HELPING PEOPLE (2024) - COLE DENYER
Text by Sam Wilson Fletcher
HEAD I
What follows is not very informative. The names (and the people they belong to) that appear in this text and in the show are very important: they are crucial. At the same time they aren’t. The work is I think an outgrowth of internalised damage, like antlers. Made of what? Not bone. (Frozen blood maybe - have you seen the brinicle? The finger of death.) One kind of surrealism (the whacky kind) is putting an egg on a roof. The other kind is a method - a way of embodying knowledge. But I don’t like the word ‘surrealism’ and all its connotations (or the word ‘embodying’) and probably neither do you. Also it goes without saying that the ‘I’ throughout is animal, it is performative.
alcohol is also a medicine - it helps me drink
i’m so tired i can’t speak
i have some kind of a disease - my throat is full of
something - insulation? the remnant of uncounted
sagging estates
- the four horsemen of the britfash acropolis
the 4 horsies of the agitpropolis
the 4 hobbyhorsemen on their private broomsticks
like harry potter - that aspiring gp!
(nobody had to teach him the basics -
cremasteric reflex gandalf! expeliamus drop your trousers)
roaming the deadstreets of the flatbrick mazy plan
far from the flyover and far from the upstairs bedroom
of commerce where the people they are
casting their votes like skimming stones
onto the waterbed on which cutouts of
the 4 hearsemen are spread
(1) sir john ritblat
a charming rogue a bit of an oldfashioned spiv
(2) david hart - black ear of thatcher
worm of thatcher, black earworm
curling in the dark liquor of thatcher’s sour soul
(even the ministers were wary of him
inside her cloak
like a bit of dried umbilical) -
abroad on the elysian field
of waves - albion
submerged to his ears, the bright prow of his forehead is gleaming
and blake is here
- see him through thick foliage
he is crouched inside the overgrown ruin
of a motorway bridge
with dental glue and a tiny spatula
he is applying to the walls
a mosaic
of the shards of one (1) exploded olympic village
and look! there is a demon at his shoulder
- a whisp of black shit, a being entirely of bloodstool
fibrous melanoma, bloodpudding and hemp
it whispers with pneuma, it talks in silvery bubbles
the slight wind now carries its smell to you
- ah, like a good cigar!
and what of (3) mike weatherly? who died of the cancer in his lungs
michael richard weatherly
born in the postvictorian seaside town of clevedon
oh how i have wandered the seawalls at night
bearing in my palm the bright candle
- in the decades of postwar slump
it was a citadel of charity shops - cliftonites
came to nab bargains from struggling old people, a form of philanthropy
the football is on the big tv
with his eyes my grampi is watching
the morrisons - he has his bright eyes
on the yellowsticker bird
a smell of wool and gravymix, a smell of rust
(i am handwriting this on the train
sat across from a man who is angrily
brushing sandwich crumbs off his expensive suit
and some of them are going on me!
he is picking his nose and flicking his crumbs
and biting his nails, this anxious child
of commerce, this son of home investment / invasion, this speculator)
my grampi was a feed salesman
he said the tea he was served on the farms
was heavy stuff - oily with great black flies afloat in it
and the cider! it really did have great black rats afloat in it
- death is not an alternative to it, he said, it is part of it
it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it
the english unemployed did not become workers to survive
they - hang on tight and spit on me - enjoyed
the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was
of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories -
in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction
of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them
they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity -
the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them
they enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages
and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of their suburbs
and the pubs in the morning and evening1
- and the great black rats afloat in the air
in the room of rotten england
they are blinding us with their feces
they have left mouldmarks all over the ceiling
which is sagging like the ceiling of the sinkhole cavern under england
that hollowed out world of toxic roots
through which sir john strides
like a pair of callipers - he measures
the extent of need
and then, with the precision of a neolithic mason
seeds another monolith
- ok, but i am not a scholar and do not pretend to be
i am only a gentle clevedon boy - i am only a gentle sussex boy
i was born actually in a petri dish, i grew upwards
from the wound surface of (4) roger scruton’s peeled chest
like red coral
- i glistened and grew fat
together we walked the glassy crick
for i am only a gentle boy of the hills of west v
and on the diet he coaxed me with, which was rich
with the crispy fragments of the exploded
mahogany drawing rooms of old europe
i grew fat
with stretchmarks like a map of antiquity
that together we explored
i was his leviathan, his muse
and he was my huck finn -
rafted by my bulk we sailed to the mouth
of the gulf
and among the clotted islands
of oil - out into open sea
pausing in the great sargasso
that he might parley with his family
who of course forgave him - he was that loveable -
making a gordian knot of their bodies
those eels offered us up
to the blinding sky - white star night
but sadly thereafter i was relegated to the shadows
i may not present myself
to his esteemed audience, i may
whale at his feet
only inside the secrecy of his college rooms
i watched him make sex with many acolytes
feeling pangs for the goodoldays on the crick
i snaked along the corridor of death: that queue
to see the queen in state (17 September 2023) -
i flowed along the thames (so many bones you harbour
i have seen the uber boys
hoik the bodies of so many
thames, i did not know you had drowned so many)
- and in that sample of island england i saw
especially: intense young men
and roger, they had your books in their hands! my heart leapt
(where are you now?)
and who are you, sweet little puffer fish? you do look smart
are you the exchangeable spiv brain
of the 4 horsemen? are you their rascal spirit? yes you are
their yellow charm - you can get away with anything with murder
if only you click your heels and
allow the wind to muss your hair
ah, (3) mike weatherly -
you who loved the foxes and hated the hounds
and the spongers cluttering the bookie’s mouth
there is a body frozen blue outside the empty bungalow of england
the empty white bungalow of england
mike, you loved rock n roll so much
you promised to wear your iron maiden shirt inside the commons
but the speaker wouldn’t allow it!
the speaker wouldn’t allow it…
mike, can you hear me?
the door appears to be bolted?
i’m in my dressing gown
i only went outside to see about the noise
and now i’m locked out
i’m locked out
and the skeletal horses
that (i see now) aren’t really horses at all
but the skeletal
blackbodied greyhounds of commerce
are towering along the street
- and there you are - mike, can you hear me!
john and david and roger are with you
riding silently
there is a black space where a mouth should be
there is a black sound where a heart should be
- i see you
weeping and fluttering your hands
and rocking back and forth - what are you summoning?
john
landlord of the universe
whose pelvis is a fortune cookie
and the note inside is blank!
david
who relayed from the sac of his toxic kidney
the drops of a rich liquor into maggie’s ear!
mike
positioning the sharp of the spade silently
to stamped off our sleepy heads!
and roger
dear roger - you are corpse jelly
sliding along on a film of thought
you sanctioned those who sheltered
beneath the wiry wing
(wing of one beechcraft 200
sailing high on the air over london
when the doorlight flashed on
and one (1) isabel ritblat ‘fell out’2)
HEAD II
This case is to decide whether underneath your friendly and lovable exterior there is a darker side lurking.
- Sasha Wass QC
… such animals often move in a disoriented and dizzy fashion, with the brains ‘arguing’ with each other. Some simply zig-zag without getting anywhere. Heads may attack and even attempt to swallow each other.
- Prof Georgina Lake (UCLA), private correspondence
1. Craniopagus parasiticus
and what of the mirror that sits
inside the body, intersecting the self?
it produces fatal abnormalities
het kint with 2 of everything - two minds two faces
het kint
who does not make it beyond childhood, who dies on that black slab
a mirrored sword - the guillotine of england
which makes of a man a beast of two backs
or - depending on where you stand
(perhaps you cut the rope?)
the doubleheader called craniopagus parasiticus
by medical science: the parasitic twin
the 2nd palm is black
handshake like an inkcap
it is the mark -
2. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
There is a precedent for such dark duplications in art history. In Rembrandt’s turgid lamplit The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, a man named Adriaen het Kint lies on the slab (supposedly). Het Kint: the Kid. He was a thief. His right hand had been chopped off before he was hanged. Rembrandt initially painted the corpse like this but later changed his mind. This added hand is dark and discoloured and disproportionate. Meanwhile (as noted by Sebald and many others), his left hand is not actually a left hand at all but some chimera: the visible tendons of it, which according to the location of the thumb should correspond to the palm of the left hand, are in fact the tendons of the back of a right hand. In this room there is one right hand too many. With two right hands you cannot pray.
3. Tryst
In the late 90s, Harris’ daughter Bindi (now Ava Reeves) learned of her father’s ‘tryst’ with her childhood best friend, which began when she (the friend) was 13 and continued into her adulthood3. In her anger, Reeves reportedly ‘smashed up Harris’ paintings’.
4. Rolf on Art (2002, BBC)
For Rolf on Art: Rodin, Harris made a sculpture of Reeves’ right hand, ‘… first modelling the hand in clay and then casting it. To my amazement I was told that Rodin used exactly the same single hand sculpture. If you look closely it is definitely NOT a pair of hands, it is a repeat casting of the same [right] hand, but placed in a slightly different position, at a different angle. I’d like to thank the people at the casting foundry who nursed me through the whole process.’ Many were made. Now purchasable from several online galleries for a few hundred quid - nearly worth it for the smelted price.
5. Kids Can Say No! (1985)
In Kids Can Say No!, Harris obfuscates by sitting under a tree. He warns children between the ages of 5 and 8 against sex predators. ‘Paedophilia was finally coming out from under its veil of secrecy’ - by the time of the film’s release he had already committed 9 of the 12 assaults he was later charged with. As though in premonition, the film concludes with two (blue) right hands, holding holstered nightsticks. Which is to say, the film ends with a song: My Body, sung by ‘a group including Harris, two police officers and some children’.
My body's nobody's body but mine
You run your own body
Let me run mine
6. Schadenfreude
Kids Can Say No! may be seen in retrospect ‘as either monumental self-delusion or a sign of deep, self-lacerating guilt’. This seems too generous an assessment. But supposing he was actually human? There is avoidance is our portrayal of paedos as diseased bleeding lizards. It almost allows us to write them out of history as aberrance - statistical, rather than a social consequence of power and its abuse, which they are?4 By October 2022, Rolf was unable to talk, his neck full of cancer.
