Okay, now you’ve read the title of this posting you may be curious. Hmm that’s interesting. Amethyst, Van Gogh’s favourite crystal eh? Well I didn’t know that. It just goes to show… The older you get and the more postings you read, the more you learn. Sounds like a knowledgeable guy, this writer. I wonder how he got to hear that?
All right, I’ll let you into a secret. We were working a crystal healing festival in Amsterdam a little while back. There we were, all stalled up on the main market and business looking good. Our table well lit and our stuff bright and attractive. We had quite a crowd round us when suddenly this short guy with reddish hair pushes his way through to the front and asks in a funny mixture of French and Dutch about the price of an amethyst crystal pendant we had on display. Strange kind of fellow I thought but you know what it’s like. It takes all sorts and on markets we get them. Even so the bandage he had round his ear caught my attention. It had reddish blotches in places like he’d been bending over a bottle of ketchup and his eyes seemed a bit wild. You know how it is, you don’t want to say anything. After all, business is business, so I slowly told him in euros. His face though seemed strangely familiar like I’d seen it before but just couldn’t place it.
“Nice isn’t it,” I said, holding it up to one of the spotlights. “And not expensive either.”
He began muttering to someone nearby but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was Dutch anyway!
The other guy gave me a look and responded in English. “He says it’s his favourite crystal.”
I nodded. “Glad to hear it. It’s a really good pendant. Tell him I said I’m selling it cheap. Half the price it would be in London,” I added encouragingly.
The man relayed my message and the short stumpy fellow’s eyes kind of gleamed. Some words came jabbering out which then got relayed. “He says he likes it and that piece you’ve got on the table but hasn’t got any money. Maybe you can do a deal on one of his paintings.”
Paintings! It was then that it hit me. Those eyes of his! The red hair and the bandage! No, this was ridiculous. It just couldn’t be! I mean, meeting Van Gogh here on the market, right in front of my stall. Of all the incredible luck! Yes it was really Van Gogh. The great man himself wanting to buy his favourite crystal from me! I can’t tell you how thrilled I felt. What an honour it was. Even more than if it had been Elton John.
I won’t go on with the story. Tell you about what we arranged. I just wanted to reply to the question you raised about how I got to know that amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal. Let you into my little secret as it were.
Please, I know you’re already amazed, probably a bit envious really. I mean, here’s this market trader, and we all know what they’re like… Don’t know nothing about art. Don’t know much about anything really, and he of all people gets to meet him! I mean, I’ve got a print of his in my living room and this bastard’s on first name terms with the man. Some people get all the jam.
It’s true then isn’t it? About amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal?
Well how the fuck would I know. I’m only a market trader as you so rightly say. If you want to know whether amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal why don’t you plonk your arse down in a library and spend a year reading some books. Then maybe you’ll get the point of this blog. It isn’t about amethyst or Van Gogh at all. It’s about what market traders spend most of their time doing, and do better than anyone else. TALKING BULLSHIT!
Sorry, I forgot about my fellow jack the lads in the House of Commons. Especially the Liberal Democrat monkeys with the New Labour jerk-offs not far behind.
Bullshit let me tell you is a very special concept indeed. Think about it. It’s not exactly what you’d call lying but something qualitatively different. I mean there are lies and there are lies. For example like telling your best mate that Churchill was really a Chinaman or that all policemen are honest. The kind of thing that’s an absolute porker. Then there are little lies. Things that obscure or distort the truth. White lies in fact. A bit like looking at yourself in a fun-fare mirror and seeing something you’re not. Lies come in all shapes and sizes but bullshit is not quite the same. It’s something that hovers around truth without being close to it. It’s what may best be described as variant absurdity. Bullshit indeed, in the hands of a skilled market trader takes on the hallmark of the absurd.
A market trader may tell you something. Respond to a question or give you a fact. All according to what he believes to be true. Yet somehow you know that there’s something not right about it. A bit like one of his bunches of bananas you see hanging up. There’s nothing else like them on the planet and if you didn’t know what they were you’d think, how absurd, those yellow things hanging there! Bullshit is characterised by absurdity. Like the truth being stretched into something it’s not, something ridiculous. Those are its key elements. The things that stretch your belief. Some story or explanation that’s too absurd, too ridiculous to be believable. Or is it? That’s the real question!
Trouble is, the shit coming out of a bull’s arse is very believable. No mistaking what that is! Its bull shit all right so how did how did the word turn into a popular expression for something you might not believe? Well if you want another story like the one about amethyst and Van Gogh I’ll tell you, but some other time. Right now it would be more interesting sharing my thoughts with you about the stock in trade bullshit that comes out of market traders, particularly in my own line of crystal healing!
Crystal healing bullshit is a wonderful thing. For the cast iron cognoscenti, those for whom crystal healing is a deadly serious matter of learning and study, going on courses, getting diplomas and setting themselves up in business as healers, a market trader’s bullshit has to be highly refined. They come to you as alumni, priests of a faith so when the crap comes out of your mouth it’s got to have knobs on it. For the vast majority on the other hand, the enthusiasts, adepts and goggle-eyed deluded who make up the 99 per-cent balance i.e. the ones who really know jack and are into pretend, a trader’s bullshit can be as ridiculous and absurd as he cares to make it. Just so long as he makes it believable with a straight face and all the sincerity he can muster. These are people who want to believe just about anything so you don’t disappoint them.
Consider this. When you’ve given yourself over to the idea that bits of rock are able to affect your personal wellbeing it doesn’t take much of a Joseph Goebbels to get hold of your soul. To this great army of crystal camp followers then may be applied all the verbal black arts of bullshit. A veritable spectrum of hocus-pocus stretching from stuff that ‘rings true’ all the way across the colours of the ‘simply incredible’ till you reach the kingdom of ‘absolute codswallop’.
Okay now you’ve got the picture, tell me the truth. When you read the title about amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal a short while ago where did that piece of bullshit fit on the spectrum of believability inside you head? Tell the truth now! Did you reject it as absolute codswallop or did it somehow ring true? Come on! Be honest! And remember, I’m not Nick Clegg!
Fine. You’ve come so far with me in this post. Want to come a bit further? I mean I could tell you things here that I know are true but I also know you’d never believe. For example, like Osama Bin Laden was seriously into crystal healing, or that somewhere in the Bible you can find a passage in which crystal healing is specifically mentioned as something you are absolutely forbidden to do i.e. it comes with a genuine thou shalt not label. There again, we’ve all heard of the prophecies of Nostradamus, but did you know that one of them was that he foretold the coming of a great healer who with his message of the sharing of hands holding crystals, all our sins would be taken from us…
Okay, so which of the above do you think is bullshit? No, let me rephrase that question. Which of the above do you think is most likely to be a piece of absolute bullshit? Yes of course you’d say, it’s the thing about Bin Laden. Even though you’ve just read in the papers his brother said that before he died the world’s number one bad guy told him that he wanted his kids to grow up leading normal lives, go to college in America and become responsible citizens. You must have seen it. It was all over the papers! So given that it’s true, and Bin Laden’s brother isn’t full of bullshit himself, are you still saying that my story about Bin Laden being into crystal healing is more likely to be bullshit than the stuff in the Bible or Nostradamus?
Well maybe you are because we all know that the Bible’s got just about everything in it and that it’s just as likely you’ll find it something in Leviticus prohibiting crystal healing as you would about gay practices. The same goes for Nostradamus. The guy seems to have made so many prophesies that he’s got everything covered. In short, if you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, has got to be true i.e. that the guy with the beard really was into crystal healing!
But then come to think of it the idea’s so absurd that maybe it’s true after all. The Americans never revealed what they found on his body, did they? And the world never got to find out what Bin Laden’s favourite crystal was, did they? And why, why did they have to keep it a secret? If you search the Internet you’ll find a whole number of theories have already sprung up. One of them about a small group of Jewish trillionaires who meet secretly every month in a house shaped like a smoked salmon bagel five miles under the Pacific because it’s the only place they can control the prophetic power of Bin Laden’s favourite crystal and stop its power taking over the world!
And do you know what is so terrifying about the above piece of absolute bullshit? That there are probably just as many whackos out there ready to believe it as there are those who believe Martians killed President Kennedy! People actually want to believe bullshit. It’s an absolute waste of time telling crystal healing enthusiasts who come to my stall that quartz crystals do nothing for you. People simply want to believe and we all know why that is. It’s because you want to believe in something, in anything really!
So many of the traditional things people used to believe in have failed. God, religion, politicians…All the words that have traditionally come from these sources have received an increasingly sceptical audience. They’re all being increasingly regarded as bullshit whereas crystal healing, aromatherapy, conspiracy theory and other new faiths are being received by an increasingly receptive audience as being more likely to be true than not. Turning it the other way around, less likely to be the bullshit they actually are!
Right now we’re on the cusp of a credibility shift. There’s more and more conspiracy theory about today than you can ever imagine, like Princess Diana, John Lennon, Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin aren’t really dead at all but all living happily together on an island in the Caribbean! What I’m saying is that an increasing number of people today prefer to believe bullshit than they do actuality. Is this because their minds have become increasingly fragmented so they just don’t know who or what to believe anymore? It’s not hard to understand why. The breakdown of traditional beliefs on the one hand and people knowing they’ve been lied to on such a regular basis by those whom they’ve given their trust are prime candidates for sponsoring an opening chasm of disaffection.
Into the gap between old certainties and economical truths comes the steady march of bullshit. People just making it up as they go along like amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal or Bin Laden into healing. But then not every purveyor has to work on markets. Some come with loud voices and armbands.
People can have their favourite mineral or crystal. There’s no harm in that. We all have a sense of what’s beautiful. We can like things that are visually pleasing, just as long as we don’t turn them into whacky ideologies or faiths and believe that it’s good for our health. What is aesthetically pleasing like a painting or natural art form can be humanising, but that’s as far as it goes. Pleasure is one thing, personal health and wellbeing quite another.
So watch out. This posting comes with a warning. It asks you to stop listening to others and start thinking again for yourselves. Only if we think for ourselves can we avoid being swallowed up by bullshit and liars. Men with funny little moustaches who tell us to go out and murder.
Thinking for ourselves... That’s our guarantee of freedom from lies, half lies and bullshit!
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
