expressionless, the figure of the LITTLE GIRL run gaily off in her party frock, waving her stumps. AXEMAN takes little severed hands, throws them down behind stump. He has a methodical unhurried address to his task: to him it is a sort of necessary social editing. MOTHER lays her own hands on stump, panting in anticipation. STEPHEN stands paralyzed against the hedge. Emerging from the group, coming towards him, are the MAN and LADY of the newspaper-photograph he showed us during his speech at the school debate: the 'father and mother of England’, who had succeeded in having the television 'Jesus’ programme banned. They are coming for STEPHEN, their faces transfigured, their arms raised as in that photo, reaching in welcome to bring him to the stump. - STEPHEN is shaking his head, his lips trying to fashion the words No No! But no sound comes, and he cannot move. Then the real, Worcestershire voice of JOEL is speaking: JOEL (VOICE): You all right, squire? You all right? (His features unclear in a blinding dazzle of sunlight, JOEL is looking anxiously down at us, his face questioning. STEPHEN is coming to. JOEL’s face is clearer now. We see that STEPHEN lies where he originally fell: by the steep grass bank. Now STEPHEN sees this. Nearby, rear wheel of bicycle still spins: wheel whirr. He sees, too, JOEL’s milkfloat: it has braked sharply, skidding at an angle in mid-road. JOEL puts arms round STEPHEN’s shoulder to help him up:) JOEL: Come chargin’ down that hill right into me. (It suddenly dawns on STEPHEN whose arm this is. The old tension, guilt-panic awakens in him; he pulls to be desperately free. JOEL misunderstands, grips more tightly, personally:) JOEL: Hey . . Hey . . (He will not let STEPHEN go. STEPHEN becomes aware of his own hands touching JOEL’s shoulder or arms. He leaves them there, using them to brace him as they stand. He commits himself to the contact, drawing his hands down a little, frankly toward his waist. JOEL now understands what STEPHEN’s attitude is, has always been. It all makes sense. Hard, but not brutal, and not over-compassionate either, he removes STEPHEN’s hands; yet does not thrust them from him.) JOEL: Sorry. Just help you up, that’s all. (He looks STEPHEN straight in eye. STEPHEN, after hesitation, finds honesty in himself to do the same. It is not easy. It is done.) JOEL: (Quite hard.) That’s all. (Their hands separate: a frank withdrawal. A GIRL sits in passenger seat in float. Now she calls out:) JOEL’S GIRL: Joel? JOEL: (To her) He’m all right, dove. We 'a'n’t killed him. STEPHEN: (Rather strenuously, to her.) I’m all right: JOEL: He’ll get over it. (He looks at STEPHEN: a mere brutal acceptance; no yielding. He goes back to float. STEPHEN watches. Engine sound. Float straightens, passes him. JOEL makes a quite objective formal gesture at him. STEPHEN waves back, his gesture incomplete. He feels a new acceptedness.) Inside the church. It is plain, neither rich nor pretty. Sun-light through high windows. The West Door heavily of)cos towards us. STEPHEN conies quietly in; in shirt, jews. lie quietly shuts door behind him. He comes along aisle. He has a book with him. We hear his footfalls, the occasional creak here or there of beam or pew. He goes to the organ. He stands there before it a moment. He switches on the organ i light; and we see there, also, an organist’s mirror - into which the player can glance while playing, to see what is happening in the service behind him in the church. Now STEPHEN swings his legs over the organist’s bench, careful not to depress the long pedal-arms beneath. He switches the organ on: a deep, faint, almost inaudible droning hum. He rests the book before him on the music-rest. He has the look of someone about to try a long-pondered spell. He opens the book, presses the first two or three turned leaves flat against the music-rest, to lie there still and not to close again. Before us now, the heading on the recto page: THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS, Edward Elgar. It is the 'vocal’ score, with the orchestral parts arranged for keyboard. Above first staves of music the word 'Prelude’. Above first bars, pencilled capitals: 'Motif of Judgment’. The first few bars themselves have single minims and crotchets spaced along the lower stave, bound beneath one long curving slur. STEPHEN considers these. He is working out in his head what colouring this opening music needs. He pulls a stop, another. Then slowly he begins to play. It is a solemn and lonely-sounding phrase, this 'motif of Judgment’: deep-hued, veiled and plaintive tones that fall from a note, fall from it again, slowly rise up to it, then a step, another step above; then rest back onto that note again where they began. STEPHEN plays on; the music begins to arouse itself - but after two notes, he pauses; stops. Somewhere in the church, a creak. And always, that deep faint organ hum. Out of habit he glances into the mirror, but of course the church is empty. We see what STEPHEN does not see. We look along the flat gravestones of the aisle, between the towering pew ends, toward the West Door. STEPHEN turns the page, looking for the next passage he wants to play. He finds it. Large wide-spaced chords to be sustained, with shorter crotchet-phrases to he interjected during then: above these, the pencilled words 'His Cry’. Already STEPHEN is playing: the chords high, solemn and pleading, over their deep roots in the bass, and an off-beat heavy treading, figure stark within them. They soon roach a climax, and collapse in syncopated fragments downwards, into silence*. Organ hum. Along the aisle toward the West Door, the light is darkening. STEPHEN continues, In the score, the pleading chords of the 'Cry’ are now repeated, but in a higher key, giving them more urgency. And, as his hands take the chords and treading-figure, and his feet on the pedals the deep roots in the bass, out of the organ suddenly conies a grand and powerful glorious tone: the boy’s music resoundingly transfigured, to move us to tears and chill our spine. And STEPHEN too is moved. Again the climax, the disintegrating collapse, the echoing silence. But for the organ hum. In the aisle threatening to run the length of it to the far West Door, the beginning of a jagged veinlike crack has appeared. STEPHEN pauses. He turns several pages, many. Then, far into the book, finds page lie seeks. Pencilled capitals 'Angel’s Triumph’. Words, notes of vocal line: ’ . . soul! For it is safe, consumed yet quickened by the Glance of God!’ We hear from afar, as STEPHEN, smiling in recognition, hears in his head: the soaring and swooping Angel-song with which the play began. She comes to her great Alleluia, and our eyes are drawn in along the notes themselves, and in, in, in towards the printed symbol of the crowned towering top A itself. But here the voice and music fade, Organ hum. The crack along the aisle has visibly widened; it 'runs’ before our eyes to the far West Door, and veinlike 'tributaries’ appear. Now STEPHEN, unaware of the unnatural darkening in the church around him, prepares to play the crescendo passage that builds toward the climax of the work. His foot takes a low A on the pedal, holds it down; the deep root- sound sustains. Quietly, his hands take the first chords: often clashing with that unchanging bass, these upper harmonies sound unnerving, intense. We hear in them a harsh evolution from that quiet. lonely phrase, the Motif of Judgment, with which STEPHEN began.’ And as, louder and tauter, STEPHEN plays now, this evolution continues: the phrases mount and grow; the key changes, the deep pedalpoint falls; the chords pile up, massive and anguished; the key and pedalnote shift again. In the mirror is total blackness; the fissure in the aisle has widened to a chasm; STEPHEN has come to the music’s peak. The moment of terrible silence. His hands rise, fingers stretch, forming to take the keys that will make up the 'fearful dissonance’. The aisle yawns, a torn-edged black engulfing void . . With all the power he can produce from the instrument, he sounds the dissonance. But it is not enough. It is not enough. Suddenly STEPHEN has broken through even this: with hands and feet he adds every other note to the dissonance that he can reach. And holds them down. A piercing discord of unbelievable obscenity. STEPHEN suddenly sees hellish inky blackness in organ-mirror. His hands quit keyboard in horror. The dissonance vanishes; only the lowest pedalnote remains, a deep C sharp, keeping all its clashing overtones alive in our heads, while through the actual silence a Voice speaks: VOICE: Stephen … … … VOICE: (STEPHEN bows head, he dare not turn.) VOICE: Stephen Franklin (STEPHEN slowly raises eyes to organ-mirror. Inky darkness there. Dimlit, like detail from Grünwald Crucifixion, the leprous Feet pierced with one ugly cruel nail. The Living Blood drips down.) VOICE: Unbury me … . Free me from this tree … . (STEPHEN transfixed. Suddenly pedal C sharp cuts off. Silence. The moment has passed. The aisle is as it was. The church is normal, the sunlight as before. There STEPHEN sits, on the organ-bench, his head bowed from us, arms loosely hanging, self and body drained.) *This passage is found at rehearsal figure 9 in the score. FINALE The Malvern Hills themselves. Their slopes, ridges, lonely, primordial, in summer sunset from the further West. Soft thud and shock of evening wind. A high ridge-top. Here STEPHEN sits, stone-still, gazing toward setting sun. It is as though he has been summoned here. He waits. His dark motionless form there, seated on the ridge-top, against the sunset sky. Two forms slowly slowly ascend into view up the Western slope before him. The MAN and LADY. They walk, yet seem not to rise on the balls of their feet. Now they stand before him on the ridge-top, tall against the Western sky, the MAN to one side of him, LADY to he other. LADY: (Shy, needful) Are you an English boy? MAN: (Gentle, on brink of ecstasy.) Such a light in his eyes. LADY: True English boy? MAN: It is He. It is He. He has the Light. (STEPHEN, as though under some influence, dumbly can merely look from one to other, daring hardly raise his eyes. MAN, LADY we now see some-what more clearly: the 'father and mother of us all’ of Stephen’s newspaper photo. They are transfigured with deep still irradiating joy.) LADY: We knew the Child would come. He has been promised us so long. But that we should find him! It is too lovely to be true! (MAN reaches out a loving hand to STEPHEN - ) LADY: (Tabu horror) No If we touch Him, He will vanish! (Turns to STEPHEN) It is written. (STEPHEN terrified: every urge in him resists, compels to flight. He cannot move. He gazes up at MAN, LADY, animal-like in his dumb helplessness.) MAN: The Child is innocent. He does not know His inheritance. Nor does He know the courage He will need, to exercise His Right in this dark world. Not that they put us to the fire any more. Oh Stephen, Stephen: think of that torment … (MAN leans close to STEPHEN, consumed with a desperate love: he is like a sonless father, begging his unborn son who refuses to be born, 'Be born!’) MAN: … to be burned. Shackled to the mockery of a tree, and burned. Living, burned away … . LADY: What torment is that? Through the flames we see Our Lord. He reaches out His Hand to bring us from the shadow of this world. We that were burned, we cried in joy. The Crosstians think we scream: we cry in joy! When we are burned, why, we are turned to Light! (STEPHEN slowly shaking his head, trying to say No, to move. He cannot. MAN kneels before him, pointing west.) Look. Your Inheritance. MAN: Look. Your inheritance. (STEPHEN tries to dredge up the words of denial from within himself: he can only writhe his neck and head.) MAN: The Kings of the earth, you can govern. MAN: (Cont) They walk in their sleep. Yours is the Right, to inherit the Power: to will their will. (LADY kneels close to STEPHEN, who now can merely writhe his head between them.) MAN: Power, Stephen, to turn the rock of the world to wealth. Power: to fall, and not to die. Like Joan the Maid, to fall, and not to die. (STEPHEN pauses: this rings some bell in him. It is beginning to steal through him in what mortal danger his soul now is. He still struggles to tear a sound or gesture of denial from himself. He can-not. MAN, LADY become more and more consumed with a desperation to bring him away with them: a passion with no erotic, but a terrifying parental-loving, element.) LADY: You have to come with us. You are our Child of Light. You have to be born ill us. Then you become Pure Light. (STEPHEN suddenly finds denial:) STEPHEN: No! No! I am nothing pure! (LADY cries out: refusal would he than she could bear, In a moment the will be weeping - ) STEPHEN: Nothing pure … My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness, mixed, mixed! I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame! (“Εγνωκεν αύτόν he has 'discovered himself’. No more now, can myth of being pure anything afflict him or cause him to afflict mankind. It is moment of his rupture, salvation from his false 'father and mother of us all’. And he finds the feet to stand, break from them, run away - ) LADY: (Desperate, afraid) If we cannot have him darkness must not. (Suddenly vicious) Run if you like! (STEPHEN’S terrible organ-dissonance breaks shatteringly out; STEPHEN is running down the Eastern slope. LADY leaps to her feet, bringing up an instant-develop camera in her hand. She snaps fleeing figure of STEPHEN, one, two times, three. STEPHEN runs stumbling down the slope away from them, not daring look back. LADY rips instant-develop print of STEPHEN out from back of camera. She, MAN are racked with weeping now: knowing they must destroy their Angel rather than let him go to their Enemy. This knowledge breaks their hearts. Their viciousness, sick cruelty, evil shake with gleaming jewel-like tears as MAN brings cigarette-lighter to a lower corner of print; flicks flame; flame takes. The fearful dissonance grinds on. From STEPHEN’s stumbling legs on the hillside smoke appears, threatening to burst into flame. The print of him in the LADY’S hand begins to blister. STEPHEN falls, writhing in the thickening smoke that comes from his own body now: he cries out, the sound lost in the dissonance, 'Help me! Help me!’ The flame eats across the print, to STEPHEN’s left side. STEPHEN himself, his left leg, arm, left side of head scorching, screams in pain. And suddenly, through the dissonance, we can see that his mouth is forming a cry to 'Penda . . ! Penda . . !’ A flash, a double scream: the MAN and LADY vanish in an explosion of flame; and in that same incandescence, amid their falling severed burning limbs, the ancient throned form of PENDA himself appears. And there is silence.) KING PENDA: There you have seen your true dark enemies of England. Sick Father and Mother, who would have us children for ever. (STEPHEN frowns, puzzled. He is totally unharmed, his clothes and body whole as before.) STEPHEN: King Penda . . ? KING PENDA: Stephen. Our land must live. This land we love must live. Her deep dark flame must never die. (STEPHEN is nearer.) KING PENDA: Night is falling. Your land and mine goes down into a darkness now; and I, and all the other guardians of her flame, are driven from our homes, up out into the wolf’s jaw. But the flame still flickers in the fen. You are marked down to cherish that. Cherish the flame, till we can safely wake again. (STEPHEN raises head to ask a question. STEHEN stands: alone, on all the hill. And now he looks back, across the land in shadow: that outer landscape of the earth, and inner landscape of the head, across which this, his journey has been made. It is the very physical reverse to that image of England with which we began: for now we look eastwards, from those hills themselves, And night is coming. No soft choir music on the soundtrack now, but the actual sounds of evening on the earth: a lapwing, a distant train, the pulse of a factory below. Onto that landscape now STEPHEN is walking slowly thoughtfully away from us down. He is fortunate. Early, and at the right time, he has been vouchsafed a meaning for that old question he once glibly asked himself: what is to happen to his soul? Which shall prevail? The Angel, or the Pandemonium; the sickness of power and obedience to power, or the sacred demon of ungovernableness.)

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Extract from Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Blade Runner is the best contemporary reading of Frankenstein. In a version of Romantic irony, the detective Deckard becomes implicated in his analysis of the replicant femme fatale, realising that he may be (may be) a replicant himself.  The story has a pervasive atmosphere of undigested grief. Does this atmosphere have anything to benefit ecological critique? In 2019, what makes you human is your emotional response to animal suffering ("boiled dog, "an upturned crab"), while humanoid replicants are exploited and "retired" (killed) if they resist. This illusion of psychological depth, extracted in face-to-face interviews, is almost an ecomimetic ethics, like the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The replicants cannot identify with this sensibility, cannot put themselves into a crab's shoes. Yet they weep like little children because their emotional age is far younger than their implanted memories would suggest. But Deckard profoundly puts himself into the replicants' shoes. Deckard's uncanny dream, which makes us suspect that it is an implanted memory (and hence that he is not a human but a replicant) is of a fantasy animal, a unicorn. Society assumes the replicants are "evil." Animals are respected, but when the stranger is too close for comfort, he or she becomes threatening. But in the story, the replicants turn out to be protagonists, fired with a revolutionary politics.

Frankenstein and Blade Runner enjoin us to love people even when they are not people. Far from being rational self-interest, ecological thought is shot through with desire.

The task is to love the automatic as automatic. In order to mean anything at all, this love must be more excessive, exuberant, and risky than a bland extension of humanitarianism to the environment. Humanitarianism would leave the environment just as it is, as an Other "over there", a victim. In Blade Runner Deckard orders the femme fatale to say that she loves him and to ask him to kiss her. This could be a violation. Or perhaps it respects the fact that she is a doll, that to go on and on about how much he loves her would not convince her, but that to stage the love as a perverse script would speak the truth. It would acknowledge the objectal quality of the beloved, and thus to love her for herself rather than as a copy of a human. Nature and the body have become Donna Haraway's cyborg, and Frankenstein and Blade Runner are allegories for how to carry on in a cyborg world.

It is time to modify Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto, which still brilliantly articulates the paradoxes of politicised identity. "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," she writes. I'd rather be a zombie than a tree hugger. Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is a vast chronicle of the undead Native Americans that refuses to become a work of mourning for them. Deep Ecology buries the dead too fast (reducing everything to an expression of Gaia), while modernity tries to torch them in a familiar story of a war against matter. Meanwhile clouds of radioactive waste haunt the world. So while we campaign to make our world "cleaner" and less toxic, less harmful to sentient beings, our philosophical adventure should in some ways be quite the reverse. We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we're in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing "Hauntology" (Derrida's phrase) rather than ontology.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

The Stone Tape — A Teleplay by Nigel Kneale and Peter Sasdy

A team of scientists working in an abandoned mansion to develop a new recording medium discover that one of the rooms, considered for decades to be haunted, may be made of a type of stone that can store sounds and images.

Nigel Kneale has returned to the ghost story on several occasions in his career, but The Stone Tape stands as perhaps his finest single work in the genre, and his most typical. Asked to come up with a Christmas play, rather than providing a traditional ghost story (which he successfully did later on with The Woman in Black (ITV, tx. 24/12/1989)), he produced something far more original and challenging.

The play focuses on the relationship between three scientists: Jill, a talented computer programmer attuned to psychic phenomena; her arrogant, egotistical and ruthless, if frequently charming, boss (and lover) Peter; and Collinson, the foreman on the project and confidante to both of them. Their differing personal experiences of the mansion's haunted room provide the framework for the drama and are drawn along traditional gender lines. Kneale's script explores male and female perspectives, contrasting rational problem solving and the application of the scientific method with intuitive and emotional responses and solutions aligned with a compassionate feeling for people and their circumstances. Peter and Jill stand at the opposite poles of this dialectic, and as their inability to communicate their differences increases, so their personal relationship disintegrates. Collinson comes somewhere between the two, as the main identification figure for the audience. Iain Cuthbertson gives a powerful yet restrained performance in the role, which was expanded considerably during filming as his character replaced the one played by Michael Bates, who became unavailable when the shooting of some scenes had to be rescheduled.

The special effects in the climax, in which Jill is pursued by ancient shapeless creatures and taken back thousands of years to a high sacrificial altar before falling to her death, are often startling, despite their crudeness. The use of sound by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, however, is highly sophisticated, with atonal electronic sounds used to merge music with the noises made by the scientific machinery.  Although reminiscent of Kneale's own earlier Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1957-58) in the way that science unleashes supernatural forces from the past, The Stone Tape can also be seen as a dark meditation on Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol', with Peter as a Scrooge figure, basically uncaring of those around him, who eventually learns the error of his ways through supernatural intervention, but only when it's too late.

Sergio Angelini

Originally broadcast on 25 December 1972. Written by Nigel Kneale. Directed by Peter Sasdy. Producer: Innes Lloyd. BBC Two. Starring: Michael Bryant, Jane Asher, Michael Bates and Iain Cuthbertson. Composers: Desmond Briscoe and Glynis Jones.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

The Making of The Owl Service

The Owl Service — Granada's first major all location, fully-scripted drama serial — was adapted in eight episodes by Cheshire author Alan Garner from his award-winning book. The story is based on a strange old Welsh legend which gradually unfolds while three teenagers — Alison, Roger and Gwyn — are on holiday in Wales.

— Granada TV 1978 press release.

The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven't happened with any other book I've written​. ​​It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went​ ​right​ ​through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw​ ​to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband's murder, was turned into an owl​ .

—​ ​Alan Garner​, Filming The Owl Service.

They took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they called forth the very fairest and best endowed maiden that mortal ever saw.

— The Mabinogion.

Many accomplished actors live the parts they are playing, but it's no joke when a legend takes such a grip on them that it affects their private lives even after filming is over. This is precisely what happened to blonde actress Gillian Hills (she was one of the little girls who stripped off in Blow Up), Francis Wallis and Michael Holden. They play the three teenagers, step-brother and sister Roger and Alison and Welsh boy Gwyn in Granada's current mystery serial, The Owl Service. The story, which centres round an old Welsh legend, is set in a remote mid-Wales valley near the town of Dinas Mawddwy, where much of the filming was done. The trio discover an old dinner service in an attic and Alison finds that if she traces its unusual pattern and fits it together, the figure of an owl appears. In fact, owls are the key to the whole intriguing mystery (now in its third week) in which the three become involved in the ancient legend of the beautiful Blodeuwedd. Created out of flowers as a wife for the hero Lleu, she was turned into an owl after being unfaithful to him with her lover Gronw. The cruelties and passions generated by these legendary figures still disturb the valley, and begin to take possession of Gwyn, Alison and Roger. Slightly sceptical of the legend, I invited the trio to a reunion down in the depths of the Essex country-side. I took with me one of the original plates, with startling results. It conjured instant memories which hurtled us all mentally into mid-Wales. Brought up in a converted shepherd's cottage in Snowdonia, 19-year-old Michael Holden described how the legend took control of them during filming.

— Ann Beveridge​, ​The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​.

It was an incredible experience for all of us. It was as if we personally were really living the thing. The legend, the spirit of the valley was so strong that we became obsessed by it. I felt very close to the whole thing. The area was so much like where I grew up in Bethesda—and it was nice to go back to being outnumbered by sheep.

— Michael Holden​, The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​.

The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven't happened with any other book I've written. It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went right through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband's murder, was turned into an owl. The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day Griselda's mother showed me an old dinner service that she had. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edges of the plates could be seen as the body, wings and head of an owl. Griselda traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, and there it was-a paper owl.

— Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​.

Rehearsals began at Poulton, and I met the actors for the first time. It was a nasty experience. "Well," said Peter, "do they look right?" I wanted to run. They looked too right. It was like a waking dream. Here were the people I'd thought about, who'd lived in my head for so long ; but now they were real. I couldn't accept that they were only actors. And this feeling got worse when they began to read their parts, and speak the words I'd given them. We took the cast to Wales for a couple of days right at the start, so that they coil hi get the feel of the original setting. Now my waking dream grew worse. The characters were where I'd imagined them, and it was as if I was looking at live ghosts.

— Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​.

Bridget Appleby (Graphic Artist) Richard Branczik (Camera Assistant) Harry Brookes (Sound Recordist) Peter Caldwell (Designer) Jack Coggins (Generator Operator) Stewart Darby (Stills Photographer) Sue Fox (Press & Publicity) Alan Garner (Scriptwriter) Ray Goode (Cameraman) James Green (Chargehand Electrician) Frank Griffiths (Music Recordist) Don Kelly (Film Editor) Alan Kennedy (Props Manager) Neil Kingsbury (Sound Assistant) John Martin (Electrician) Ian McAnulty (Stage Hand) John Murphy (Casting Director) Marjorie Norrey (Wardrobe) John Oakins (Unit Manager) Peter Plummer (Producer & Director) Dick Pope (Camera Assistant) Michael Popley (Camera Assistant) Jon Prince (Asst. Film Editor) Harry Rabbie (Camera Assistant) Elvira Riddell (Make-up) Phil Smith (Sound Recordist) Michael Thomson (Camera Assistant) Peter Walker (Dubbing Mixer) Alan Waterfall (Set Dresser) Louise Williams (Production Assistant) David Wood (Cameraman).​

Granada Television for ITV​. ​December 21, 1969​ ​— ​​February 8, 1970.​ 16mm, colour. ​Filming locations: Dinas Mawddwy, Gwynedd, Wales, UK and Poulton Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK.

The Owl Service was much admired but because I could never bear to watch myself I have seen it only now. Father's very proper English family frowned at having an actress in the family yet they watched the first episode to see what I was like and followed the whole series. That was a huge compliment. The Owl Service was a magnificent gift that allowed me to haul back a slice of my lost youth. It had fallen by the wayside at fourteen when I was 'discovered' by Roger Vadim. No more contact with kids my age meant there was a chink in my learning compass. So my memory is not of anecdotes, stories. I was totally engrossed with the feel of Alison. In effect, Alison allowed me to become while she too was unfolding. It also played a part in changing the course of my life. The graphics designer for The Owl Service came while we were filming and I told him how curious I was about his work: when I was a recording artist in Paris I'd go round to see my friends at the music magazine Salut Les Copains - I adored the way the magazine was being put together. The designer invited me to visit the TV centre where they produced the visuals, soon I began at St Martins, but work was always taking me away, then Sir John Cass, Saturdays - but I was filming a lot. Throughout my childhood I was always drawing. My grandmother was a painter but we never met. When I began acting I gave up drawing. Three years after The Owl Service I would plunge into illustrating. The Owl Service is a peculiar work. Singular. Mesmerising. It stands out as a one off ... I never thought The Owl Service was for children only. It felt as if it fit a larger audience. That's what made it special. Because it also belongs somewhere where the memory of one's own adolescence lies. It is super-real to the extent that it becomes unreal. Wagnerian. And too, like an old film it unreels itself repeatedly, then begins again. Any criticism that the series was unsuitably adult for children is untrue. Never underestimate the child; it is pure, it observes, makes up its own mind. But then is taught to see things otherwise ... I have not read Peter's book I've Seen a Ghost. I was unaware of it and maybe I should not read it. My grand father, the superlative Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian, was ruled by his exceeding 'superstitiousness,' so the family was too. Artists are sensitive to this in varying degrees. I am glad I focused on Alison. But if something unusual happened I would keep it to myself. I prefer to believe I am contemplating the cosiness of a blanket than a levitating counterpane.

— Gillian Hills in conversation with Kevin Lyons, The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television​, 2008.

I've Seen a Ghost: True Stories from Show Business compiled by Richard Davis. Hutchinson, 1979.

​The mood of this book darkens perceptibly with Mr Plummer's piece. Many of you will remember the excellent TV adaptation of Alan Garner's ' The Owl Service', that strange novel about spiritual possession, haunting and fascinating in its own right. As you will read, uncanny events took place on screen as well as on. It seems that when you are creating productions about the super-natural in whatever medium, you are laying yourself wide open to psychical onslaught​.

We shot it on location at a little village church in Cheshire and it concerned the theory that the 'dark lady' referred to in Shakespeare's sonnets was a local girl, Mary Fitton. Her ghost is said to haunt the area around the church which is, in any case, a strangely solemn and timeless setting of still pond, dark trees and ancient gravestones. It had rained hard the night before we arrived, but now, as we came to the village, a hot summer sun suddenly blazed out from behind the clouds and David's camera was presented with the extraordinary sight of individual mists rising from each of the quickly heated stones of the old flat box-tombs. All the way across the big churchyard these white veils were being drawn up from every grave. As the mist closed, it revealed, lying on the newly mown grass by the south door of the church, a scythe. Presumably the rain had interrupted the mower the previous evening. Anyway, as a piece of tempus fugit symbolism it was just too tempting and we used it in the film as a requiescat for poor Mary.​ ​After a gap of many years — nine years after the making of 'The Owl Service', in fact — I found myself once more back at that same remote village church, this time to attend a service. It was the winter of 1977-78. A grey day offering neither sun, cloud nor vision. The mechanics of the service determined that we enter the church by the north door and leave by the south. As we came out into the cold fresh air through that south door, there, on the grass, was the scythe.​ ​I correct myself. There on the grass was a scythe. Between the first and second sightings lay a gap of some fifteen years. I know very well that the object can't have been lying there on that grass verge for that length of time. For all I know they now use a motor-mower and I can only guess at the chances that brought the thing to that spot the second time around. But you may care to know that the occasion which had brought me back to that church was the funeral of David Wood who, some years earlier, had decided to come and live in the village.​ ​All of which — if you have ever read Alan Garner's original book of 'The Owl Service' — or indeed any of his books — is not quite such a detour from our starting point as it might seem. Because an idea whose variations dominate Alan's books and films is that all time runs, in a sense, in parallel, and that patterns of violently emotional climaxes can imprint themselves through from one parallel to another. This is, if you like, rather in the way that 'pre-echo' can occur in gramophone records or that aligned areas of sound tape can occasionally suffer from a print-through so that magnetic patterns of certain particularly strong resonances may occasionally be duplicated out of context in adjoining areas of that tape spool. As a result, when we come to play the tape it runs in continuous and uninterrupted sequence but occasionally we hear displaced echoes both before and after their true situation.​ ​Is this what happened with 'The Owl Service'? And were Alan's book and Granada's television film themselves the inevitable echoes, and 'prints-through', from the past event? Or, just as plausibly, were they and was the vision of the original men who 'created' the legend pre-echoes? Were they 'prints-back' from a shattering primary event that, on a normal consideration of time, hasn't yet happened?

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Picnic at Hanging Rock — A Book by Joan Lindsay — A Film by Peter Weir

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place”

“A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves”

At Appleyard College, a girls' private school, near the town of Woodend, Victoria, Australia, the students are dressing on the morning of St. Valentine's Day, 1900. Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis), Rosamund (Ingrid Mason), waifish Sara (Margaret Nelson), and outsider Edith (Christine Schuler) read poetry and Valentine's Day cards.

The group prepares for a picnic to a local geological formation known as Hanging Rock, accompanied by the mathematics mistress Miss Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray) and the young and beautiful Mlle. de Poitiers (Helen Morse). On the authority of the stern headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), jittery teacher Miss Lumley (Kirsty Child) advises Sara that she is not allowed to attend.

Driven by buggy operator Ben Hussey (Martin Vaughan), the party pass through and arrive at the Rock by mid-afternoon. After a meal, Mr. Hussey notes his watch has stopped at the stroke of twelve, as has the watch of Miss McCraw. With permission from Mlle. de Poitiers, Miranda, Marion and Irma decide to explore Hanging Rock and take measurements, with Edith allowed to follow. The group is observed several minutes later by a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), who is lunching at the Rock with his uncle Colonel Fitzhubert (Peter Collingwood), aunt Mrs. Fitzhubert (Olga Dickie), and valet Albert (John Jarratt). At the top of Hanging Rock, the group lies on the ground, apparently dazed by the sun. Miss McCraw, still at the base of the Rock, stares up. Miranda, Marion, and Irma awake and move, as if in a dream, into a recess in the rock face. Edith screams and flees down the Rock.

The distraught and hysterical party eventually returns to the College, where Mlle. de Poitiers explains to Mrs. Appleyard that Miss McCraw has been left behind. Sara notes the absence of Miranda; and Mr. Hussy explains to Mrs. Appleyard that Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Miss McCraw went missing. A search party, led by Sgt. Bumpher (Wyn Roberts) and Constable Jones (Garry McDonald) of the local police, finds nothing, although Edith reveals that she witnessed Miss McCraw climbing the Rock without her skirt. Michael Fitzhubert is questioned and reveals he watched the schoolgirls but can provide no clues as to their whereabouts.

Michael becomes obsessed with finding Miranda; and, with Albert, he conducts another search of Hanging Rock. Despite Albert's protests, Michael decides to remain overnight and begins climbing again the next day, leaving a trail of paper. When Albert follows the markers, he finds a nearly delirious Michael. Just before leaving on a buggy with a local doctor, Michael passes to Albert a fragment of lace from a dress. Albert returns to Hanging Rock and discovers Irma, unconscious but alive. The residents of Woodend become restless as news of the discovery spreads. At the Fitzhubert home, Irma is treated for dehydration and exposure, and tells the police and Mlle. de Poitiers she has no memory of what happened. A servant notes that Irma's corset is missing but is advised by Mrs. Fitzhubert that it is not important.

Michael befriends the recovered Irma but alienates her when he demands to know what happened on the Rock. Mrs. Appleyard advises Miss Lumley that several parents have withdrawn their children from the school. Before leaving for Europe, Irma visits her classmates a final time; but they become hysterical and demand to know what happened to their missing friends. Mlle. de Poitiers intervenes; and, as Irma flees, she also notices that Sara has been strapped to a wall by Mrs. Appleyard to correct her posture. That night, Miss Lumley gives notice to a drunken Mrs. Appleyard that she is resigning.

Mrs. Appleyard tells Sara that, as her guardian has not paid her tuition, Sara must return to the orphanage. Afterwards, Mrs. Appleyard lies to Mlle. de Poitiers and claims that Sara's guardian collected her early that morning. The next morning, Sara's body is found in the greenhouse by Mr. Whitehead, the school gardener. Believing Sara committed suicide by leaping from her bedroom window, Whitehead confronts Mrs. Appleyard, who is calm in full mourning dress with her possessions packed. Michael tells Albert he has decided to travel north, with Albert revealing he had a dream in which his lost sister Sara visited him.

During a flashback to the picnic scene, Sgt. Bumpher states in a voice over that the body of Mrs. Appleyard was found at the base of Hanging Rock and that the search for the missing school girls and Miss McCraw continued sporadically for several years without success. Their disappearance is left as a mystery.

Directed by Peter Weir. Produced by Hal and Jim McElroy. Written by Cliff Green. Based on Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. Starring: Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse & Jacki Weaver. Music by Bruce Smeaton & Gheorghe Zamfir. Cinematography by Russell Boyd. Edited by Max Lemon. The Australian Film Commission, British Empire Films Australia, McElroy & McElroy and Picnic Productions Pty. Ltd.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Retrocausality / Backwards Causation

A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally.

Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.

The idea of backward causation should not be confused with that of time travel. These two notions are related to the extent that both agree that it is possible to causally affect the past. The difference, however, is that time travel involves a causal loop whereas backward causation does not. Causal loops for their part can only occur in a universe in which one has closed time-like curves. In contrast, backward causation may take place in a world where there are no such closed time-like curves. In other words, an ordinary system S taking part in time travel would preserve the temporal order of its proper time during its travel, it would keep the same time sense during its entire flight (a watch measuring S’s proper time would keep moving clockwise); but if the same system S were to become involved in a process of backward causation, the order of its proper time would have to reverse in the sense that the time sense of the system would become opposite of what it was before its back-in-time travel (the watch will start to move counter-clockwise). So neither backward causation nor time travel logically entails each other and time travel is distinct from back-in-time travel.

The philosophical debate about backward causation is relatively new. Only little consideration of the problem can be found in the philosophical literature before Michael Dummett and Anthony Flew initiated their discussion in the mid 1950s. The reason for this is twofold. No empirical phenomena seem to demand a notion of backward causation for our understanding of them. And for a long time it was thought that such a notion involved either a contradiction in terms or a conceptual impossibility.

David Hume’s definition of the cause as the one of two events that happens before the other thus rules out that the cause can happen after its effect. Moreover, according to Kant’s idea of synthetic a priori truth the claim that the cause temporally precedes its effect was considered to state such a truth. In 1954 Michael Dummett and Anthony Flew had a discussion about whether an effect can precede its cause. Dummett defended the idea whereas Flew argued that it involved contradictions in terms.

Two years later, Max Black (1956) presented an argument against backward causation, which became known as the bilking argument, and later attempts to meet the argument seemed to generate all kinds of paradoxes. Imagine B to be earlier than A, and let B be the alleged effect of A. Thus we assume that A causes B even though A is later than B. The idea behind the bilking argument is that whenever B has occurred, it is possible, in principle, to intervene in the course of events and prohibit A from occurring. But if this is the case, A cannot be the cause of B; hence, we cannot have backward causation. Since then philosophers have debated the effectiveness of the bilking argument in particular and, in general, the validity and the soundness of the concept of backward causation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, physicists began to discuss the possibilities of particles travelling with a speed greater than light, the so-called tachyons, and as a consequence a similar debate about paradoxes involving backward causation arose among them. In case superluminal particles, like tachyons, exist and could be used to generate signals, it seemed possible to communicate with the past because tachyons going forward in time with respect to one set of reference frames would always be seen as travelling backwards in time from another set of reference frames.

As Newton and Mary-Lou travel the New Mexico landscapes in a limousine, Roeg provides views of trains, farmland, mountains and a wonderful sequence where Newton appears to time travel and he and his limousine are seen speeding along the road by 19th Century farmhands. Phillips adds in moving songs such as ‘Try to Remember’ by The Kingston Trio as a horse gallops by their side and the landscape dissolves momentarily into the surface of Newton’s world as the ghostly figures of his wife and children invade his memory.

[thehauntologicalsociety]

Jan Faye, The Reality of the Future — An Essay on Time, Causation and Backward Causation (Odense University Press) / Who is afraid of the Causal-General Approach?

Faye’s book is, without doubt, an important contribution to the theory of causality. It is meant not merely to reconstruct or to react to existing scientific knowledge but "to outline the conceptual foundations of new scientific knowledge”. In that sense, it stands in the tradition of classical essays concerning natural philosophy and metaphysics. Faye’s aim is nothing less than to give us a comprehensive characterisation of the conceptual and logical features of the direction of causation (including a coherent notion of backward causation) and, what is more, to give us an understanding of how causation is related to energy and time. The monograph is original to a very large extent; sometimes provocative (for more traditional accounts). It contains eight chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and a helpful index. In the following, we briefly mention the content of Faye’s book and point out those of his claims which seem to demand further clarification. Chapter I deals with ‘The puzzles about backward causation’. However, Faye’s theory of backward causation is not a really shocking one - no fortune-tellers, no altering the past, nor shooting someone’s own grandfather. Even if there were instances of causal relationship directed against the temporal order of events of the system under consideration, the kind of involved particles is limited to hypothetical quantum-mechanical objects (“advanced particles”) only. Moreover, those objects would not be able to interact (at least not directly) with the “normal particles” of the world. This topic is considered in more detail in the last two Chapters VII (The advanced particles’), VIII ('The theories of tachyons and their interpretations’) and in the Conclusion. Naturally, telling stories about backward causation is not the ultimate goal of Faye’s considerations. Chapter I revisits a representative sample of arguments against backward causation to see whether it is ruled out by any of the aprioristic reasons stated so far. Faye’s conclusion is straightforward: backward causation is conceptually possible.

Jan Faye, The Reality of the Future - An Essay on Time, Causation and Backward Causation. Odense University Studies in Philosophy vol. 7. © 1989 by Jan Faye and Odense University Press. Photoset and printed by AiO Tryk as ISBN 87 7492 710 8. ISSN 0107 7384.

Who is afraid of the Causal-General Approach? Philosophers have struggled with understanding the direction of time for centuries. No common notion is available even today. There are those who think of time’s arrow in terms of objective becoming. They hold that since fundamental laws of nature are time-invariant, allowing processes to be symmetric in time, it must be some kind of objective becoming that tailors these processes in one direction. On this perspective the orientation of causal processes are parasitic on objective becoming. Becoming is ontic prior to causation. This view fares well with substantivalism but not with relationalism, since, ex hypothesis, becoming are not reducible to any relation between events. Nonetheless, some philosophers urge to bring in objective becoming in a relativistic framework partly because they don’t see the possibility of physics to describe the necessary asymmetry as an intrinsic feature of the causal processes. The major part of philosophers and physicists agree that causal processes do not exhibit an intrinsic arrow in virtue of certain nomological features, i.e. they believe that the asymmetry is not internal to the processes themselves. But they also reject the idea that the observed causal asymmetry is due to an objective becoming as vacuous or incoherent. Objective becoming is incompatible with relationalism if it cannot be reduced to features of the causal processes or features of the laws of physics, and relationalism is traditionally regarded as the ontological foundation of relativity theories – although today this is more controversial. These philosophers and physicists are still looking to physics to find a proper way of describing the causal asymmetry in spite of the fact that they deny that there exist intrinsically asymmetrical causal relations. The upshot is that they find various physical arrows of time but all of them, or nearly all of them, are due to an asymmetric distribution of boundary conditions. They argue that any asymmetrical causal relation consists in either a contingent asymmetry in the distribution of boundary conditions or in an anthropocentric projection. The basic laws of physics are symmetric in time and provide no help in marking out the direction of physical processes. Apparently, we are left with two alternative approaches to a causal asymmetry: becoming or boundary conditions. One has little if no place in physics (as Dorato points out), whereas the other yields mostly an extrinsic asymmetry. Such an asymmetry may, however, not even in fact coincide with time’s arrow. In my opinion, however, there is a third alternative: The basis of the arrow of causation rests on an intrinsic, non-relational physical property of a process that makes an instance of it a temporally asymmetric cause of an effect.