A Little bit of wickedness by the sea.
Where is wickedness?
The problem is an odd one.
That people are wicked is dickens is very clear not to b taken at face value (unlike good).
Wickedness needs an explanation, which his very different from the good (although at time meet it), and only a Epson blinded by faith would ever confuse the two.
In one respect alone. Dickens contends the wicked reflect the good . it interests the starting point. The good explodes from the domestic. It pulls apart it own domesticity in the process (and goes on journeys on substandard vans or carts).
Wickedness is by contrast the utter abstract of the domestic seen. One starts therefore to be wicked in the house of the Vennerings, and in a wedding ceremony which is never what it seems.
It obeys the rules of convention and appears therefore to be as other weddings are, and yet everything is false, and everyone is in role.
These are not friends – this is not a best man or a father this is not a marriage f lovers but foe.
Ha makes this move so odd and the root of what s to come, is not the role, so much as the inability to understand or question these roles.
Normality becomes therefore the only blend yet forceful presence.
It lacks everything and anything other than itself, other than it wicked embrace.
To be as wicked is therefore to deny anything other than the social role are.
One is caught within the polluted rat –trap or crystal of a Veneering banquet. As ever expanding affair (with tables long and short), were everything is only as it is a part of society.
A place where nothing that is not a part of society is realizes or thought admitted.
Veneering is therefore only friend to the social world.
He is its little linking Daemon – making endless empty attachments and best of friends.
What is so problematic about such a world is that it is utterly unaware or even worse does not care about what it beyond it.
It is itself and is enough.
Its bland assertion of normality (every normal role in a far from normal wedding is allowed for) is sweetly bourgeois – or it would be if this sweetness ed anywhere or showed any concern for anything other than the social role.
Friendships are stripped down into abstract formation that really ay one can enter or partake off.
Personality is lost in corrosive masks – but so it originality. One must rather merely find the people (or pretend one had found the people) to enter the role.
Callousness is therefore married with sympathy in a very weird manner.
That is a stripped down sympathy (a being a role in the mind of everyone else, and for everything else), becomes all one allowed to be. One must meet their expectations, and that is enough. There I nothing more than this expectation, and their should b nothing more than them: Any evidence of anything else else is attacked and ridiculed as substandard, and not a fitting guest at a wedding.
The world might be nasty and poor and problematic but then who cares about that? In the world inside everything is quite as it should be as long as we always pretend to each other that we are what we pretended to by
Rumour becomes reality.
A greed hope; hope promise, promise realized – or a least it does in the words of others.
Nothing can therefore be told apart from pretence– nothing it thought to matter apart from it.
One opens in being as callous – being the problem the how one allows for others be insisting that they conform to what one expects of them: that is one opens is the sealed circle where everyone is only a social role, and nothing can b other than that role. The world beyond the Vennering door is either a world of potential (honourable) guests and bosom friends or it is not anything.
But then one move the sea – the world of ininfte challenge and change.
I is by the sea one discovers that the entire shifting image was an illusion.
There was not wealth and not virtue other than the virtue of impression oneself on others minds.
One needs caution here – what one impressed was not the actors art of loading affects, but rather the con man’s art of ensuring that others falsely value. What the Vennering therefore allowed do impress was the image in the mind of another one ones own sanding. One force others to conform and bend according to ones desires of what they would see, therefore: a Desire which lacked meaning of validity in itself and for itself.
Moreover this move was not for the joy or the fun of it.
It rather was made to ensure that ones own life was made more comfortable ad richer. A move that was made wilfully at the expense of the other who was impressed. Their impression of you, their conforming to your desire becomes therefore your source of money. There impression is your power.: You inhabit it in them, and force them to give you what you need.
The move is therefore not accord but vampire (and vampires and actors run always together, but are not the same).
Where the vampire differs from the actor is that society will enforce the right of the vampire over everything. That is the social bonds (matrimony but any other socially enforced relationship) will set in iron the vampires power.
All one needs then to do is to impress once, to make another conform the once (or the set of once) and that is enough. Society will enter into the picture and set that enforcement in some.
It does o because once it has improved this role, once it has set it, then it is in this role one appease to all others and through all others.
A little highly flawed scrap of social relations is thereby set up as a thing. That is one way one personal forced another to value them (falsely) according to a social role becomes pitched into the wider world of relating. Other must conform to it to and it must (whatever the consequence) conform to itself.
Thus far three opening moves of the wickedness have been made. the Wicked is composed in the social fabric, that has no reference point other than itself.
It is embodied with the enforcing another to have an impression of oneself, an impression that can do that other no good, bit which will greatly aid the impressed.
The relation is then contrived to be made permanent by the wider forces of society, that hold with one set of impression up against the world, and enforces it alone.
However of course this much by itself is not the wicked. It is too common. The Wicked really starts. Dickens says in the next fold.
What happens he asks if this enforcing of oneself in the mind of another (to ones advantage) is itself pitched out of one relation and becomes that the socially approve waggle in which any others can be caught.
This is complex.
The point here is than the fact that society will enforce one relation to stay, can then become used as a means to trap others watching that relation. They enter into it from the wrong point, and assume it to be what society claims it to be.
If it is not their is not power is hell of finding out why not (or a least no power society allows for).
The crystal, which does not actually configure to the rules it is meant to, is therefore imbibed with a real power. It can naturally empress: All it will need is to impress to its own advantage and power.
It will therefore be able to ride the social conventions.
The point then being that this riding is itself open-ended and productive.
The social conventions allow it to do any one else up into is fiction.
It becomes a little whisker, like the veneering table, pitched into the world,
It demands at people behave according to one fashion (and will also as the elements in that marriage crystal behave themselves) – and as they behave they are caught (as they must b impressed with a reality that is not theirs).
At which point the picture become more complex.
To use this power, to use the expectations of other is complex, a one needs o be able to play two games a once.
On the one hand one needs to be able to impress. One needs therefore a powerhouse of being. One needs an impression, than will trap another who looks on. This might be a fine fact or an imposing manner.
On the other one needs a partner in crime who is able to ride the effect that this has on others, and use it. one needs a minister of propaganda, capable of ensuring the ones impressions is enriched in the minds of others, and that they are forced to allow for it.
This second role is thereof the cunning one. It uses the powers of society to surf expectations, and create extra value in the mind of another. Might do this by intuition, depending on the circumstance and individual relation. Either can be effective (although time will tell the two will move apart).
The callous world of the veneering with their limited little banquet is then pitched up against a wider reality. A Little callous crystal spins out into the world, and forces that world to accord to it the power and prestige that it would have in the Veneering dinner table. He sealed set of construed reality is therefore blown open to the advantage or one or two of its guests, and everyone else no matte how power or how desperate are forced to dance to this crystal’s advantage.
One is wicked therefore not because one simply forgets others are. But rather because ones desperation one remembers that they are, and in tat remembrance forces them to forget their own advantage and being. Their act of remembering you becomes then what they must conform to.
One forces them to forget oneself as one remembers them, and what is more one can use the entire power of social convention to do so.
Now that is wickedness…