Author: John Cussans

Reading Jasun Horsley’s Seen and Not Seen

‘The present book will come out and, as with the last seven books I’ve published, it will be ignored by the mainstream press and change nothing or little for me on a surface level. It will cross the sky like a comet in the dead of night while the world sleeps, and only a handful of insomniacs will ever see it. That’s all it needs to be. There’s no need to climb the mountain. I need to be down in the dirt, where the stone is buried. I will find my home at Zero’.

Jasun Horsley, Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist (2015)

Fortress of Solitude

I hadn’t thought about the book since I rested it on top of the rather limited fiction section of my library a few months ago. I’d picked it up at a give-away stall at the tube station I pass through when revisiting London. It was the cover that caught my eye: a swirling design of black graphic doodles on a parchment-coloured background. The author’s name rang a not-too-distant bell. Maybe someone a friend had recommended. The title cinched it: The Fortress of Solitude. It wasn’t going to be Celine or Kafka, but, given the endorsements on the back, it would likely be well-crafted, New York existentialism-lite in the mode of Paul Auster. Perfect for the tube.

The yellow post-it now poking from the book indicated that I’d made it to page 40 before parking it on the shelf. That’s probably about the average distance I get into a novel before my interest wanes. This is no criticism of Jonathan Lethem as a writer. It’s the form. The interwoven lives of semi-invented characters just doesn’t work for me and it’s a rare day that I make it to the end of any novel. I keep trying though. Most of my friends seem to like them very much and plough through them like butter. But when it comes to novels, I seem to have some form of literary ADHD. But who knew? Maybe this was an author whose novels I might have enjoyed till the end. The odd thing was it hadn’t occurred to me until this morning that the author of my random find was the same Jonathan Lethem who’d written the postscript for the book I had just finished: Jasun Horsley’s Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist.

Jasun had contacted me by email two months previously, having heard a conversation between myself and Erik Davis, inviting me to discuss our shared interest in Video Nasties on his own podcast. I agreed, in principle. But first I wanted to familiarise myself with his writings. When I perused Horsley’s Auticulture website and listened to samples of his Liminalist podcast I was wary about entering into a public conversation with him. I could see that his interests gravitated around what might be called the paranoid end of the contemporary cultural spectrum: UFO’s, child abuse, false memories, satanism, alien abduction and mind control. It’s not that I have a personal aversion to discussing these things. On the contrary. But they are issues I have moved away from over the last few years for reasons of personal wellbeing and professional smarts.

Having fallen into teaching out of practical economic necessity in the 1990’s, it has taken many years to develop the kind of tactical intelligence that many of my colleagues in the education business seemed to have gleaned much earlier: keeping your head down, being ‘politic’ and not picking fights you can’t win. I was always a little too post-punk for the job. That’s all cool when you’re in your 20s and 30’s. And, if you play your cards right, even into your 40’s. But when you’re thirty years older than your students it just doesn’t cut it. To hold down a precarious academic gig in art schools these days it’s much better to be identified as the “theory guy” than the “horror guy”. I still think that’s the case, but I falter. Like many other “guys” I’d become mildly paranoid about how you’re identified in the eyes of your academic peers. In an increasingly polarised, reactionary and socially mediated milieu, any association with authors or ideas identified as “weird”, or worse “toxic”, can jeopardise what is already an increasingly precarious life-work situation. And even theory, once a credible thing to be associated with, in art schools at least, is now also viewed with suspicion.

Suffice to say, getting older has meant becoming more risk averse to engaging with anything that might tarnish my “profile” in the eyes of the academy (whatever that might be), or more importantly, in the social media chat of its customers. In fact, I’d become so concerned about my enthusiasm for ideas now considered beyond the pale of the tenured-academic, Guardian-reading consensus, that I’d taken to listening to Radio 4 – something I’ve never done before – as a form of auto-hypnotic behaviour modification that would make me more amenable to university interview panels.

The second, and more interesting reason for being cautious about Jasun’s work had to do with a sensitivity developed over many years investigating the relationship between psychopathology, paranoia and the occult, specifically to modes of thinking where rational-consensual thought folds into subjective fantasies that take on a life of their own. There is a kind of liminal zone, known well to those who have passed through it, between a reasonable person contemplating uncanny synchronicities with agnostic detachment and one who takes their amplification as sure proof that occult agents are running their lives. My immediate impression of Jasun was a person navigating this space with great analytical depth and sincerity. But I was unsure just how firmly in Chapel Perilous he was snared.

He offered to send me one of his books. I received Seen and Not Seen in the post a month later and had been reading it every morning since with my first cup of tea. What a joy!