Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross

Since, in each case of my lantern slides this evening, the image is a species of ideological propaganda let us compare and contrast the exhibits for intended (or possibly unintended) effect. 

Exhibit 1: What do we see? The anti-englische propaganda is reproduced here from Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie ([National] Socialism vs. Plutocracy, 1940) a product of the ministry of Dr Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who in his youth had considered the Catholic priesthood. Does it not resemble The Deposition of Christ from the Cross? (See Exhibit 2.)

Exhibit 1

A demonstrator is removed.

Note subliminal black armbands mourning the dead configured by the black-gloved hands of the British police officers. Inside those gloves we may imagine fists hardened in sacramental vinegar squeezed from a pugilist’s sponge.

We cannot escape the concordances that link the imagery with the conventions of devotional art that depict the Thirteenth Station of the Cross as the stark, unconscionable indignity of a man reduced to vermin to be rubbed out as Enemy of the State.

Exhibit 2

A demonstrator is removed.

The ‘Compare-and-contrast’ page-spread is a technique of Photojournalism stolen from the British Lilliput men’s magazine (founded 1937), which suggests a further level of propagandist subtlety, never mind the nostrums of Goebbels’s partner-in-crime, Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, who in 1937 pronounced: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Exhibit 3

‘The Cruel Ones.’

 So . . . Wem gehört die Zukunft? Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie. (Who Owns the Future? [National] Socialism against Plutocracy.) Are the concordances I find imaginary or is there substance in my suspicions?  You can see here how page 74 (Exhibit 1) and facing page 75 (Exhibit 3) are images staged for contrast, side-by-side. So let us compare the diptych of ‘The Darling Bobbies [British policemen] lead an unemployed demonstrator away’ with its facing text of calculatedly nudge-nudge knowingness,‘The “cruel” SS helps two girls who want to see the Führer.’  The cynicism of Goebbels has the bitter taste of wine mixed with gall.

Certainly, a captive rebel – pinioned to evoke crucified limbs and hauled off to his Golgotha (‘Place of the Skull’) – can be considered to possess a sort of commonality with the ‘Death’s Head’ unit on the opposite page (their Totenkopf insignia may be discerned above their peaked caps) if we accept the birth of another myth . . . the apotheosis of their fair-headed Mädchen as goddesses destined to be the Aryan race’s progenitresses to magnify the thousand-year Reich.

Any resemblances end, however, when we compare the duty of unarmed policemen to serve British democracy – bound in law courts by oaths sworn to Almighty God – with the sacred oath of the pistol-packing praetorian guard, the dagger-wielding SS, who swore by God to render unconditional obedience to one god-like man, Adolf Hitler, the self-proclaimed Führer of the German Reich.

The contradistinction of the two cultures, as perceived by Dr Goebbels, may be examined on the double-page spread of  Exhibit 4 (pp. 18 and 19). Apparently, the combined might of the Eton and Harrow Officer Training Corps was no match for Hitler Youth on the march. (Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian.)

Exhibit 4

 

Degenerate Art.

Yes, the sly subliminal imagery of Goebbelsian propaganda, intent on inversions of perception for the sake of the id-satisfying, sensation-seeking, cheap thrill, still remains the stock-in-trade of soi-disant shock-jock artists even today. Ironically, the Nazi Party’s 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst), assembled to condemn ‘cultural degeneracy’, included any number of surrealists, whose founding credo also celebrated the freeing of the unconscious mind with (ostensibly) inconsequential juxterpositions of imagery devised to provoke a viscerality of response. And isn’t the visceral response of the herd the precise aim of propagandists the world over?

 

I append a centre-spread (Exhibit 5) published in my father’s rather frayed copy of Lilliput men’s magazine, a 1940 dyptych from the year of Dr Goebbels’s masterwork of parodic agitprop. 

 

Exhibit 5

 

Shellshocked chimpanzees.

Somehow, I am reminded of the words of the revered Russian WW2 photographer who was tempted to visit Berlin Zoo on May 2 1945 to view ‘. . . two dead SS men next to a cage of shellshocked chimpanzees. That might have made a picture, but I was after something bigger. I wanted the Reichstag.’

So, in event, Yevgeni Khaldei braved his way to the top of the Reichstag under fire to take the celebrated shot that made his name: the flying of the Red banner of the Hammer and Sickle over the smoking ruins of Berlin. (Maybe it’s instructive to note that Yevgeni’s first choice of subject was a surrealist incongruity that promised a self-indulgent viscerality of response, from which we might draw the conclusion that the lure of voyeuristic sensationalism is inescapably a refuge of meretricious art, yet a documentary photographer of true greatness, as a witness to a genocidal epoch, resists the cheap thrill.) 

 

Who Owns the Future? 1940

[National] Socialism against Plutocracy.

 

Sunday Best.

Yevgeny Khaldei, soviet photographer:  ‘ [In 1945] I was in Vienna.

We were closing on the square in front of the parliament. 

This senior Nazi had come with his family, all in their Sunday best.

He shot his wife and his son, but his daughter did not want to die.

So he pinned her on the bench and shot her.

Then he killed himself as we arrived.’

 

See also: Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html 

and:

Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html

Now You See It Now You Don’t

‘Battleship grey! Inconspicuous? Take my word for it,’ declared our camouflage unit’s senior Training Officer, ‘a grey that declares itself to be a battleship is almost guaranteed to be seen!’

            Of course, these days, my knowledge of camouflage paints probably has no equal outside the armed services.

            On what grounds do I make this claim?

            See for yourself. There’s my old uniform on its hook behind my secret studded door. That battledress jacket was once worn by a supernumerary Concealment Officer commissioned to draw enemy fire from Allied airfields by decoy and deception . . . no canvas of any academic painter (a calling in which I have gained no small repute) has ever been on such a colossal scale.

            You’ll recognise our elite shoulder insignia. The scops-owl (a superbly camouflaged species, almost indistinguishable when perched against the bark of a tree).

            But I will not rehearse here the history of DG-SCOPS: the Directorate-General for Secret Camouflage Operations based at Cleremont Park.

 

The Outside Viewing-tank of the Directorate of

Camouflage (1943). Painting by Commander

 J. Yunge-Bateman of the Directorate. A model

of an aircraft carrier floats in the tank.

•

A camoufleur may fool the enemy but he is not in the business of fooling himself . . .

            If only I could now vanish into thick darkness as wholly as we did then.  

            No human eye can penetrate the dark fastnesses of the human spirit where I would wish to wander.

            In the boatshed, above the slipway, Ingrid peered into the gloom.

            ‘I see no ships.’

            ‘Trust me.’ I took her hand, leapt towards the water and, without a splash, disappeared.

            I heard her gasp, bewildered.

            ‘It’s not possible,’ she whispered.

            But it was.

            For three months we’d been refining a special heavy-duty marine paint that a wag in stores, because of its dead matt blackboard-type properties, had labelled Nightschool No. 9.

            By studying the adaptive camouflage of cuttlefish in starlight, together with the spectrometric theories advanced by that master painter of moonlit waters, Julius Olsson RA, and compounding our findings with the principles of M.C. Schwab’s hull-camouflage-through-downlighting system modulated by rheostats (filed in U.S. Patent 2,300,067 and devised to dissipate the under-shadow cast by a battleship by night) the state of nigh invisibility had been achieved for our Mk. 5 experimental hooded coracle into which I’d stepped. 

            ‘It’s as I thought,’ I called from the blackest void. ‘I’m nothing to you.’

            I gripped Ingrid’s wrists and she stepped aboard to fall into my arms.

            ‘Tell me!’ My grip tightened. ‘Has anyone ever mattered to you?’

            ‘I nursed a baby monkey once,’ she murmured. ‘It was everything to me. Everything I ever wished!’

            My hands brushed her shoulder blades. It was as though I had touched a razor-backed mule.

•

As I trod the narrow cinder foot-path that runs between the railway’s boundary fence and the water meadows, I contemplated my crooked shadow in a gibbous moonlight that by my reckoning measured eighty selinolumens.

            At Cleremont Park the Camouflage Directorate had built a Moonlight Vision Chamber above a circular tank on a turntable, presenting a shallow sheet of water for our crypto-shaded model warships, which permitted the measurement of all kinds of marine light effects, from the diffused radiance of starlight to brightest moonlight, so we could judge our visual trickery in miniature from the vantage of an aircraft circling at any altitude.

            I was still contemplating the secrets of nocturnal mimesis, unlocked by that distant peepshow, as I stealthily entered No. 56 by the trade gate.

            In my lab-cum-dispensary, fearful of waking Ingrid, I closed the door and, before I switched on the light, drew the heavy drapes against the prying moon.

            You don’t hear the one that gets you.

            Her kid sister, Lena, came up behind me, unheard.

 

Extract from  Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

(A Bad Case, 2014, Salt.)  

•

Anthony Deverell-Hewells. A Sketch.

(Narrator of Now You See It, Now You Don’t.)

The character of this bristling, irrepressible artist, and camoufleur, Anthony Deverell-Hewells, is alluded to in a number of Eisner’s narratives. The ‘Prof’ was said to have ‘more opinions than the Queen has soldiers.’

            And ‘the professor’s raw complexion rivalled the face of an engineroom stoker ... and, certainly, “the Prof” never ceased to relish stoking up controversy, for the “rummy old coot” had often claimed that he was the first practitioner of Optical Art (a claim that rivalled Picasso’s), and that he had not only invented an invisibility cloak but had caused a battleship to disappear, in a series of trials that had surpassed the Philadelphia Experiment.’

            (Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner. Page 312, 344, 346 and 403, Dispossession and A Stranger in Blood.)

            It should be noted that Henrietta Goodden’s Camouflage and Art (2007), in a very real sense, omits a number of the Royal College of Art’s alumni who were distinguished serving artists in the camouflage section of the Air Ministry in WW2, whilst only a select rollcall of RCA artists is favoured with inclusion.

 

Set Designers, Couturiers and the Aesthetics of Camoufleurs.

Later I took Ingrid dancing at the Starlight Rooms in Stoneburgh.

            In the event, my invisibility cloak and my self-denying ordinances were needless since, returning through the moonlit park by way of Cleremont Chase, to my surprise she quite voluntarily led me into a New Brutalist pillbox, now adorned with pilasters and rustic trellises, which a foppish stage designer dragooned into our unit had sweetly transformed into a Greek temple for Lord Jewkes of Cleremont.

            In the moonlight, Ingrid’s hair was greyish mauve and her bright red lipstick had turned black, the accident of a not displeasing nocturnal aesthetic.

            Her war paint, like the actinic chlorophyll pigments of military camouflage, changed under certain conditions.

            But her cool grey eyes were no less grey and no less watchful.

            I had been of the belief that I’d trained myself aright in night-time peripheral vision to avoid the blind spot; yet, despite all my best efforts, I hadn’t seen what was there to be had for the taking.

            I repeat: in the night-time deceptions of a camoufleur, the light can become dark and the dark can become light . . . so even a wary seducer can be seduced by a fledgling seductress . . .

Extract from  Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

 

I might, perhaps, have been useful to the War Office in camouflage work, for I had had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty. One of the essential elements of a majestic wardrobe is visibility.  As a rule. ladies of the Royal Family wear light coloured clothes because such colours are more discernible against a great crowd, most of which will be wearing dark everyday colours.

Norman Hartnell (1901-1979),

Couturier to Queen Elizabeth II.

Vignette 2 Twenty-five words.

No sooner had he performed the Ritual of the Word than an Imperial Edict expunged the Ritual Word. The Ritual Word was never spoken again. 

At the temple of the Oracle at Siwa, Alexander the Great 

was reputedly acclaimed Pharaoh of Egypt and proclaimed 

the son of Zeus. The worship of the deified Alexander 

superseded the pharaonic rule and supplanted worship 

of the ram-headed sun god Amon-Ra.

Vignette 1: Twenty-five words.

‘Remember me? It’s been forty-eight years,’ the stranger with the gun greeted him.

      The man looked up blankly, without recognition. 

      The stranger shot him.

 

 

See also, Dead Wife, New Hat. (Femme morte, chapeau neuf.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html

 

Harvest.

 Hope lives on air.

The empty hay barn,

stacked with raw sky.

.

Photo credit: RH Dengate / 1960's Barn / CC BY-SA 2.0           

See also, Ellis Island 1902:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/ellis-island-1902.html

Frog Regnant London NW3

The day after the Labour party’s astonishing landslide election victory on July 4th, I discovered to my dismay that the essential tranquillity of our afternoon tea ceremony was threatened not only by this catastrophic outcome but by the disappearance of our tea caddy together with the trappings that go with it.

 

The mystery drove me to distraction.

To an English person it seemed like a sign that augured ill.

So, on my way to buy a tea-strainer and a new canister of loose Earl Grey tea, I visited a friend who lives near Hampstead Heath to seek consolation.

He had just finished constructing a small garden pond, and had added a well-chosen variety of water-plants. He was wearing his white cotton ducks and when he rose from kneeling I saw his knees were streaked with green. (‘Plantation Order,’ he muttered obscurely.) He stood awhile admiring his handiwork and then remarked, ‘All it needs now is a tame frog.’

Without thinking, I said, ‘I’ll get you a frog. Really.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that’ll put you to too much trouble. I've already telephoned the closest likely source, and they don’t stock frogs. Or toads. Only fishes. There’s been a run on lampreys for some reason.’

I thought of Harrods, then put aside my offer for the time being.

After buying the tea-strainer, I decided to take a walk on the Heath. It was uninspiring just there, featureless, with no trees, no cover of any sort, and no water in sight. Nothing but an expanse of dried up grass. Yet in the distance were to be seen familiar figures, seemingly dancing an impromptu reel-of-four, whooping with insuppressible elation.

I recognised the quartet . . . the HamIntern . . . perhaps the reddest of the Red Hampstead-Highgate-Camden nexus . . . W. B. Choriambes, the eminent Marxist historian, the two Balmidin brothers, trendiest of politicos, and Luis Tinctorial, deep-dyed Russophile and Soviet ideologue and translator of propagandist tracts for the Progress Publishing House, Moscow. (Classics of state orthodoxy: Journey to Forever, A Time of Wonders, and Stalin: One Perfect Man.)

The last time I’d observed this NW3 cabal was May 1st when they were knelt at the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, hands joined in worship. On that occasion they had then sung the Internationale, their voices raised with a quavering emotion that only compounded their portentousness. (The absence from their devotions of Mr Berny Joyce – the Marxist maverick and demagogue, beloved of the Many-Headed – who leads astray the High-Net-Worth citizenry of Islington, was not entirely unforeseen.)

I shuddered at the recollection and looked away.

North London’s gambolling Marxists would drive any properly brought up person to shield their eyes against their excesses.

The fashionable vulgarity of gestural triumphalism, such as punching the air and whooping, is simply beyond the pale, in my view.

So I looked down, and there at my feet squatted a little frog. It sprang away, but I caught it by dropping my handkerchief over it. The tea-strainer with the handkerchief stretched across the rim was exactly right for a frog carrier.

Certainly, my friend gave me several odd glances when I returned, but he was very happy to accept the frog.

‘What is his name?’ he asked.

I gazed at the little creature, so noble yet so powerless.

 

‘Born to reign over miscreant pondlife,’ I soothed. ‘If nothing else, at least he’s certain to rule over the algae and see off the scum.’

 

I retrieved my handkerchief.

‘You shall call him Charles,’ I told my friend.

‘C R,’ I murmured, as I released Charles into his new domain. The new insignia for His Majesty’s letter boxes had been announced just that day. 

 

‘C R,’ I repeated. ‘Charles Regnant. Seer.’

 

 

Photo credit: ronsaunders47, Warrington.                     

 

PS.  On my return home I learned the missing tea set had turned up abandoned in the summer house.

For footnote on the travails of the Frog King Physignathus

see:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html

 

Also see:

Sussex folk were first to predict a Queen’s accession.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/prochronism-sussex-folk-were-first-to.html

Ancient Greece has Elegant Variations for the Beast with Two Backs.

Since that which Helen did and ended Troy . . .*

Apart from drawing on the limitless resources of a first class scholar-brain, poet Robert Graves in his Greek Myths (1955) is a master of the the Elegant Variation (i.e. the ‘practice of never using the same word twice in the same sentence or passage,’ according to Fowler), in this instance the reluctance of Graves’s poetic impulse to repeat the verbing of the act of coitus. Yet it’s a unique effect achieved by him in blunt worldly English prose. And in his poetry, too, these characteristic soldierly conceits in plainest English may be observed and relished. 

 

A typical bravura performance is Graves’s cautionary verse, Down, Wanton, Down! where he writes, ‘Love may be blind, but Love at least / Knows what is man and what mere beast . . . ’  There’s no cheap innuendo but the wit of a would-be lover laying siege to his intended and ‘. . . sworn to reach / The ravelin and effect a breach . . .’

 

A shaving mirror Heracles.

These examples of Graves’s poetic facility are as inventive as the seducer Zeus’s metamorphosing deceptions. Zeus, libidinous son of a Titan, and husband to his sister, Hera, is a shape-shifting lover to innumerable ensnared victims with whom he ‘consorts’. And, of course, we may imagine Graves’s identification with Olympian gods and heroes is the more intense for his resemblance to Heracles, son of Zeus and legendary lover,  for surely the similarity did not escape his notice each time he regarded his own flattened nose in his shaving mirror (‘Crookedly broken nose – low tackling caused it . . .’) 

 

Heracles . . . bellicose warrior with flattened nose.

 

Fifty nights of Herculean bed-hopping.

Doubtless, the resemblance did not end at Graves’s nose. Graves’s identification with the legendary Heracles/Hercules can be measured by the zest with which the poet relates Hercules’s Thirteenth Labour: ‘Heracles lodged at Thespiaie for fifty nights running.’ Thespius, king of Thespiae, ‘. . . had fifty daughters’ [and] ‘fearing that they might make unsuitable matches, he determined that every one of them should have a child by Heracles . . . Some say, however, that he enjoyed them all in a single night . . . ’

 

(Note: Lest the charge of flippancy be levelled against me for these musings on the fate of women at the hands of those who return triumphant from the martial field, please refer to the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 and certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of the previous year. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/correction-notice-soviet-weekly-january.html

 

So, for your interest, here then are itemised the robust demotic verbing Robert Graves (a venerated WW1 combatant) deploys in his Myths, though it’s entirely possible there are other not dissimilar usages in his masterly and soldierly despatches of salacious goings-on reported from the Heights of Olympus I have regrettably overlooked.

bed with

bedded

begot on her

caught at last and got with child

[with whom] he companied 

couple with

courted by

covered her

do as he pleased with her

enjoyed each other

tried to force her

[woman is] no more than an inert furrow

[in which] the husbandsman plants his seed

[with whom] he lay for nine nights

lay together

forced her to lie with him

forcibly married

mounted

on whom he begot

outrage her

taken to wife

took his pleasure (cf. verb pleasure)

touched her to some purpose

trod her triumphantly (Zeus in guise of swan)

ravished her

violated her

violent love made to her

had his will of 

yielded to embraces

 

 

*Sonnet VI (Fatal Interview, sonnet sequence 1931) by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

Post scriptum August 4 2024 : The obituary appeared this month of the Surrealist artist/magician/wildman, Salford-born Tony Shiels, who once exhibited in St Ives a work called The Two-Backed Beast constructed from a piano strapped to a harmonium, which he doused with turpentine and set alight . . . at once a simile and a metaphor for consummation, if my reading of his vision is correct.