Peaceable Land 15 - Erotic nihilism

And weaponised vacuum abhorrence...

I spent six hours of Thursday driving to and from Cheltenham to watch Boris Johnson. Seeing on my way signs for Thame I realised the roads were those he wrote his GQ car column about driving on between his constituency and London. I also passed, without expecting to, Jeremy Clarkson’s new pub. So I tried for a new speed record (111mph) on the empty midnight M40. Fun for me – less for the trainless young Independent reporter I was giving a lift back. 

The excellent first episode of Sky’s documentary has a clip quite revealing of focus where Johnson, then a young reporter in Brussels, waving angrily at noise in a press room. Thursday involved my first press room, and a man was playing his phone call aloud, so I almost did a wave. But I was deterred on hearing “So how did winning the Nobel feel?”

My fascination with Johnson was authored, like the rest of my personality, by an early feeling of impotence. In the Partygate days when my mum banned his name at the table (“It ruins my day!”) I remained sure he could have that table helplessly charmed within seconds of sitting at it.

I think my most original idea on him is that his initial rise – I’m not sure what happens in later years – was charged by something like weaponised vacuum abhorrence. Here is part of what I wrote in the NS: 

Years ago, Keir Starmer’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, called Johnson “devoid of substance”. It’s far from an original insult, or an effective one. Johnson first rose exactly by presenting a void of substance and letting what the French call l’appel du vide, the call of the void, compel his audience to explain him. “Oh no no, don’t just say yes to everything!” Sue Lawley protested on Desert Island Discs. In his Have I Got News For You appearances he permitted every suggestion, interruption, refutation, and instruction – or accusation. Lynn Barber found him “so ready to retract an opinion, or agree with criticism, that it is very difficult to sort out what he really believes”. Picasso gouged hysterical prices from art dealers not because they didn’t know the number he wanted, but because he himself didn’t know it. Johnson similarly allowed endless speculation. What weak conclusions could be reached about him came only after so much thought had been invested that he was already more meaningful than his rivals.

Here is a description of a dominatrix from Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, a novel made even cooler than it already is by the fact no one knows if Pynchon is alive or not. The dominatrix is

run not by lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope. She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist…She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself.

Thanks very much, by the way, to all the zero of you who took up my offer of free tickets. I hope you’ve all had really nice weeks of people wanting to hang out with you, and see you on Sunday!

GM