Chapter 5

Homunculus

Arriving home I copy out the document, print it, take it out to my local park and sit on a wooden bench dedicated to Mr Bengelstein who allegedly loved to sit there when he was alive. Then I read it over again and again. I will give you all another short extract:-

COMMENT

 The enlightenment principle presents itself as a possible idea. Among all the competing possibilities it puts itself forward. It makes a claim to authority, that is to be more than just another possibility, one which makes a particular claim on our allegiance. It offers a solution to the competing claims to authority. The construction of the principle has been a cold, rationalistic exercise, operating at a level of some abstraction, deliberately oblivious of actual conditions. It is not simply to take its place alongside a lot of other ideas awaiting the approval of the public; that would presuppose some other idea, democracy for example, as more fundamental than this idea. One is putting forward a bid for supreme rule. One is a philosopher, and therefore desires to persuade, one's creative effort is in this respect less like that of the artist or craftsman and more like that of the politician…… and so on for several pages before lapsing into mathematical symbolism which I did not entirely understand, but which am assured contains formulae  precisely tailored to my purposes.

What was I to make of this cold crude programme for rationalistic enlightenment? Somehow or other, in the limbo in which he had been subsisting for the past few decades my dead sage had been keeping up to date with developments, however poorly he understood them. That is what I am thinking when I am startled by a loud noise. A mynah bird is shouting “Poppycock! Poppycock!” into my left hear. He tells me that there is nothing in there that my pundit could not have known when alive. He was apparently one of the swarm of what I had taken for ravens.

I shoo him away and think some more about this highly mathematical form of rationalism.

“Utter poppycock, poppycock”, says the spirit, returning to my ear, “The man was a mathematician and he tries to make everything arithmetical”. I note what he has said and banish him formally.

How disgusting it is, he is told, to come here having stuck his finger up such a horrible creature’s fundament. It put him off his meal. He must go and wash his hands.

Class.

Very distant past.

A theme of decadence. Class. Power trickling down, trying to clutch at it. The theme of descending democratising power. Descending.

Enough of spirits.

I take a real train journey to visit a real person in his suburban house to discuss the manifesto and work out what to do with it. I enjoy the journey. There is something almost idyllic about it, uplifting, poetic. It must be partly to do with the spring sunshine. I am charmed by the old fashioned little railway station, just like so many others of course. It is May time in the suburban streets. This is my flesh and blood friend in his happy domestic surroundings. We sit in the living room. His wife Marie is in the back garden weeding. His two children are playing upstairs, a nine year old boy and his six year old sister.

I want to make some use of this manifesto. I explain the circumstances by which I obtained it. I take it out and show it to him. He is sympathetic to my political aspirations. What are we to do with it, I ask? Can I publish it, will it have any impact? Put it on the world wide web perhaps? Marie comes in and smilingly says hallo, then goes into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. We carry on talking. After a few minutes she returns with a cup and saucer for me. She is not bad looking, I think. Apparently she herself, though not exactly a medium, regularly has conversations with spirits. They advise her when she goes shopping. Sometimes they call her a tart. Sometimes she tells them to fuck off. I am amazed.

The children come down. I observe the little brat and with my clairvoyant powers I know what he has been doing upstairs with his little sister, the filthy little beast.

“I did not stick it up”, he said. She just doesn’t seem to wipe it very well. “I just rubbed it gently down the crack. I haven’t had the chance to wash my hands”. He goes to the toilet to do so.

So what am I do with these ideas? I don’t want to adopt them myself because I don’t really agree with them. I need to train up someone else to believe them, a child or a pupil. But that would take many years. After a long and exhaustive discussion we decide I need to make a golem or a homunculus. I shall invoke more demons to help me find an appropriate vehicle for my construction. According to the recipe the being must be formed from the sterile sexual imaginings of the immature.

It is afternoon. Time for my nap. My friend leaves the room to join his wife in the garden leaving me in his very comfortable armchair. I lean back and close my eyes. Forcing my imagination away from visualisations of Marie taking off her gardening trousers, I focus on the nine year old brat. and follow his nightmares. He leads me into a vast cavern full of tailors’ dummies. Dothod is there to introduce me to them. I have a frisson of unfathomable terror.

For two years the boy has suffered from a recurring nightmare about being chased by tailors’ dummies. These terrifying  objects stand for corpses. A medical student may get used to dead bodies, but even he would recoil in horror from this, as none can resist Dothod. They are dead like the undead of the vampire tales, but this time far from evil. In their cold deathliness they are the essence of virtue, the horrible goodness of the Christian God. I mean the good is what I have to fear. Theirs is the full clammy disability you are enjoined to embrace, and whose life experience (absolute zero in this case) you are required to share. As when at five years old the boy was taken every week to the spastics school, and ordered to hold hands with the retards. These are the silent majority. Full equality is enjoined with these loathly sightless beings who feel nothing. This is the fairness to which it is virtue to submit, this is what is required by creeping Jesus and the big Spirit in the sky. They are to foul up all our pleasure. Nothing could be viler.

This horrific vision reinforced my visceral loathing of fairness and equality. I happily stick it in the mixture.

Youth and age, life’s unfairness, provocation.

The disillusion of the old man who can no longer trust his virility.

I hope to avoid the mistakes of Paracelsus who successfully created one  but which refused to obey him and ran away. I use most of the same material, gallons of spunk, bits of skin, bones, the  dung heap, but add a lot of spiritual stuff, politics and sociology. 

I consider what my pundit’s work has wrought, the unintended effect of the principles he promoted. It is hard to think clearly. My reason is confused by emotion. A group of modern girls, wild and dangerous little sluts, drunken, laughing as they emerge from a nightclub at two in the morning are observed by a sexually frustrated Muslim boy who wants to blast them all to eternal Hell. I take this feeling of his as another ingredient.

They are far less depraved than he thinks they are. They get naked only in private with their boyfriends. This I could see if I wanted, but I am not such a pervert. To the puritanical fanatic of course such lawless love is intolerable even to contemplate. Actually they are not especially transgressive. To me they are quite prim. They want to define all the pathways to Paradise. Some of them chatter endlessly. Something wrong though. They have too much power.

Far more depraved is this respectable looking twenty two year old woman walking in front of me this morning on the way to the station, who does threesomes. Here I find immaturity in myself, I find it hard to take on board that such a wholesome, even respectable, looking being can engage in such abandoned behaviour. I feel myself disapproving. I am a teenager again, weak and under experienced.

This too goes in the mixture.

Even she though has her rules, her oppressive ideals of faithfulness, her serial monogamous ideals, her coruscating jealousies.

A cluster of mythological monsters, ancient species that no longer exist, vampires, harpies, furies, gorgons. Girls as seen by the immature  and insecure, as well as the old and impotent. They are not the sweet yielding things one hears of in song. Dangerous and strong, all their flirtatiousness is directed at others. There is nothing warm about them, while these creatures exist the warm have no reality, none of them exist or at least nothing like as many as there are supposed to be. Basically almost all women are nasty little things.

Thinking of paradise I switch to Dante’s Beatrice in Paradise sitting on the grass with her arse. Her I do want to strip naked, to see what she has under her shift, even she, angel that she is. Her pubes, her anus, her beatific twat…

But I have sped too far back in time. How different back in the days of the great great grandmothers? Fast forward to the top hatted gentleman who knows.

He informs me that human nature doesn’t change, but that it is transformed by language. That seems a paradox, it makes no sense to me. Women were always the same, he says, there is a constancy in  human nature, the same characters reappear in every generation. But what was he saying about language?

He evades the question. Instead he shows me the row of terraced houses that he owns. He is a landlord. He tells me. He lives in the mansion at the end of the street.

Maytime scents of jasmine, honeysuckle and best of all the laurustine.

Nature not changing. The same types recur in every generation. Nothing to say that women really are slipping out of control. I should find that out if I really had money, he says.

Already there are socialists out to get him, quoting St Paul and make him work to eat. There is much envy of his pleasant and easy life.

He recalls when "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired" But why should men care?

To return to the matter in hand.

I journey home.

I spare you the detailed description of the manufacture. After a lot of wanking and a few false starts I eventually begin the process. Over the next few months the being was hatching under the dung heap. Finally I dig him out. I programme him with the new philosophy that is to combat Veronica’s hateful creed. I prepare to set my philosophunuclus loose upon the world.

I need to consider most carefully how this new philosophy might be applied. What my pundit’s original teaching did to the fair sex was not quite what was intended. The original idea was to make them available in a rational way. Things did not turn out as planned. Despite what the gentleman said, I suspect there has indeed been corruption. How bad they have become we can see from Veronica, the revolutionary hag for whose depredations I feel partly responsible. But my little chap will hopefully put things right. Unfortunately he is not much more than twelve inches tall. I can hardly bring him out in public. I would probably get arrested.

For the moment however, I can relax and forget her. I imagine, far into the future, a much nicer, much better woman. One whose delight it is to look at men’s bare arses. And who herself enjoys being naked, completely naked, delights in the feeling of her vulva exposed to the air and visible to a male gaze.

I commission a statue of her. She is my own great grand daughter.

With such a pleasant thought, I lay me down to sleep. The cat is already curled up beside me on the bed. I lay on my back naked under the bedclothes. As usual she climbs onto my chest. Languidly I stretch out my hand as stroke her head, picking out the fleas. I keep it up for a while, then as I leave off she gets up and moves back beside me. I turn over and fall asleep to the thought that cats are divine like women.

Bast, little sister of Sekhmet. In restoring paganism, firstly we worship women, then it has to be cats. Women as images though, most accused and abhorred be the divinisation of women as they see themselves.