Crowley: A Rotten Tooth?

Heroin, opium, ether and anhalonium addiction; deportation from France and Sicily; anti-Semitism; bankruptcy; bestiality; gonorrhea; sadomasochistic tendencies; Buddhism; a family brewing business; police investigations; scarlet women and mountaineering: Aleister Crowley wasn’t a bad climber. Indeed some would argue, his interest in chess and mountaineering were his only redeeming features.

Crowley climbed in British mountains, in the Alps and in the Himalayas… and at Eastbourne, where he was a real pioneer – making ‘epic’ first ascents of routes he named, Devils Chimney, Crowley’s Crack, The Needle, and The Tooth - on the White cliffs of Beachy Head. It’s clear that he had a special affection for chalk.

This is Crowley:

“The fantastic beauty of the cliffs of Beachy Head can never be understood by anyone who has not grappled with them… my association with the Head possesses a charm, which I have never known in any other district of England…I had the particularly delightful feeling of complete originality…On Beachy Head I was the only one – I had invented an entirely new branch (bristle even; read on!) of the sport.”

A soldier attempting to climb Beachy Head with a bicycle, 1898.

His account of actual routes on the Head (in East Sussex, remember) was contributed by some strange quirk of choice to the Scottish Mountaineering club Journal. With his friend Gregor Grant he climbed The Tooth and The Needle - the fabulous pinnacles of the Devil’s Chimney - on two weekends in July 1894.

Here's The Tooth, but spot the climber?

And here’s The Great Beast again:

After carefully reconnoitering The Needle, which lay beyond, and pronouncing it impossible… we then proceeded to do The Tooth, the summit of which, towered above me in all its rottenness. On this Grant  ‘fixed himself’- a humorous term we sometimes employ – and I went down the ridge into the Gash, ‘fixed myself', and began my steps…Five times I tried to cross The Gash, but with no decent handhold it is hardly to be expected that one can pull one’s self up to a vertical wall. One chance however, remained. I scooped a hole (in the soft chalk) out in the east face, inserted my chin and hauled. I had not shaved for a day or two, so was practically enjoying the advantages of face-spikes”. With this maneuver, Crowley not only avoided a close shave, he invented a new piece of climbing equipment: the chin-crampon.

The Needle was conquered. However, as it is not ‘built for two’ (and as everybody knows: you should never share needles), Crowley’s companion, much to his disappointment, had to stay on The Tooth.

Crowley’s avoiding a close shave through being unshaven reminds me of the time Baron Munchausen had to single-handedly get himself out of a swamp. The Baron had fallen into a swamp – was literally, up to his neck in it and sinking fast. But this fast sinking initiated some fast thinking. Munchausen lifted himself out of the swamp - single handedly - by pulling his own hair.

There’s also a Munchausen tale about a whale: a whale who swallowed an anchor and died of a swollen tongue. And don’t giant needles harpoon whales? And how about all those photographs in Boys Own books: of smiling men, sitting on teeth, in the jaws of a dead leviathan?

And thank goodness ‘floating whale theatres’ were never launched. The absurd idea (coinciding with Jarry’s altogether different concept of Theatre of the Absurd) was proposed at the Buffalo fair of 1901 – about the time Crowley was clinging on, by bristled chin, to a tooth on Beachy Head. If the floating whale theatre had been performing off the South Coast of England, and Crowley had fallen, the two great beasts might have met.  What a sublime thought: one Great Beast falling off a tooth, only to fall into the teeth of another great beast. 

Frozen Tune

I can see myself frozen forever in her laughter-lines; my arse-flier morphs into the arse emerging from her cheek on the album cover: my backside's her sunny-side. Very Bosse-de-Nage (Dr Faustroll’s buttock-faced baboon). But what’s the connection between cockpit and trumpet?

I’ll post my flier in the Bye Bye Blues album-cover and take it to Oxfam, leave it (the buttock-face connection) for someone else to discover.

I used to play in a brass band - played tenor horn. When it was this cold (minus 14 last night!) you’re spit – the spit that invariably collects in the instrument’s labyrinth of pipes - would make a terrible rattling noise when you played. You’d have a horrible job, would have to unscrew the valves and drain your horn of spit. I must have secreted gallons of spit on war memorials; we played around the war memorial on Armistice Day, at Christmas and for Lent. Led a double-life as a teenager; spent most of my spare time in the bandstand in the park; half the time in a blue uniform, blowing down a tube; the other half (when the band had gone), inhaling glue from a plastic bag, with a different band of friends. In the brass band I played the tenor horn, but in the school orchestra, I played the French horn. The strangest thing about the French horn, you play it with your fist thrust in the opening of the instrument: you become (feel) ‘part horn’. But my French horn also became ‘part me’.

When I wasn’t in the bandstand, blowing octaves or inhaling adhesives, I was out climbing on the rocks - jamming my fists in cracks; or, as you can see from the ICA flier, jamming my whole body into cracks.  One of the effects of hand-jamming is a build-up of calluses.

When playing the horn I got into the habit (a nervous habit - exams, exams!) of picking the calluses off the palm of my hand - my hidden-hand stuffed inside the horn; eventually the calluses would become detached and get eaten by the horn. If I inhaled, as occasionally happens, I'd swallow my own calluses: and eating yourself is wrong! Worse still, the horn was the property of the school, and horns live a long time; some poor child (generations of children since) could well have eaten my dead skin. Imagine the headlines: “Child horn prodigy chokes on hand-callus – school closed – horn operated on - genetic fingerprints taken – DNA tests ongoing – the police will find their man”.

Frozen tune: Baron Munchausen has a good horn story. He’s traveling by coach and horses (the post coach) through Russia, it's a freezing winter’s night: I travelled post, and finding myself in a narrow lane, bid the postillion give a signal with his horn, that other travelers might not meet us in the narrow passage. He blew with all his might; but his endeavors were in vain, he could not make the horn sound, which was unaccountable, and rather unfortunate, for soon after we found ourselves in the presence of another coach coming the other way… After we arrived at the inn my postillion and I refreshed ourselves: he hung his horn on a peg near the kitchen fire; I sat on the other side. Suddenly we heard a tereng! tereng! teng! teng! We looked round, and now found the reason why the postillion had not been able to sound his horn; his tunes were frozen up in the horn, and came out now by thawing, plain enough, and much to the credit of the driver; so that the honest fellow entertained us for some time with a variety of tunes, without putting his mouth to the horn-"The King of Prussia's March," "Over the Hill and over the Dale," with many other favorite tunes; at length the thawing entertainment concluded, as I shall this short account of my Russian travels.