Mapping the Void at the Heart of the Twentieth Century
by Gyorgy Singh Ahluwalia
Bunker Chic:Chic Bunker,
or Bruckheimer Among the In-Substantialities
Only when YOU finally EXPECT it, does the UNEXPECTED happen.
--The Delphi Graffito, circa 1917
To employ a term first coined by Harkness (1955), the ‘compensatory idiom’ of early Decompressionist work, essentially the void itself, the hole, that into which the structure, its foundation undermined, falls, represented as much a hole in search of a void as it did, if we believe the Codex P ascribed to the Madrid Theorists, the void itself. It was not that early Decompressionist thought lacked the later subtlety, that particular nuance which allowed it to tether nothingness to nothing, to suck, in a sense, air from an already existsing vacuum; instead—and here we enter those particularly treacherous waters where, if we are to follow a post-Glasnoverian reading and give Moody (1963, not 1976) his due, we are in danger of allowing nothing to, in fact, once again become something—the marked nuance of early (here I follow the Stackpole Chronology and read early as pre-Bunker, not pre-Hiroshima) Decompressionist work is marked by its ability to avoid the traps of paradox that led to so much of the later work being abandoned before it was begun. Indeed, it was clearly an infection of post-Hiroshima Paradox that contributed directly to Retreat 1968! the show in which, as we all now suspect, nothing was put on display nowhere, no one told about it, and which no one remembers ever organizing, contributing to, naming, attending, or taking down. The critical difference, and here the Stackpole Chronology serves us well, between pre-Bunker and post-Hiroshima, or Paradox Tremens and Paradox Ad Absurdum as Boole (1983) helpfully calibrated it, rests in those missing months, between the death of Hitler and the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb over a densely populated city.
Boole refers to the period as Paradox Ludens while Stackpole employs the distinctly Decompressionist term Post-Pre-Post. As elaborated earlier (2001), I have eschewed the deliberately false celebration at the heart of Paradox Ludens while distancing myself from a terminology that places rhetoric so directly into the employ of Decompressionist anti-propaganda, and will return to the term I have deployed previously: The Interregnum. The time signature is here barred on both ends by a violent act. The opening of the Interregnum is as much a closing. When Adolf Hitler, at 3:30 p.m. on April 30, 1945, raises a pistol to his temple and shoots, we encounter what many Decompressionists had previously termed the Expected Unexpected. Indeed, if we are to take the date of May, 1931, for the compilation of the Codex P seriously, it is to this event that all work tends, as if in patient waiting for that particular hole, the hole formed by a 7.65 mm pistol. The Expected Unexpected of the Codex P, which in one version of the decoding (admittedly Zweig’s 1947 potentially garbled rendering) refers directly to “the Pistol in the Bunker,†has been read Paradox Ad Absurdum as invoking the closing of Paradox Tremens and ushering in the Interregnum (or Post-Pre-Post, or Paradox Ludens).
That the Expected Unexpected might carry such weight, and I mean historical weight garbed in the robes of an artistic non-event, a happening before there were happenings, the suicide in the Bunker, the ultimate deflationary moment read through the distorting lens of a distinctly Decompressionist scope, has not escaped the scornful notice of critics, detractors and skeptics of Decompressionist thought and work. That something happened, this said by Bruckheimer (as early as 1946), surely must put a lie not only to Decompressionist claims to the very nature of the void they were attempting to elaborate, but to the whole Decompressionist project itself. Additionally, though reportedly an avowed Decompressionist himself at one time, it was Bruckheimer who published the 1952 pamphlet, “Inflating the Tyre: Letting the Air Back In.†This, of course, a direct assault on that early Decompressionist battle cry: “Let out the air! Deflate the twentieth century before it begins!†Bruckheimer’s attack on the claim of a non-event event sealing, as if in a tomb, the period of early decompressionist thought with the suicide of Hitler, a literal decompression of early twentieth-century hate thought, gains a curiously virtual-Decompressionist tint when read against Boole’s characterization of Paradox Tremens, or pre-Bunker.
Let us therefore reconnoiter Bruckheimer, for it is through him, and only him I suspect, that we can begin to understand what was meant by the Delphi Graffito—this, as we all know, was found scratched into a bench staring out at the indifferent raging of the sea on a forlorn bench in the barren wastes of the Orkney Islands.
It is in the moment of anticipation, Bruckheimer writes, the very trembling before the gun, that we understand the failure of the Decompressionist project. How does a man, and this man no less, the mechanical butcher himself, come to terms with the void, the trembling void, that he is about to exile himself to? The Decompressionists would have us believe, especially if we take the specious and patently ridiculous Codex P at face, that the decades of the first half of the twentieth century have not only led us here, to this bunker, to this man, to this very moment, but have, through a literal somersault of the actual butchery of history, given us a momentary vision of a path out of, in the words of the Codex, ‘the Mechanical Null, the Butchery that must ever Reproduce itself, the Soulless Horror.’ What is this path? What way do the Decompressionists light for us? There is NOTHING there!
To read Bruckheimer as the astute critic who decries the naked emperor, who literally sticks the pin into the balloon, to accept him, in toto, as the mask he presents to the world, is to read a wholly reconstructed Bruckheimer, a man sans past, or, in a sense, ex virgino. This the Bruckheimer we have all wearily accepted, the figure he has struggled at creating, at persuading us of its reality; there is an approach to the magical, fawning yes, but there nevertheless, in his Svengali-like manipulation of our image of him. To discard the standard reading, to throw out Bruckheimer qua Bruckheimer post-Bunker, and re-enter, like a child returning to the childhood garden, the magical state; seeing, in effect, the clothes once again upon the emperor; we allow ourselves not only the possibility of a somersault of perception, the ability to see that which is not there, but to see nothing where indeed there is nothing, we may once again allow ourselves a more clear-eyed vision of Bruckheimer pre-Bunker, or plainly put Bruckheimer Tremens: yes, vive Bruckheimer le vrai Decompressioniste!
Speaking heresy among the ranks? Perhaps. We have for many years considered Bruckheimer the thorn in our side that we are unable (unwilling?) to pluck out, endlessly chafing, digging ever deeper. He is the suspected turncoat, the one who was once at the heart of things and is now set upon the eradication of all ideas Decompressionist. This the mask we have welded over Bruckheimer’s already considerable visage—I say we deliberately. Who can forget reports of Horst Blanco’s scathing 1966 speech to an empty basement auditorium at the Athenée Palace Hotel, Bucharest: Whither Bruckheimer? To the CHAIR with him I say!? Or the infamous, and anonymous, 1973 pamphlet found glued to a wall in a men’s room at the Holiday Inn in Toledo, Ohio. One line from this pamphlet is all I need to bring back the rough-hewn fury, admitedly uttered in purely Decompressionist terms, of its thirst for vengence: ‘We are in the WITHOUT without Bruckheimer; to the WITHOUT for Bruckheimer!’ Could anyone have said it with greater and more devastating clarity? Not in the opinion of this solitary reader.
The construction of Bruckheimer as the quintessential anti-Decompressionist has been as much a Decompressionist project as any I have known. Let us remember, among certain of the Decompressionists, there exists an almost insatiable appetite for Bruckheimer’s rhetorical flesh—or, if we are to take the Toledo Pamphleteer’s fury as substantial, his all too real flesh. This rises at times to levels that border on the cannabalistic; indeed, it is not without surprise that I learned last year of reports of a 1957 Christmas celebration at the home of Aloyisius Smith where a chocolate and pecan effigy of Bruckheimer was consumed by a dozen naked, self-described Decompressionists. The vitriol that has been let loose upon the head of the Deutsche Dung Kopf, as Heather McFallon has been heard to call him, can be compared only to the fury of the betrayed—is this indeed the child’s ranting againt the parent? the ineffectual rage of the lover abandoned? I argue there is more—that the rage that constructs Bruckheimer as the most arch of arch anti-Decompressionists is the same rage that illuminates the paths between the many texts attributed to Bruckheimer and allows us to see, in the words of Bruckheimer himself: ‘The Nothing that is Not there!’
It was Bruckheimer himself who was first to cast into dispute the authenticity of the Codex P; and later, it was Bruckheimer, under the assumed identity of Jean Claude van RémyMartin, in the shudderingly turgid, even by Decompressionist standards, work ‘Questions upon a Theme that is Not One Thing or The Other, Except When it Is that Theme (or, perhaps, The Other)’(1974), who single-handedly began to demolish what little was left of Decompressionist Theory after those most difficult of difficult Paradox Ad Absurdum years. No longer interested in undermining the foundational texts, Bruckheimer (as RémyMartin) set his sights on the very idea of Decompressionism itself. Needless to say, I and many others have devoted many volumes to this seminal anti-Decompressionist text and there is little need to reiterate old arguments here; it is important to remind the reader of Bruckheimer’s method: not through his usual scorched earth policy where no argument is left standing, instead we find here a meandering, often pointless monologue—the pages go and on, into a seeming inifinty of text, and when we, with a slight flutter of expectation, believe we have found the opening gambit of an argument or even, God forbid, a Theme, we are as quickly disappointed. ‘Questions upon a Theme…’ continues for some 1,983 pages of small print (not including endnotes) in a fashion that can only be described as catatonic. Dipping in at random we discover, for example, on page 739:
Exley’s The Dystopian Schlemiel, an early, and some say Intra-Pellagic, examplar of Horton’s injunction: Thou Shalt Not Say Not Unless And If And When Thou Shalt Say Not, here becomes, if we process, post-Black Hole of Calcutta, through a distended reading of The Madagascar Texts and their various addenda, and speaking purely in terms of cultural translation as per: iKung tribesman to Maytag salesman, we find ourselves once again upon the cliff edge—looking down? No! We stare with wild eyes ACROSS. To where? To that which refuses to be there.
And so it goes on—for well over another 1,000 pages. Bruckheimer’s purpose is clear. He seeks to bore the reader into literal derangement, to send them into a state of catatonia that must, in some way, have mirrored his own in the writing. His wider purpose? It has been read quite plainly. McFallon (1987) states it succinctly: ‘To erase Decompressionism once and for all, not by dint of argument, but through sheer exhaustion. After ploughing through the rhetorical horrors of RémyMartin, aka Bruckheimer, who would want ever to read another word on the Decompressionists?’I have made a similar argument many times (you need only look at 1979, 1983 and 1995). Here I propose something different: a somersault! Bruckheimer not as the arch anti-Decompressionist, but as the figure who has, through all these lonely years, the Dark Years Paradox Ad Absurdum, been attempting to light a way for us, a distinctly Decompressionist way!
When Harkness coined the term the ‘compensatory idiom,’ he was referring to certain extra-rhetorical strategies employed by the compilers of the Codex P; namely, how the compilers attmepted, through the selective erasure of significant passages within the Codex, to have the Codex mirror its subject: the Void that is also the Hole that Surrounds the Void. The idiom here is the duality of vision offered the sensitive reader, the compensation refers to the supplantation of reality as it is seen by most of us on a regular basis: thus, reality, when viewed through the flawed lens of the Codex P, becomes both Hole and Substance, Nothing and That Which Is Not Nothing. I argue now, and against so much of my own previous writing, that Bruckheimer’s intent, the purpose of his entire ouevre, is nothing less than a refashioning of the Codex for modern times: Bruckheiner is, and always has been, a Decompressionist of the most fundamental stamp.
His work is marked by a natural understanding of the form of the Codex, indeed, it is almost drunk with its sympathies for the Compensatory Idiom; like so much of the productions of the classic Decompressionists (pre-Bunker/Paradox Tremens), which allows one to see and not see, to be seen and not be seen, or as Choudhary (1939) succintly put it, ‘to exist and not exist simultaneously, to be, like matter itself, there and not there, point and wave, solid and vacuum…,’ Bruckheimer’s unrelenting attacks on the very fundamentals of Decompressionist thought (and anti-action) are mirrored acts that must, indeed can only, if we wish to understand them thoroughly, be viewed through the correcting lens of the Compensatory Idiom of the Codex: That Which Is, Is Not; That Which Is Not, Is, & Vice Versa.
Where do we approach most closely to this backwards Bruckheimer, the Mirrored Figure, the Critic who is There and Notthere, who Is and Isnot? Could it be inside that very Bunker, at that very moment—the gun is raised, held to the temple, the trigger is squeezed, the action is released? This is, inter alia, the moment that divides, if we are to place any value on the predictions of the Codex, the twentieth century from itself; it is also at the heart of Bruckheimer’s attack on the foundations of Decompressionist thought. The Mirrored Century originates at this point, as do, curiously, the Decompressionists themselves; in the words of the Codex: ‘The original Moment of decompression, when the gun is Fired, when History overturns ITSELF, when the Mechanical Butcher exiles himself to the VOID: THIS the moment the PAST unfurls itself: The Codex is finally Written, twenty years before, but not until the NOW of the ORIGINAL DECOMPRESSION does it find itself AUTHORED.’ Bruckheimer castigates this passage for its lack of clarity and sense, not to mention the sheer impossibility of its claim: that it is the final moment of Paradox Tremens that ushers in the era, retroactively, of Paradox Tremens.
But it is not Bruckheimer qua Bruckheimer who is writing this; it is the Mirrored (and Mirroring) Image, no less the Compensatory Idiom of Bruckheimer qua Bruckheimer. Let us recall his words from the passage qouted earlier: ‘What is this path? What way do the Decompressionists light for us? There is NOTHING there!’ My italics here. Can any of us, critics and Decompressionists alike, have formulated a more unambiguously Decompressionist statement than the one made by Bruckheimer in his attack on the foundational text of Decompressionist thought? I think not. He points clearly to the NOTHING that is indeed the path the Decompressionists have been writing about for the past century. It is my argument here, and I will go into it in far greater depth in the ensuing chapters, that Bruckheimer, that great anti-Decompressionist critic of critics, the Sandman of so many Decompressionist nightmares, the Bugaboo of Bugaboos, is none other than one of the staunchest promulgators of Decompressionist thought this century has seen; indeed, it is my belief, and I will presnt a great weight of evidence to support this belief, that Bruckheimer is none other than the aauthor of the Codex P itself!
I hope, when this last great work of mine is complete, that this MIRRORED Bruckheimer, this critic who has, and mistakenly, been ever at our heels, will be allowed to come in from the COLD; for it is an AGE, as we all wake each morning to the very same FEAR, when that WHICH IS, IS NOT, and that WHICH SHOULD BE, MAY NEVER BE; and in such TIMES, when no one is who they are, when even a glance into the mirror must need leave us TROUBLED, it is the SMALL ACTS, not the gunshots in the bunkers, it is the RECOGNITION of another in ourselves, that ASSUAGE the frightened, that offer SOLACE to the lost, that allow us, we lonely Decompressionists ever in search of a PATH, to bring one more into the fold to stand with us again AMONG THE INSUBSTANTIALITIES.
