CYCLE TWELVE

1. England is thus paradoxically a country in which a majority of men are cynically suspicious towards the feminine intellect while yet being unable or unwilling to embrace its masculine counterpart, a country where the majority of men are either 'bent', in gentlemanly fashion, towards the feminine tongue-wagging brain or, if comparatively 'straight', inclined to reject intellectuality from a necessarily fleshy or vegetative point-of-view.

2. England is not, and never has been, a genuinely intellectual country but, on the contrary, a country opposed to the masculine, or 'Martian', brain. Even with changes brought about by computers and other such technological inventions of a radically progressive significance, England is still officially structured in relation to the 'lunacy' of feminine intellect.

3. Even its most characteristic literary genre, the play, is effectively feminine in terms of the extent to which drama or theatre is dependent upon speech, which is certainly to a greater extent than upon action. Not for nothing is England's greatest literary figure, viz. Shakespeare, a dramatist, since drama is well suited to the feminine legacy of a parliamentary democracy.

4. It is the 'brain that wags the tongue', rather than the cogitating brain, that most characterizes the dramatic mode of literary production, and the English, not to mention their British offspring in, for instance, Anglo-Irish guise, have shown themselves to be second-to-none at it.

5. But when it comes to narrative fiction or to philosophy, they are much less prominent overall, even though they have a certain facility for poetry, a genre arguably closer, in elemental terms, to fire than to either water or vegetation, and which is accordingly more emotional, in its structured pulses, than intellectual or instinctual.

6. Yet 'sans genie et sans esprit', as Nietzsche would say of the English, spirituality remains 'beyond the pale' of English civilization, as does the Gael with his cultural flair for air.

7. Music is much less typical of the English, as of the British in general, than of the Gaels, and even their sculpture leaves something to be desired by masculine standards, since sculpture is of course a 'vegetative' art form rather than either a 'watery' or a 'fiery' one, like literature and painting respectively.

8. The British are generally better painters than sculptors, though whether they could be regarded as better painters than writers ... is perhaps a moot point.

9. Yet this is an interesting paradox, because it pits fire against water, constitutional monarchy against parliamentary democracy, and obliges one to choose one or the other, making for a distinction between the Englishman's civilization and the Anglo-Irishman's, Anglo-Scotsman's, and Anglo-Welshman's barbarous subversion of Gaelic culture via British nationalism.

10. Why settle for one when you can have both, identifying writing-over-painting with the Englishman and painting-over-writing with his British counterpart, so that one does justice to both watery civilization and fiery barbarism.

11. Which is not to say that there aren't English painters or British writers, but, rather, that history gives us ample encouragement to identify writing with English civilization and painting, by contrast, with British barbarism, the latter an aspect of English imperialism vis-à-vis the musical culture of the Gaels.

12. Thus a more vigorous painterly tradition, one might suppose, for Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, in keeping with British subversion of - in opposition to - Gaelic culture.

13. Painting becomes English art in 'the front line', and it is there to remind the Gael who is boss!

14. But this is not to say that, even with British imperialism, England is first and foremost a painterly nation. How can it be, when it is most characterized by the feminine wateriness of a parliamentary democracy?

15. On the contrary, England is primarily a literary nation, albeit one that has a bias, through feminine intellectuality, for drama over fiction and/or poetry, the latter of which will, when vigorously metered, be comparatively more the literature, traditionally, of 'the front line' where British imperialism vis-à-vis Gaelic culture is concerned.

16. The English masses may prefer fiction, but drama and poetry rule the roost in virtually parliamentary fashion, the former arguably more Tory and the latter, taking an increasingly free-verse form, more Labourite; the one effectively affiliated with antichrist and the other with antispirit, i.e. that which is rather more anti-philosophical than anti-fictional.

17. For only with drama and poetry is the tongue unleashed, whether verbally (as with drama) or emotionally (as with poetry).

18. Fiction is too fleshy, despite its emotional and verbal pretensions, to pass muster as a Protestant genre in hegemonic Heathen opposition to the vegetative earth. There is a suggestion of Anglo-Catholic, pseudo-Christian liberalism to it which is all very well from a vegetative point-of-view, but insufficiently feminine to rule the roost in parliamentary fashion.

19. Even when predominantly poetic or dramatic, as the case may be, fiction is still too close to the masculine earth for Protestant comfort, a sort of 'cowshit' that could become entangled with the 'bullshit' of philosophical literature to the detriment of so-called protestant/parliamentary solidarity and its inverted triangle.

20. The fiction-writer is not trusted in England, least of all these days, when it is almost mandatory to be a woman if one hopes to secure patronage for novels or short stories that are less likely to subvert the Heathen hegemony than defer to it.

21. The philosophical novelist is a Gaelic outsider, and thus implicit if not explicit threat to English civilization, who paves the way, in masculine vein, for the philosopher-gods beyond, whose business it is to affirm entirely different values, in keeping with their virtuously moral resolve, the resolve of supermen in the most cultural form of literature conceivable, a literature of consummate 'bullgas'.