Notes From the Underground
December 2015. Pete, an Elvis impersonator, sues the town of Cicero after he receives injuries falling into a manhole. It is determined he should be awarded $260,000 for lost wages, no longer able to continue performing karate kicks and other manoeuvres necessary for his act.
Pete’s act in my collage is less demanding. He simply makes his entrance, plays the gig, and returns to the underground until next time.
Going back years/centuries I read the two terrors of the 19th century world are epidemics and revolutions. Disintegration of the physical and the social body. At the time the word ‘contagion’ is applied to any ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs that might possess a crowd and to the filth diseases of cholera, typhoid, typhus and polio which likewise threaten the order. It’s interesting that both forms of contagion are associated with the underground, the one swept away in the sewers, the other naturally taking root there. Cleanliness and order, on the other hand, are associated with the open-air, the over-ground. Even with this divide, it’s impossible to maintain effective boundaries between upper and lower. There’s a kind of flow happening. Seepage.
Dostoevsky’s narrator in ‘Notes from the Underground’, is a 19th century man in personal revolt against, and flight from society. He chooses to go below, to settle with an ill-natured, ignorant and filthy country woman as his servant in what he calls a wretched, horrid room on the outskirts of Petersburg where the air is bad. In this hole he writes his passionate, obsessive notes which amount to a kind of memoir and diatribe against society and the emerging utopian philosophy.
The underground, representing an alternative to whatever is going on above, is a place where heroes traditionally spend time, some going to considerable lengths or rather depths. It’s a place where a person doesn’t settle down, the idea being to do the THING and get the hell out of there. To prepare, awaken and then bust out into new life above ground, a move that suggests progress, advance in a desirable direction.
I don’t get a sense that Dostoevsky’s narrator has any inclination to bust out. Or perhaps more accurately, he seems to think he already has advanced far beyond the above-ground men even while remaining ‘rotting in his corner’. Addressing them he points out: I have in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that after all, perhaps there is more life in me than in you.
The sentiment that to remain in the underground is the better way seems to be shared by the British rock band, Siouxsie and the Banshees. They concede however and finally that even so, they must go up. Got to give up life in this netherworld, they sing. Got to go up to where the air is stale.
As for Elvis, there is some evidence that he too is an undergrounder. The Presley Commission has been tasked to research reports that the king is still alive, that he escaped using an underground tunnel from Graceland. I suppose I should be pleased he managed a short appearance here. But I’m still waiting for the second coming. After all that time spent underground there’s sure to be some good rockin’ that night he really and finally surfaces.