cassandra (wall street and metaphor)

photo by john clarkson mix assembled by howard grange tune selection horsemouth helliwell featuring the singers and players as themselves

it seems to horsemouth that cassandra is popular at the minute (for she is in both penny dreadful and homeland). (both would support feminist and post-colonial readings - indeed they are both written from the position where these ideas have become banal and the stuff of tea time drama).

horsemouth has often played cassandra in various am-dram productions - this is the essential tension in horsemouth’s character (such as it is) betweeen his mr. apollo routine (science, rationality, do right) - he diagnoses a lack of this as the world’s problem to which the adorno flavoured problem of stopping rationality from overtaking all that makes us human takes second place. and then there is cassandra warning of judgement to come - who is not believed (and this is what gives the drama its tension).

of course until it all falls you are objectively wrong - and then suddenly (and briefly) you were right - but then you are wrong again as the new normal forms its inverted pyramid and stabilises the cracks and contradictions one more time. the neo-liberals didn’t die of embarassment with massive state intervention to stabilise capitalism because they were never really about preventing it - austerity has taken eight years to march through the institutions to where horsemouth both lives and works once inside the walls it will make short work of the defenders.

what is needed in many ways is a new new culture of capitalism - the teams, the innovation, the diversity are the flip-side of the coin of casualisation, zero-hours, the zombie-drone of disenfranchised service workers - its higher form which can be spoken to legitimise its lesser deeds.

interestingly in homeland (series 1 at least) saul is the apollo figure - if not a tormentor then a facilitator - the one who believes - cassandra prophesies and is (at least for a while) believed - there is (his) work of rationality to excavate the hidden rationality, to bring the timeline into visibility, to reveal the break. cassandra is now a valued employee. time is pressing - there is a problem of lack of sleep, at waking and in the moments before sleep the doors to the subconscious are open.

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horsemouth’s illness is ending - he’s getting bored - today he will go for a walk.