Some Facts Concerning the Jermyn Organisation

It now falls upon us to divulge a little of the background and history of our association. We hope that we shall be able to do so in such a manner as to arouse interest and sympathy rather than to provoke contempt and outrage – as has in the past been the lot of too many of our number.

You may jump directly to our manifesto here, or continue reading

Let us begin with the Jermyn of today. We are a loose collection of colleagues united by cultural researches and artistic – mostly musical – explorations; a diverse conglomeration of individuals gathered into association by shared sympathies and mutual respect. That we, like all such organisations, are so gathered in the pursuit of certain benefits and perquisites goes without saying, though the reader will forgive us if we are not so imprudent as to elaborate upon the exact nature of these benefits. Jealousy and prurience are vices which we have no desire to nurture in whatever small public it is our lot to address, so let it suffice to repeat what is already public knowledge – that a portfolio of investments developed in the absence of bourgeois moral squeamishness has left us not wanting of luxury or influential friends.

Leaving aside such matters, let us press on to the nature of the mutual interests and sympathies of our number – a matter upon which we are far more eager to elaborate, particularly insofar as they are drawn together in the figure of our namesakes the Jermyn family. In particular we celebrate the great Victorian anthropologists Sir Arthur and Sir Wade. Of the two Sir Arthur is the bettter known, indeed he is by no means an obscure figure – though perhaps a figure who has often been obscured, for while his story has been told it has not been told well, nor without deformation. No,  Sir Arthur’s story has suffered the distortions of hearsay and censorious Chinese whispering that affect all accounts of true singularity and genius.

To take but one example of this distortion, the reader may be familiar with the account written by Mr Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This account, as the only readily available to the public at large, has gained some renown and has, quite unfortunately come to serve many as their introduction to the details of Sir Arthur’s life and ancestry. ‘Unfortunately’ we say, for it is regrettable to our organisation that Sir Arthur should reach the public through the pen of one so small minded and so twisted by bigotry. As drawn by Mr Lovecraft’s pen – which insists on illuminating everything in the most sordid light – Sir Arthur appears at worst a monstrous figure and at best a tragic mote of dust destroyed by a glimpse of the forces that jostled it.

For those unaware of Sir Arthur’s story, Mr Lovecraft’s account is available here. For those disinclined to read that account and not privileged enough to have read one of the accounts by authors more sympathetic to Sir Arthur, I will now provide a short introduction to what we consider the defining features of his story.

Our organisation holds that the central event of Sir Arthur’s life was (and here we agree with Mr Lovecraft) one that proceeded him and that was in that sense outside of his command. This constitutive occurence lay in his ancestry and was written as literally as is possible into the material of his being. It came several generations prior to his birth and consisted in nothing less than the flight of the Jermyn line from the comfortable limits mapped out for it by nature and society, a flight into a realm unexplored since mankind’s instantiation, a glorious leap beyond mankind’s cultural and biological threshold. In short, while on a research trip to the Congo, Sir Arthur’s ancestor, Sir Wade, copulated with an ape. And being no half-willing, petty, bohemian he had the moral fortitude to take that ape as his wife.

It must be admitted that the union was not perfect – but first steps, however bravely taken, are rarely unfaltering. It is the sad truth that Sir Wade’s wife proved herself incapable of adapting to human ways. She maintained violent, unpredictable behaviours at such a pitch that it was necessary immediately upon his return for Sir Wade to keep her shut away in an isolated wing of the family house. None among his associates so much as glimpsed his new bride. Shunning visitors and even servants, Sir Wade undertook quite selflessly to attend personally to her every domestic need, that he might spare his servants the spectacle of her rages. So fine a job did he make of this and so modest was he regarding the entire matter of his personal researches that nobody around him came to guess at his great breakthrough. Nonetheless despite the early difficulties and the seclusion of their moral experiment, their union precipitated an event that certainly surpasses such momentous others as mankind’s mastery of tools, script and fire, even his more recent brief escapes from the home planet. In an episode that single handedly shattered Mr Darwin’s cosily segregated tree of the species, Sir Wade’s ape wife bore him a strong, healthy son.

And this was no sterile mule as the dull-witted consensus of species biology might have us believe. The son, Philip, having effortlessly taken up the aristocratic life of his less hybrid forbears produced a son of his own. This son in turn produced another and so on,  continuing down the four generations leading to Sir Arthur. By Sir Arthur’s birth, integration into human aristocracy was complete, but in the process the restrictive mores of bourgeois humanity had suppressed all details of his noble lineage – Sir Arthur knew nothing of his ape heritage.

Still, the spirit of knowledge is more resilient than that of base custom. While his conscious self remained oblivious, something innate in Sir Arthur insisted upon the truth. In this lies the first part of his greatness, for Sir Arthur returned to his ancestor Sir Wade’s now discredited work and took up study of the ethnology of the Congo. Through this line of research his persistence and intellect gained him a respect in academia that his crude animal features had disallowed him in society. As intellectual curiosity drove him ever closer to the site of Sir Wade’s breakthrough (a research whose tireless pursuit led him to sell off much of his estate) others began to take a keen interest in his work. Soon Sir Arthur found himself in correspondence with some of the foremost ethnologists of his generation. It was through one such acquaintance that his final epiphany arrived. M. Verhaeren, a Belgian trading post agent and amateur ethnologist of some note contacted Sir Arthur after stumbling across a curious artefact which immediately bought Sir Arthur to mind – a mummified goddess-idol found in the region of Sir Wade’s original expeditions and bearing a gold locket of European design. After a brief but excited correspondence a chest containing the idol was duly sent and soon arrived in England.

It was through this artefact that Sir Arthur made the revelation of his origins. The idol which bore a striking facial resemblance to himself and the locket which opened to reveal images of sir Wade and his wife in an entirely human show of sentimental attachment, revealed to Sir Arthur that he was the ultimate product of sexual congress between man and ape. At this point the passage from unconscious drive to conscious knowledge was, it seems, momentarily too much for Sir Arthur. The years of unconscious preparation for this moment had evidently been insufficient and he was driven to rash action. Our organisation holds that had he passed through this difficult stage, the achievement of full awareness of his ancestry might have led him to a living greatness befitting his circumstances. Unfortunately this first stage never passed and a crueller form of symbolic greatness was his lot; gripped by horror at his discovery Sir Arthur immediately doused himself in heating oil, fled from his house and made a flaming beacon of himself upon the moors.

Mr Lovecraft writes “The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it.” and this may seem at first glance quite a reasonable assertion. It is however the project of our association to demonstrate the simple-mindedness of it’s error. The Jermyn line itself was no simple tree-like thing, and Sir Philip was no mere branching. He was rather the unprecedented union of two isolated and disconnected points – a line drawn across a genetic vacuum by will and strong desire. By comparison, it is only time that separates us from Sir Arthur. If such a union as that instantiated by Sir Wade could be forged across the cold interspecies void then why should we treat a mere chronological disconnect as a barrier. The soap-bubble of the present, whose feeble membrane is endlessly punctured by the uprising of hateful memories and dark mourning, is as nothing compared to the hermeticism of the pre-biotech genome.
So we assert our inheritance of the Jermyn line and it’s symbolism. From this material we forge our manifesto:

1) The Jermyn line stands for a shattering of the bourgeois confines of humanism. The Jermyn line after Sir Wade represents a step away from the human – the willing into being of a new post human species through the drive to gratify “unnatural” desire. How much further this drive could be pushed!  So we assert the provincialism of human concerns and aim to cast off the straight jacket of the natural and organic.

2) The Jermyn line stands for progressive atavism. Sir Wade’s great leap forward was achieved only by his discarding of modern scholarly apparatus and assumptions – his learning and his culture – in favour of the most direct and primitive means available to him; fucking. What is more, he fucked an ape – the very symbol of the pre-human. So we uphold the value of the base, the retrograde, the dead and the apparently failed in the development of and flight from our present condition.

3) The Jermyn line stands for improvisation and the value of the unintended – of drive and of circumstance. Neither Sir Wade nor Sir Arthur intended to be innovators. Both took hold of the material at hand and groped blindly towards their respective revolutions. Sir Wade shattered the double helix of the human genome to replace it with the lineaments of his gratified desire. Sir Arthur signalled this shattering to history through his desperate act of self immolation – an act born out of that same will but now turned towards death – the kind of glorious death about which greatness could crystallise. Without that first act there could have been no Jermyn line, without the second grand gesture this story might have remained buried. Instead the flaming, screaming figure of Sir Arthur signalled out of the blackness of the silent moors the greatness and monstrosity of his being.