gunge

Joker

There are those who think, my god, that remembering is gentle. They confuse it with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the [illegible] doll. Remembering is violent — a kind of excavation, like hacking out of ice. The bigger the memory, the more it sunders when pulled out.

— Handwritten index card from the Mnemonic archive, as photographed for the programme for the 2024 National Theatre revival

It’s a popular (mis)conception that the Joker card derives from the Fool in the tarot pack, the 0 in opening, zero de conduite, new beginnings and beginner’s mind. Card game expert David Parlett attributes it to another root: the name Joker is an Anglophone version of Euchre, and of the key card in that game, the Jack, which could be promoted over the King in some older card games. The Joker card in modern packs can be used in all sorts of ways: a blank space, a double, a get-out-of-jail-free, an addendum; the ultimate wild card.

I don’t play card games, so this is all research to me, but I do love index cards (I miss card catalogues and other physicalised forms of external memory that cannot be crashed by a bug in an update, although they can burn). I don’t know why this card says ‘Joker.’ in the top right hand corner, and I don’t know how it was filed. There’s a photograph of it, along with two other similar index cards that have faint blue lines bar a red headline, in the programme for the revival of Mnemonic currently running at the National. Neither of the other cards have words in the top right hand corner, above the red headline. Instead, they both have locations: Taxi at night, followed by images; Journey to Station, followed by dialogue. These are things we see on stage, even if not as described in the detail below the headline. But Joker? Not so much. Not this piece of dialogue. Not that I remember. A programme for a theatre production is a mnemonic, an aide-memoire for a live experience. Usually they reproduce elements of the staging through photographs and essays. This programme does not. It has a harder task, which is flashing across the spark gap between the 2024 production and the original production in 1999 (which I saw when I was 21, how is that possible) and its 2001-03 tour and restagings.

For the last few weeks, between reading a review of the new production that sent me to book tickets, and seeing it, I have been suspended in that spark gap, a strange sensation that is over-determinedly reduplicative of the play’s own subject/object of the mobility of memory and how we unfreeze ourselves from traumatic pasts. At the end of the performance, the cast wheel about the stage, sequentially placing their bodies on a table in the frozen position of the Bronze Age body recovered in the Alps, and then adopting standing (and lying, in the case of the person on the bed) postures in a rough circle traversing the stage. It’s reminiscent of the crouching-to-standing diagram that supposedly outlines human evolution, and a rebuke to it. It evokes the fighting, fleeing, freezing, falling poses taken by the ensemble minutes earlier in a tableau (non)dramatizing the all-out assault on a Bronze Age Alpine village. Mnemonic is a play about migration and genocide, about the not-so-soft non-places of pause, of passing by each other in loss, of pain: shattered bones and rheumatism are marked on the ice man’s skin with charcoal tattoos. We remember them each time a cast member lies on their side, back to the audience, upper leg slightly lifted.

The cycle gets faster and faster, poses barely held in the whirl, passed from person to person in a frenzy that is still always precise, attentive. Electricity races between neurons, making the synaptic leap, making memory through newness and repetition, reminding us that this is a play that includes a child’s piano lesson, that site of shock and discipline, of muscle memory, of emotion and repression.

What does it mean to repeat something? What does it mean when something repeats? The title of the show, Mnemonic, seems circularly like its own answer. We remember things in order to remember them. We repeat them in order that we can repeat them. I touch type this because I spent months learning to touch type, and years securing it in my muscle memory. It stops me thinking that I touch the/to type: I place my skin, sending signals to the nerves and muscles beneath them, on the differentiated keys of the keyboard, with their haptic click, the raised bars on the F and J. For Joker. The signals sent through my skin are of efficiency, the satisfaction of spelling correctly, of a finger doing what it is supposed to, or that is what you read, the deletions deleted from the finished text.

An error, says Freud, is a Joker card: an interruption, a blank space, a substitution, a double, a get-out-of-flight/fight/freeze. Trip, and you fall. Fall, and you feel. For weeks I have been misremembering Mnemonic, although not its significance for me. In fact, the significance of the performance I saw in 1999 at the Cambridge Corn Exchange is so great that it produced a literal screen memory of video effects from a different production that kept me cerebral, kept me theorising, sent me reading neurology instead of feeling the felt key(s) beneath my skin.

What I saw in 1999 isn’t the point, not for this letter. The point is the remembering, the shock of it, the physical sensations – heart racing, sweating, nausea, breathlessness, hypervigilance – that do not line up with seeing a show at the theatre, however meaningful or hot a ticket. It’s how the process of not writing this letter kept bringing me back to what I couldn’t think about; how thinking with the show, the Joker of it, freed up chains of association, mobile thinking, synaptic formations that as the opening monologue says, reveal that to think about the future, we need functional memory. As Dr. Daphna Shohamy writes in the programme, since Dr. Brenda Milner’s observations in the 1950s, neurologists have known that without the hippocampus, a person cannot make new episodic memories; more recently, it has been observed that such a person cannot imagine the future. ‘Memory’s machinery’, Shohamy notes, ‘reconstructs evens, whether they have happened or might happened.’

Shohamy’s essay ‘What Is Lost’, begins with her own experience of seeing the original production of Mnemonic — or rather, her unmemory, or multiple memory, fractured by the loss of her sister, with whom she may or may not have seen the show, which is about how loss and grief both fragment our processes of remembering and can drive us in search of that which we cannot remember and need to, of pasts that could explain our present if only we could remember them fully, specifically, perfectly — impossibly. Impossibly, the show says, even as it teaches us mnemonics. Images, moments: they come in the flash.

I can see Simon McBurney alone on the raised stage at the Corn Exchange, can feel the stifling summer heat of 1999, can see my hand writing notes in that summer’s notebook — even so, I check the Complicité website to see if that was real. 30 June – 3 July. I saw it again at the Riverside in Hammersmith later that year. I was in my theatre era. And. Everything else is synthesis and screen, projection and invention. If I told you a story about what I saw, forgive me. This show did – does – something to my memory, like a wormhole in reverse, as if the past tunnels into the present and — JOKER! — makes a sudden space that I fall into, like a fool. It’s a show about a lost father, or rather a lost daughter in search of meaning; a frozen traumatised body examined and studied; and the workings of memory and storytelling as we try to connect across our own loss and isolation.

It goes deep.

And I fall.

I fall all the time, being the Jack of parapraxis. Over my own feet, down the stairs on the bus, off kerbs, under tube trains — twice, something that Rebecca Watson’s article reminded me recently. Unlike in her account, I don’t remember my mortality rushing towards me; perhaps more that I was rushing towards it, with a sense of inevitability and fatalism. Oh, here we are, again, repeating a gesture that is supposed to startle or shock with its unfamiliarity. Trip and you lose your mind, a mondegreen I’ve been singing for years for a much better and funnier lyric from Kristen Hersh’s song ‘Gazebo Tree’ (‘strip and you lose your hide’). Or find it, in the shock of being in a body that has limits, surfaces, edges that meet the world hard.

As much as I fall, I drop and spill. No liquid is safe around me, whether a drink or the supercooled liquid it is in (yes, glass is a liquid. Sort of). I once smashed an entire glass coffee table and all the glasses of raki on it, unintentionally, upset by an ex. I smashed so much glass in my adolescence and twenties that I learned to walk on it, à la Annie Lennox. My soles were tough as hide. I felt nothing: not embarrassment nor pain. When I fell between the platform and the train, I felt surprised that anyone helped me up, that was all. I didn’t notice the blood soaking my trousers from a cut so deep that it revealed bone.

So it’s progress, I guess, that now when a spilt coffee or spill down the stairs of the 243 while carrying three reams of paper reminds me that I am a human in a body that is crap at being a body, I feel both the pain and the embarrassment. I’ve got it wrong, and here it is visible. I misremembered, miscalculated the gap between my hand and the cup, the table, the question, the railing, the speed of the bus or train in the night, the signals given by another person. Trip and you lose your hide — you are plain to see, and your stake is gone.

In the revival of Mnemonic, there is a persistence of nakedness; cismale nakedness predominantly, performed by Khalid Abdalla: tall, thin, slightly stooped or defeated by sorrow, chest slightly caved with the weight of memory. Nakedness reminds us we are vulnerable: his character Omar and the co-protagonist Alice (Eileen Walsh) repeat this, or variants of this. An accident strips us metaphorically naked, perhaps because a serious accident may involve being rendered literally naked for treatment. The mechanisms of our body are suddenly hyper-visible; all the more so when I’ve just poured a pint of water down my front, or ripped my trousers. Nakedness is part of the threat, fear and weird bubbling hysteria of an accident: its possibility, its presence, its memory.

I thought about this as I ran under the Cambridge Heath railway bridge after an event at the Vagina Museum on a sultry evening recently, which spilled into a sudden, sharp rainstorm that left one – to quote the friend I’d been with – wet to the pants. Bucketing is the phrase. But what I thought was, ‘I’ve been gunged’. I blame myself for the rain, for being in a T-shirt and sandals, for not having an umbrella, for not moving faster, for caring that I’m wet to the pants. I take it as punishment: the rain, the fall.

This is not a piece of gunge nostalgia, a continuation of the discourse around gunging that arose around the time of slime videos in the mid 2010s, an newly brat appetite for the informe combined with pervasive 90s nostalgia for toxic gloop framed as more innocent times, health-and-safety-free. Alice Bell suggests gungings go back to ‘pantomimes [which] often feature a so-called “slosh” scene, the entire stage covered in a form of explicitly anarchic mess’. The joke of the fall, whether liquid onto body or body into liquid, repeated and repeated on the TV of my childhood, always with the same shock at the same highly-signalled consequence. In an interview for an article about gunging by Amelia Tait for Vice, media studies professor Máire Messenger Davies notes that

we can speculate if we like, about the Freudian implications of slimy stuff being reminiscent of human excretory processes which children are fascinated by… I don’t think you need to be an advanced psychologist to see why this appeals to the young and relatively powerless child.

To me, gunge evokes not fun (house) or anarchic power, but Carrie’s pigs’ blood: torture, shame, something gendered and gendering. How far is the funfair dunk tank from the ducking stool? Yes, coloured neon (with edible food colouring from the Early Learning Centre after the original blend turned out to be toxic), gunge is a threat made small enough that you can survive, a homeopathic thrill that becomes a reminder of having a skin: a sheen or thin film of integrity that cannot be fully compromised by assault, some residual self that, stained and soaked, still is.

The original gunging was linguistic, a game show not so much of poets win prizes but the obverse. Legendary (and deleted) sketch show Not Only… But Also… famously featured a tank of ‘BBC gunge’ in ‘Poets Cornered’, perhaps named in an attempt to get around the Beeb’s prohibition on brand names meaning that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore could not have called it ‘BBC gunk’; more properly Gunk, ‘a self-emulsifying colloidal detergent solvent’ patented in the US in 1932 by the A.F. Curran Co. On the show, guest ‘poets’ who paused or hesitated in the improvisation game got catapulted into the tank, the first instance of what became a slippery TV staple and possibly of the word, which the reliably dim OED dates to 1969 because it insistently relies on written sources, despite the TV show starting in 1965.

Slip and you lose your pride. Gunging was what happened to losers, stumblers, mumblers, those unable to keep up with the demands of fluency: the bit revealed poetry as a clever clogs’ status game, a self-emulsifying social solvent played to stay clean. Getting messy has its attractions (naked ones; famously BBC gunge was extremely difficult to get out of clothes, which the production team had to dry clean) as well as its costs. The shock of the rain, of the soaking, of being back in a body that leaks and spills and bleeds and shits and cries, is what I understand by being present: the one time flood of memory, returning, through distinct bodily sensation. Oh. Wet to the pants. Heart racing, sweating, nausea. Gunge is the feeling of going backwards into memory-holes, liquid absences of startle.

No-one has a good theory of gunge’s origins as a word (at least, none better than my © theory above). Perhaps gunge’s origin in origin (g-n), is one of the oldest syllables we have, gē, earth. Gunge as the dirt under your nails, as wet red clay, as mudslide, as the Eurowestern association of the soil that gives us life and filth (to soil oneself), the body and sin. Gunge is where we come from, the primordial goo, that infantile syllable of liquid onomatopoeic repetition, four open o’s like the mouths of baby birds. Spill spill spill.

Perhaps it was my new favourite book The Queer Arab Glossary, edited by Marwan Kaabour, that brought gunge and its dis/embodying associations to mind. In the section of slang words from Gulf dialects, he includes līga (from the UAE) and māyi‘ (from Kuwait) that both mean malleable and non-solid, and have associations with effeminacy. Līga is:

a colloquial term that refers to malleable material such as dough or mud; effeminate; ‘faggot’. Within local queer subcultures, it refers to a particular way of dressing and styling that is flamboyant and aims to be shocking and confrontational. The terms can be derogatory if used by other queers to dismiss those who ascribe to this subculture.

English uses ‘wet’, to some extent, similarly, referring to what is perceived as emotional or cultural gender transgression against normative masculinity: the leakage of liquids and liquidity outside the supposedly hard, firm borders that describe dominant dis/embodiment. Real men don’t melt. Gunge is the ur-Other: the primordial un-being of fluidity and spillage that refuses to play by the rules.

Even the rules of physics. What’s so interesting about mud and dough (and semen) is that they are elastic, expansive, fun and sensorially pleasing because they are non-Newtonian liquids, a truly magnificent instance of Eurowestern science going ‘errrr, this thing that is not this thing and actually disproves this whole thing on which we have based our thing is also this thing… because!’. Mud can be thixotropic (gets more liquid when agitated: this is what caused the Aberfan disaster) or rheopetic (gets less liquid when agitated) depending on the solids in its colloidal mixture; dough is, well, I tried to read an article on the rheology of dough, which is a thing I understand with my hands but not so much in graphs. I got agitated and my brain thickened, but I can definitely say that dough is non-Newtonian in behaviour. Toothpaste, gels, cement, some inks, paints and adhesives all make use of thixotropic properties; the thixotropic nature of stage blood – that it has to be liquid and set, which often means a substance that is jellied at rest and has to be agitated – is one of its most vexing production issues.

While it seems quite obvious from experience that shaking ketchup or paint frees it up, physics does not like change without permanent energy transfer. Not only does gunge change, but it also changes back. In science terms, thixotropic substances are history-dependent and have a ‘memory time’ (Lakie and Campbell, 2019). Gunge remembers. Perhaps that’s why it prompts memories and acts as a metaphor for remembering.

Mnemonic is gunge-free, its staging as dry as its wit in contrast to other notable 90s productions such as Robert Lepage’s mud-wrestling A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It goes back to the Bronze Age in its narration of the fate of the ice man (formerly known as Ötzi), but in thinking about neurons it implicitly leaks a little primordial goo, as what happens between brain cells repeats the connection between single-celled organisms. We depend on connection as much as on movement, or they are hard to disentangle. Instead, it is fascinated by glass, superimposing windows, mirrors and our ubiquitous screens, which are linked to naked skin in the moment that a video projection of Alice’s face appears across Omar’s chest and stomach like a cross between a Bruce Nauman video piece and a Teletubby (this is not reductive: Marina Warner makes a brilliant argument about appetitive ocularcentrism and the Teletubbies in No Go the Bogeyman).

Glass is, symbolically, transparent and reflective: it connects us, reveals us, and comes between us. It is misleading, like a funhouse mirror or a glass door you (I) walk into. It creates repetitions and echoes, distortions where presences are absent. Glass is present in a huge amount of technological objects because of its transparency and reflectivity, and the fact it can be made light and thin, and made from commonly-available minerals such as silica. Glass is god, in the phrase ‘through a glass, darkly’ that echoes in Anne Carson’s book title Glass and God (Glass, Irony and God in North America; I asked her on publication in 1998, why the title change, and she said drily, ‘I felt you had enough irony in the UK’).

Yet at the molecular level, glass is gunge. ‘Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid – supercooled or otherwise – nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid – a state somewhere between those two states of matter’ (Scientific American, 2007). The definitive shift between its solid and liquid states is known as ‘the glass transition’ and was first observed directly in 2022, in an experiment where a piece of organic glass was sandwiched between two other tougher pieces of glass and heated above the transition point until it liquefied patchily. Betweenness between as it in-betweens: there’s a lot of amorphous play going on here, a lot that challenges our ideas of solidity and viscosity, fluidity and malleability.

Because it is a kind of non-Newtonian liquid (sort of), glass lacks ‘long-range order’, or a stable latticed crystalline structure; its molecules rearrange themselves over time, seeking more stability. If you’ve ever walked on a glass floor, this is something your body knows, that the molecules in glass are moving faster than those in concrete or wood; that you are walking on something even more liquid than ice. It’s solid, until it’s not: not just shattering but transitioning to liquid. It’s possible (according to my memory of a long-ago trip to Verulamium) to identify which way up surviving Roman window panes were placed in the frame because they are now thicker at the base than the top, the glass having sludged with the force of gravity.

In Western poetics, glass stands for the (if brittle) virtues of clarity and purity, but it is liquid grit. It is messy, blobby, and gungy – but moving much more slowly than we can see, in a memory-time that is far longer than ours. It is always a funhouse mirror, uneven because it reflects an uneven world. It has softness, blurriness and instability not just because of its sheer surfaces, but because of its shear under time pressure. So: poets, cornered. Our ambition for a precise, transparent, sharp glass language melts; language is actually goo goo, it’s langunge, however much we want it to be pure and clear.

Memory, too, which we form in(to) language and self which forms our language and self, is gunge and grunge and gunk and goo, constantly shifting its viscosity in a non-Newtonian manner. It does not make us any less ourselves that we change and move, that we are not a stable lattice but anomalous structures constantly changing. If we did not, we would still be primordial soup, single-cell organisms unconnected and uninterested in the thrill of connection and exchange. We think of memory as that ideal of glass, a transparent, reflective surface, but it starts as an abrasive opaque mineral being super-heated into drippy gobs of a wild liquid. Memory is as unstable as glass, a thin film of grit in which we look for ourselves.

And perhaps nakedness is the same: a vulnerability because it is not stable in its surfaces or its meanings. It is used to shame and torture, to expose and to claim power over. The Greek word for naked is gymnos, the root of gymnastics. I think about this while watching, on repeat, Simone Biles talk in a short video on iPlayer (the/se Olympics are politically and economically indefensible and Biles is the GOAT I will watch anytime, anywhere: I don’t have a way of reconciling these thoughts except to write this). She says openly that the twisties she experienced in 2021 were a direct result of surviving and confronting sexual abuse, individually and systemically within US Gymnastics, speaking out for herself and her teammates. She talks about how difficult it is to leap and spin while carrying the weight of the world, and how she is back, ready to leap higher, land more assuredly, shine brighter. She has been stripped and stripped herself, and returned to training. Gymnastics is nothing if not repetition, with all its difference. Hours of muscle memory, which is what the twisties trips up: trust in your body. You are walking on glass.

To be naked is to be human by way of being excluded from the Human (as in Man, as in cismale, white, able-bodied, adult, wealthy, slim, muscled) – is that what vulnerable means, because it reminds Man he too is naked despite the trappings of power and fancy clothes. To be naked is to be gunge: undefined, undelimited by status markers, threatening to leak and spill. If clothes can come off, so can skin. Carson’s long poem ‘The Glass Essay’, which gives that collection its title, has a series of repeating figures called the Nudes that appear to the speaker during meditations in response to surviving abandonment and betrayal. The Nudes – ‘naked glimpses of my soul’ – begin and end as écorché/es, bodies flayed alive, flesh and skin.

Remembering is violent, my god. It is God who is the source of the violence in Carson’s poem, as both its factor and its surveillant spectator, God who violates us by omnipresence and omniscience. God is glass, pervasive: window, mirror, lens, screen, and the face seen in it. Screen memory, parapraxis. It’s easier to make a figure responsible for our falls and fails than to sit with them – often on the ground, wet to the pants, shaken and angry and shamed, over t/here with the naked and the gunge/d. Swimming around in the mess, trying to make connections. Strip and you lose your hide.

Remembering is something that is done to us, is something that we do to ourselves: in the very act, it is as if we separate into two or more shards or strips of being, flayed alive, flayed into life. The me that remembers and the me that is remembered, the me that does not want to remember and the me that clicks into being only because the hard thing is remembered. The origin, earth, dirt under my nails. I don’t mess with the bullshit of origin myths, but I sit with this, sit with there, the thixotropic air of July 1999, the words that formed a hippocampic shape inside me, making visible an absence in my brain, teaching me the movement and connection I was refusing to make, frozen and afraid. Carson’s work framed and perfused that academic year for me; a week or so after I saw Mnemonic, I spent a day in bed reading Autobiography of Red on its UK publication. Hot, red shame flowers. How many times did I read that book before I could fully notice that Geryon is a sexual abuse survivor.

At their best, a performer or a poet, a performance or a poem, is a Joker, a non-face face card that throws us through the looking glass as it melts, out of the count, out of the competition, out of the win and into the wilderness. Mud, blood, ice melting, above the red headline, repeating.

It goes deep and keeps going. And so I will always fall.

If you’ve made it this far and you still want to read more of my God ironies, check out The God File: Yentling (broygas edition), a brand-new poetry chapbook I’ve co-authored with the legend that is Sarah Crewe. It’s available for £2/4 [UK/ROW] postage plus a donation at your discretion, via paypal: please leave your snail mail in the note field so I can post you the pamphlet! All funds raised go to #Valentines4Palestine, an indie book workers’ campaign donating to PEN International’s writers at risk fund, supporting Palestinian writers.