forks, Q, cults and plagues
We were putting away the cutlery at home and got talking about forks. Tom said his favourite fork was a particular small-ish fork. The one with the engraving on it. We all have our favourite forks.
The fork was given to me in a job-lot of crockery and cutlery that my mother had retrieved from her elderly aunt of Wellington, New Zealand, when the elderly aunt died. I still have the fork, a couple of small dishes and a gravy boat; I’ve been dragging some of her stuff around since I left home at 19.
She was a theatrical type who used to come to stay. Her face was always heavy with makeup and she drew vivid colours around her eyes and lips. She smelled very strange and looked like a weird clown, or so I thought back then. I never knew her that well; she lived in another city. She sent very odd presents which we ridiculed her for; is it a candlestick or an egg-cup?
The story went that she left home in the South Island of New Zealand at some point around WW2 and joined the Plymouth Brethren up north. They became known as the Exclusive Brethren, a money-hungry sect of evangelical Christians who, in Australia, had unusual access to John Howard when he was Prime Minister.
The story goes she escaped this sect by climbing a fence but this may be myth. Folklore. The story has my grandfather travelling to pick her up and settle her into a house in Wellington for a new life, which is where the fork came in because he got her a bunch of stuff that she would need: pots and pans, a gravy boat, knives and forks.
It’s been a minute between letters. I have now moved here to Substack from Tiny Letter but the archive and mailing list is the same.
Between drinks, I wrote this here (and here without paywall, but please subscribe if you can) about a TV documentary series called The Vow, about the cult NXIVM. I have this interest in cults and the whole broader spectrum of belief, faith and religion. I saw a description in the New York Times of leader Keith Raniere as a “curious void” and this really pushed my buttons on account of what I’ve learned about the artifice and mirage of leaders and gurus, their Feet of Clay. A cult leader erects a building with nothing in it but it’s also a blueprint for a torture chamber or haunted house. For the survivor it is the image of distress.
A ‘curious void’ in this context is also a rabbit hole with nothing inside, not even a rabbit. It – a quest for truth, a ‘searching’ for the answers in rites and rituals and promises, always promises – is these days an invitation down any number of online rabbit holes. The suspension of belief to willingly fall in and willingly take it all on is incredible. Millions of people really truly want to believe in something; they want to feel as if they know the answers, that they have cracked the code, and down infinite rabbit holes they go.
QAnon – the global conspiracy theory also referenced in The Saturday Paper piece on NXIVM – is just literally a set of codes. It’s the greatest conspiracy of all, the greatest trick ever played, the wildest, most disastrous cult, the highest of high-stakes games. The guy quoted in here, who designs alternate reality games, says it is a game. This guy, another role-play-game designer, agrees.
Q is now mainstream because it is way to hack reality. We see it manifested daily in racism, paranoia, entitlement, greed, and gullibility. It’s everywhere. We all know someone who has turned toward ‘the light.’
The game of Q preys on pre-existing suspicions about global power hierarchies, immigration, Trump and the mainstream media but twists it into a deliriously ornate and triple-fake puzzle of signs and symbols. There are Q-alert websites which purport to give updates or ‘drops’ from this anonymous US government insider who knows everything about everything. When Trump had COVID for a couple of days last year it was wild time on the conspiracy bulletin boards. Only an ‘Awakening’ can see us out, they say. The election was rigged. Let’s storm the barricades.
Which, of course, they did.
If Q is outed as the three American chan site death nerds in the Philippines then that won’t matter either. This is where we find ourselves, in that hollow building, devoid of fucking everything but invisible data and grotesque lies. The Q mindset has already been disproved; the ‘elite’ paedophile sex dungeon under the Washington DC pizza shop – Pizzagate – was never real. A man with guns and a knife went looking for it to free the children, but there were no children. It didn’t matter. The truth means nothing.
The Q people are subject to a very funky form of quasi-religious mind control like a cult member. When cult leaders like Keith Raniere fuck the young women or men, this is mind control too. NXIVM played the long game and got itself a secret inner circle of women who were branded, and fucked, and watched while fucking, the whole nine yards. NXIVM, for an upstate New York ‘self-improvement’ community, was brutally medieval in the end and the storming of the Capitol in DC by Q-fed Proud Boys and patriots was a tableau from the Middle Ages, ill-founded, gleeful and violent.
A cult leader will ask you to die or approach death. The lady who tried to climb through the glass, she died for Q. The illusion of freedom or a higher plane if existence is everything, the truth is nothing and it is indeed a curious void.
Couple more things on this.
We are inside a dark period of political absurdities and a plague of the lungs which has killed almost a million. During the Black Plague in Eurasia, North Africa and Europe in the 1300’s – up to 200 million dead, caused by rats – the most popular medical theories drew from the sky; astronomy and astrology. Doctors from the University of Paris thought it was because three hot planets joined in the sign of Aquarius causing “a corruption of the surrounding air,” writes Robert S Gottfried, an American professor of history, in his book The Black Death. Other medieval doctors thought it was the devil’s work.
Now, in our pandemic, mad conspiracies and cults have taken flight again. The devil, the deep state, Q, the heavens, the Awakening. Better Thyself. Big threads here, big continuity. Heaven’s Gate was a UFO cult in California which ended in a mass suicide of members who were told by their increasingly unhinged guru that death got them on board interplanetary craft bound for that better life. The fine detail of the 39 simultaneous suicides in 1997 is very strange: each person was dressed identically, including the same black-and-white Nikes, and each carried a five dollar note and three coins. But is that any stranger than believing QAnon’s memeified frights? Is it any stranger than believing a woman from Sale in Gippsland was reincarnated as a psychedelic Jesus? She was into UFO’s too. She once claimed a child she starved was sick because a UFO flew overhead when the girl was born. She said if ‘flying saucers’ went over her hideout in the Dandenong Ranges in spring, it was a warning.
She also said she had flown one. They believed her.
I work in medical science at a university. I’m not a scientist but I work with the scientists, who deal in sets of absolutes, or truths. Science is about an overall idea of truth. If a thing is not true, as far as they and their peers can tell, it’s no good to them except as false evidence to eliminate. As science evolves, previous truths can evaporate, but only in the interests of making a thing truer. The scientists then move in another direction where, they hope, there may be more to understand.
This is the golden age of science but it’s also the golden age of conspiracy theories. I know someone – we all do - who believes the pandemic was planned in order to control us. She believes in Pizzagate. She loves Trump. She thinks Dan Andrews is a fascist dictator just like the more notable ones before him in Chile, Germany or Italy.
She has told me a little about her re-birth as a suburban Q-Anon propogandist. She was in a relationship with a Muslim man some years ago and he treated her badly, she says, and his family backed him. She was then attracted to the extreme right messages of Pauline Hanson around Islam because of her own individual experience. It went from there. She started going back to Christian church, and found one that mirrored some of this mess: nationalism, salvation, family values, end times, freedom, capitalism, Trump, Q-Anon. She wrote anti-mask slogans on her rear windscreen during Melbourne’s lockdowns and flies an Australian flag from her porch. She is rabidly anti-marriage equality and can’t understand what non-binary is. She thinks we are all being played but it’s her that is caught inexorably in The Game.
I had this piece on Joy Division published after flagging it in the last Tiny Letter, but it turned out to be way more about my friend B, who died when he was 15 and I was 13.
I started thinking about B again a few years ago. Initially I got almost everything wrong about him. Our ages, the year it happened, his family situation. I think this was some kind of post-traumatic scenario. My own family life at the time he died was not exactly harmonious; I couldn't retreat into it to be nurtured. I remember my mother telling someone else that I was "inconsolable" at the time, but I don't remember any attempts at consolation. Maybe I get that wrong too. I can see that a lot of my pieces in recent years have been about memory, and getting things wrong, and the sensation of memory, whether true or false.
I applied to the NZ Coroner for B’s paperwork. Time passed. More time passed. Then out of the blue last year it arrived in my email in all its gory detail. July 1980. Winter in the granite plains. As it happened that was also when the Joy Division record came out. I’d like to write a much longer piece about B and the sensation of memories and what is right and what is wrong, what should be buried and what should be exhumed.
Recently also I started writing for Inkl, on culture. It’s a news and commentary aggregator like Apple News, except it’s from Melbourne and it has access to better publications as well as original local columns. It costs you money. This is Inkl. I have written on American post-classical harpist Mary Lattimore, and Mark Mordue’s book on the young Nick Cave. The other ‘Inkl Originals’ writers cover, so far, sport, media, criminal justice, gender and politics.
I read Blood by Tony Birch in which a young brother and sister caught up in nasty, outsider-Australian family violence and dysfunction make a bold escape and are chased amongst the wheat silos and highways and bleak motels back to Altona and safety, through blood and gore and flashes of immense hyper-colour despite the tarmac and red dirt. It’s a great read. It should be a movie.
On repeat I’m listening to these incredible sets by Luke Una, of Manchester.
On repeat I’m trying to write about a tree and about B and also trying to dig into ‘issues’ involving: my pet cult The Family and their new friend The Dalai Lama, two dead children from Kinglake and, also, a criminally unknown lady race car driver from Cooma. Her name was Joan.
See you soon. Subscribe to Inkl! This letter may also become subscription, but it isn’t for now.
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