The Lem Reviews 2020 #4 - Companion Vegetable Community

According to legend, ‘Companion Vegetable Community’ began life as a touring song cycle in the Scottish Highlands.  The words and music developed separately: the former originating in the Celtic fringe, arcing through Brittany, Cornwall and the Atlantic coast of Ireland before reverberating into the demi-fjords of the Scottish western bays; the latter came from the north and east, down from beyond the Arctic circle, across Scandinavia and the islands of the North Sea to oscillate through the granite coves of Scotland’s eastern flank.

However it may have been, the eastern players toured the glowering taverns, hunkered below the fierce winds, their number fluctuating, their instruments evolving, the tunes themselves becoming and bewitching, turning this way and that, unstable and beguiling.  To the west, the poets, strangely syllabled and rhythmic, their messages of hope and loss as frightening as the great Atlantic storms at their backs, sheltering in homesteads and glades, declaiming their intentions and dreams.  In the mysterious fusion – dated, according to the enthralling new account from Dr Peter Winter, as having happened in the mid eighteenth century – the Community was born.

But just how credible is Winter’s account? Does the Community really exist?  Indeed, has it ever existed?

There are times, for example, in the book entitled ‘Companion Vegetable Community’ where the idea of the Companion Vegetable Community appears solid and substantial: there are references and vignettes, documents and records, there are quotations and tables.  But then, just as you are beginning to be persuaded that CVC is real, or at least true, the narrative begins to fragment, the evidence becomes less persuasive, indeed the entire exercise begins to feel like a carefully curated score from Bill Drummond.

Is Winter, in fact, a prankster?  Or, if not, has he himself been profoundly misled?  Or even mis-led? Perhaps – we are forced to wonder – the vegetables were not so companionable after all?  In its darkest thickets, CVC suggests a Borgesian meta-dox: the author is himself the emergent property of a collective (think Luther Blissett) that is determined to mock its own inversion.  Take this passage, for example, which begins the chapter attempting to explain how the Community first began adopting vegetable iconography:

 “They like this Bolano bloke, the critics.  The unnamed girl moves slowly across our field of vision, carrying a blade.  “The weather forecast is due!”  Slavering and whining they preen for our attention, empty even of the will to see the emperor’s attire.  “Behold” the bird.  Regret the “sentence”.  Assert “the” significance.

 They say he’s a genius – and who are you not merely to disagree, but to be seen disagreeing?  It could cost you your /// no there is a // we interrupt this / -gull or some other seabird wheeling in a dark cry of / by which time the second armed guard had // insists that there is, indeed, a narrative struct- /// but by this time anyone with anything better to do has wandered off.”

Just who is being mocked here?

Meaning collapses completely in the middle chapters of the book – though it could be argued (though it is difficult to imagine by whom) that this is a literary isomorph for the difficult middle period of the Community itself.  Insofar as any of the material can be thought of as reliable, it seems that the Community spent several decades in the middle period of the nineteenth century engaged in a furious process of political self-actualisation.  Foreshadowing the wokeflake culture of the early twenty first century, Community members would “identify” variously as one musical notation or another – or, indeed, as one verse-form or another – and other members would seek either to acknowledge and embrace that identity or to oppress and cancel that identity.  Various rituals developed in which messages would be written and despatched at great speed, transmitted through the bleak ether on the strings of dark violas or the stanzas of molten couplets.

By the latter part of the nineteenth century – if any of this is to be believed – the full scope of possible oppression had been articulated.  Eschewing developments elsewhere (the emergence of Darwinism, the early psychoanalysts, the mechanistic metaphors of economics and so on) the Community determined that that the status of the vegetable was to be most exalted: the vegetable could not be oppressed; and neither could it be an oppressor.

Possession (and here there is, or was, or might have been, or one day will seem to have been a connection to Kropotkin's emerging anarchism) was also deemed unacceptable or impermissible or just generally not very nice, and so it came to pass (or so Dr Winter would have us believe) that all relations were cast in the spirit of companionship: all should walk alongside, neither in front or behind.  After half a century of argument, the lyrics, tones and lacunae were settled and named: the Companion Vegetable Community.

And so it might have stayed, forever, had not an acronomic accident unexpectedly brought the Community back into the light of day.  Who in that Community – self-described, eschewing oppression, asserting that all matter lives – could have been hoping that the security requirements of modern credit cards would presage the same three letters – CVC – behind which they had been quietly hiding for more than a hundred years?

All of them, perhaps!  For is it not possible that the conspiracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is itself a conspiracy to hide the machinations of the Companion Vegetable Community!  Winter is silent on this point: but this too, of course, could simply be part of the ouroboros of doubt and invention concatenated within this all too implausible evasion…

We are left, if not exhausted then despondent.  The CVC may or may not have existed.  The book about the Companion Vegetable Community, itself entitled Companion Vegetable Community, may or may not real. And, if it is, or isn’t, then it remains unclear as to who or what it mocks, and any purpose there may be in its mocking or not remains just as opaque.  Perhaps Winter – should he exist – aims at his own cancellation?  Perhaps, in his identifying as the member of a community that seek to have itself cancelled, Winter is an analogous annulment to the community about which he has written so much?

Perhaps, in the end, we must leave it to the words themselves: for, if nothing else, there are definitely markings on the screen, shapes that correspond with sound and meaning; and, even if the meaning is obscure, or even fraudulent, at least Winter went to the trouble of writing his own review and appending it as an annex to the text:

“According to legend, ‘Companion Vegetable Community’ began life as a touring song cycle in the Scottish Highlands.  The words and music developed separately: the former originating in the Celtic fringe, arcing through Brittany, Cornwall and the Atlantic coast of Ireland before reverberating into the demi-fjords of the Scottish western bays; the latter coming from the north and east, down from beyond the Arctic circle, across Scandinavia and the islands of the North Sea to oscillate through the granite coves of Scotland’s eastern flank..."