The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (2 page)

Have you ever seen a Punch and Judy show? I do not wish to assume that you have, for not many souls alive today know the show beyond the name. It smacks of something fearsome, unfamiliar and alien to those not in the ‘know.’ It is a puppet show. It is a very old show that tells a simple, thrilling and very dark tale. The puppets and style of the show renders the tale of multiple murders oddly amusing, hilarious even. Centuries of familiarization with the show have endeared it to the hearts of the British nation, where the tradition now firmly resides. Yet, journey with me now and learn that Punch is not only a creature found around the world, Punch IS the world.

That is what I now know.

‘I was on a knife edge of utter terror and hysterical excitement.’

Walter Wilkinson on his ‘First Puppet Show’

The Japanese art-form called Bunraku is an amazing invention. A life-size puppet is attached by extended rods to the puppeteer’s limbs. Thus, with puppeteer fully dressed in black robes and hoods, or hidden, the puppet exactly replicates whatever moves the human makes in the shadows. Puppet mimics man. Man mimics puppet. When the puppeteer is seen by the audience, the style is known as dezukai. I studied Bunraku with a group of master puppeteers half a lifetime ago in a half-arsed way. It took a real knack. My ungraceful movements irritated the director of the show and he made me step out of the line. I mention all of this because Bunraku reminds me of how decades of contorting the face as we mirror our hand-puppets gets to us. This does not mean that we become murderous puppets. We empathize with his fits and our muscles remember. There is something so arch in all that is bug-eyed, jutted of chin and ferociously hooked of snout.

Sometimes I have wished I could crush the entire world with my little stick. Crack so many skulls, like dominoes the brains slosh, a pink, bloody frothing tidal wave. A perverted Biblical flood, all bells and high-pitched cries, and the world returns dreamily to an earlier, primitive manifestation. Take this! Bonkety-Bonk. That’s the way to do it! Klonk! Klonk! No, No. Not anymore. I am repentant. I used to be a bad boy but have made a great effort to behave. I must, after what I have found out. After what I discovered, or was meant to find. After what I am about to share, you too will know, as never before, what is happening... now and forever. So keep reading, please. Do not cut to the chase. If you do, I will catch you.

Later, yes, leap in randomly to remind yourself how shocking the shock was, how demented and deliciously depraved was the main course. If the blacks are too black and white is too bright, sorry. That’s the way I do it. All will merge to a grey rainbow, ashes to ashes, sawdust to sawdust. Which makes as much sense as the newspaper notice: ‘Survivor Killed.’ Join me in this revelation of little grocery lists of marionette love, and awe-inspiring history. All jotted with stubby pencils saved in farmhouse jars. Things scholarly will be revealed: facts, trinkets, snippets, bon mots, Rabelaisian lists and fragments. The good and lost things which fabulate and Punchify our raindrop lives. How bittersweet, harrowing and strangely beauteous it all turned out to be. How scarlet and yellow. How sun-edged purple and palest emerald.

So let this short story, and my research data, wear you like a strange set of silken garments from another time. The fabric is woven at midnight from the silk of the Death’s Head moth. I will attempt to keep my ornate and flowery speech to a minimum, but this may be a difficult promise to keep. If I am a bit over dramatic, so be it. It has taken me this long to even attempt to fully become myself. Would you tell a bejeweled butterfly to change his colours as he emerged from his chrysalis?

We will attempt to present the facts in some form of logical order. I may have to present some of the details as footnotes, or as an appendix or two. I certainly hope that my publisher will allow me to augment this text with some photographs and illustrations of certain important objects which I have arranged to be made. To prove to you that what I write of is TRUE!

I softly pray the final recognition, the same fervor of delight, dismay and a similar soundless keening of sorrowful hilarity, bubbling joy without a source, of purple sunrises and rare, flower liquors, might fill your soul, Dear Reader, safe where you sit. It will be good for you. Dreadfully challenging events occur for dimly perceived reasons, I have come to believe.

It can take fifty years before we even begin to know how to run a puppet show, and why. I want to pull your strings. We want and have wanted so many things. Silly, wrathful little pebbles, carved and feverishly marching urns of humanity!

Why it has taken me this long to set it all down I do not know. Something was holding me back. Perhaps the End of the story had not yet Begun. Or was it that the Beginning had not yet Finished? Now I have no choice but to tell my tale, spill the beans. To let the sausage links unfurl methodically, show after show. Everybody is expecting it. The book of secrets has been announced, the ink has crossed an ocean and is being primed, the vellum sits quiet now, awaiting these words. I just hope I don’t leave something out. That would be almost as bad as putting too much in. Children in large, straw sun hats stand and watch. An old man watches, resting on his cane behind his back as he stands, chuckling, remembering the show from his youth and loving it all the more.

To write of Punch and Judy is not a thing to be taken lightly. The first temptation might be to attempt to write a realistic history of the show, a history filled with debate and controversy. Which aspect of the infinite variety of this eternal, anarchic passion play shall one choose to focus upon? The sheer delight and magic of the little play. The survival of the drama. The endurance of such a brutal and hilarious art-form. The darkness? The blood and guts? The terror of clowns, that old, reliably weird chestnut of leering, paint-crackled puppets and inanimate objects. I could go there, and have, but have discovered that there is so much more to Punch and Judy than the potential for fear and symbolic delving.

There is sheer, pure entertainment.

There is the curiosity within the mystery of the wicked, never-ending grin of the star of the show.

To write of Punch and Judy is a great responsibility. It is to attempt to do justice to an English national institution. It is to pay homage to humanity’s eternal obsession with humanlike dolls, totems and sacred puppets. To write of Punch and Judy is to pay tribute, to honor the countless generations of families and lone performers, who spent their entire lifetime perfecting their show, hand-making their puppets and booth and traveling, usually by foot, through soul-crushing weather, through unpopulated beaches; all drawn and dreaming in the scarlet, mad-eyed beacon of the gleam within the eye of Mr. Punch.

Mr. Punch!

Mr. Punch!

Obsession in many forms surrounds and inhabits the soul of Mr. Punch. To be a Punch and Judy performer means to be a Punch and Judy obsessed person. Like the young soul who first discovers the art of legerdemain, those who fall under the spell of the little wooden man are hopelessly, helplessly lost and found. It is as if we have been stung by the bee, that made honey from the weeping oak, that made the wood, that made the puppet. Within his ruffles and folds may be found the purpose of a lifetime and the secrets of eternity.

Who is this Mr. Punch and why are we dancing around him? If you are reading these words I suspect you are already a part of the show. Now you always will be! After all, when one is initiated into any sort of society, secret or otherwise, there are unwritten vows and obligations to be taken. We enter a partnership, you and I. I will confess if you will listen. Then I will pause and you may reflect. I will not be offended should you choose to fill in my blanks, scratch words between my own. Go on, make notes, irate comments and doodle away upon the slender borders next to my words. My own notebooks and journals are filled to the very gills with things I see in the woods and in stones. Oddly, they all have hooked noses and moonlike chins. Ha Ha.

To write of Punch and Judy is to dip a rare quill into an inkwell shaped like a clench-toothed, squat little jester. A hunchbacked imp who sits upon a silver platter, the scribe’s tiny vassal gargoyle, frozen where he frolicked.

Do you know of the legend of the Lincoln Imp? In the great Lincoln Cathedral, in Lincolnshire, England, there sits at the base of one of the spandrels of the triforium arches, a very strange and goblinesque figure. It is a devilish imp of stone which squats amidst carved stone foliage. He half-squats at the bottom of the v-shaped arch carving, one hoofed foot crossed over the other. Not at all a gargoyle, this demon—the size of a large cat—is one of the most frequently requested sites by visitors to the sacred place. Even pilgrims from across the ocean dash first to gaze upon and photograph the Lincoln Imp. He is quite cute and charming of design, in a bestial way. I sense that the sculptor secretly loved this creature from Hell, and into it put his full art and love. It may be a self-portrait (as are all Punch puppets.) The Lincoln Imp lives forever for, like Punch, it celebrates what some call the Id, the vast sea of mind, in a goody-two shoes world choking on repression and rules. Who is
anyone
to make up a rule, to tell you or I what to do? By whose command? FIE I say. The worshipful might pray and toss some coins in the box on the way out. Earrings, knit socks and tie-tacks all bearing the troublemaker from hell are available from the Cathedral Gift shop. They have all heard the story of the Passion of Christ, so the legend of this imp that flew up from Tartarus to wreak havoc upon God’s earthly domain fascinates beyond measure. The carvings of the quatrefoils and the Sub-deacon’s misericord are also worth a gander should you find yourself on a pilgrimage there. I was chewing some teaberry gum when I visited there. This chewing gum tends to quickly lose its flavor. One must add stick after stick, until you’ve built up a juiceless wad. This I took out of my mouth at the cathedral, I must confess. What possessed me to sculpt my used gum into a crude Punch face I do not know. Was it that wicked imp’s malign influence? Where I stuck that hook-nosed wad of gum I shall not write here, although I shall hint that I imagine it remains undiscovered.