Whithersoever

I went on a small journey in preparation for a bigger one. On Monday I fly out to Amsterdam, so this little trip to Loudwater was to change some pounds to euros at a bureau de change. I set off in walking boots, they’re best for my swollen toe-joint. I might have gone on foot via the Valley Path, but when I passed the bus station there was one leaving for Flackwell Heath, so I gladly leapt on. The warm embrace of a bus, its judder and roar, transports me to the Forties and Fifties of childhood, for in essence diesel buses have not changed, a surviving technology like fountain pens and notebooks. I used all three at once, for there I was scribbling away amongst the peaceful chattering of fellow-passengers, whose cadences hadn’t changed either in the last sixty years. One one side were two white-haired ladies; on the other an attentive mother with her bright toddler. I felt ageless.

I could see the driver from where I sat, an alert young man, apparently half-Chinese, with a pleasant countenance. At the next bus stop a couple with piercings got in. She showed her concession pass; he told the driver he’d forgotten to bring his. “But we’re together,” he added, implying they held their eligibility in common. I’m sure this was against the rules but the driver waved him on, putting the principle of pleasantness before profit. He was sure of himself, his skilful control of the vehicle, his responsibility for everyone’s safety. Thus I surprised myself: seeing as it were through a bus-driver’s eyes.

The toddler had been chattering to his mother, pointing things out right and left, but the motion and noise of the bus put him soon in a doze, and he slumped forward, his little head threatening to bump a metal side-rest. Mother stood up, put her hand in the way like a cushion. Then it was time to get off so I pushed the bell for the next stop. The mother followed, toddler on one arm, pushing buggy with the other, so I helped her lift it to the ground. I was ageless but caught myself feeling like a teenager. Flackwell Heath somehow has this effect on me, wiping out the years. I published a piece about this effect, you can find it dated March 3rd last year. (This blog sometimes acts as my journal, recording subjective states with the time and place of their occurrence.)

Once off the bus, I noted how good my boots felt, ready for a long trek, though it was only a mile to my current destination. It might be a good idea to wear them all the time in Amsterdam. I passed through a housing estate where the lilacs were all out: white, mauve and purple. I saw a couple of birds walking along the gutter, resembling young grouse, but I don’t know what they were really. It was pointless trying to take a photo, birds always flee at the sight of my camera. But soon I was through a gate and into the greenwoods, no forest but a narrow strip planted to drown the sound of cars on the motorway which cuts through these hills, like two fast rivers, with flotsam whizzing in both directions. I saw these roads with their cargo of cars through gaps in the fresh green leaves, through which they appeared bluish and blurry, their rasping roar offensive to the senses like a giant open sewer would be, but with sound rather than stink. I shuddered instinctively at what mankind has done, mankind meaning me of course, despite my detachment in that moment. Some things are necessary though offensive. I suffered this momentary twinge of distaste as anyone unaccustomed would suffer, seeing a production-line of animals on their way to slaughter. The whisperings of those fresh green leaves, the nobility of those tall beeches, were a lullaby to the soul, distancing me so far from ordinary consciousness that I saw the commonplace reality of intercity traffic as a kind of horror.

I looked for the square tunnel under the motorway, built for walkers on the line of a centuries-old footpath, but missed it. Instead I found a magnificent stairway built into the side of the hill from railway sleepers, with a proper handrail, from which I could descend under the motorway where it bridges some local roads. I had to cross one of these: the traffic was busy both ways, but I was in no hurry, looking to right and left, waiting for the moment when I could saunter across at my own pace. I’d never known traffic like this in the Forties and early Fifties. Behind me, though, were some houses in a country style of about 80 years old, above a steep bank, set back behind the road. I imagined their owners keeping large dogs, cooking on wood-fired cast-iron ranges, where they would dry out their boots and wet clothes. I’d never lived that way, but suddenly felt that I could have done, whatever that may mean. For I was in the kind of peaceful state where in moments I could imagine being someone else—that bus-driver, that mother, that toddler; or a house-owner I’d never met, living as I’ve never lived.

While I glanced to the right, still waiting to cross the road, my eye glimpsed a single hair, outside the frame of my glasses, quite blurred. I thus unexpectedly caught sight of me, at least a part of me big enough to carry my DNA, the blueprint of this body. DNA is a special thing. It encapsulates your uniqueness but also your membership of a species. From imagining myself to be someone else, I entered a different dimension, one of agelessness, where time, space and individuality were just constructs. Here was a human being, the thing I call “me”, but my consciousness had escaped it to become an observer, feeling a vast respect for that thing, and its membership of something vaster than itself. The experience lasted half a second at most, so I obviously didn’t think all these thoughts at the time. I probably had no time to think anything beyond “That’s my hair”, but I’m trying to convey that which had no words, for it was a very specific feeling. And the reason I’m writing this piece at all is for the sake of that feeling, to preserve it as a kind of reference point in life.

This sense of individuality we normally possess is a practical necessity like that roaring Leviathan of a motorway. It’s certainly not an illusion, but all the same it’s a kind of screen or curtain, hiding whatever lies behind. Sometimes, in a special case, we can see through a chink, and try to comprehend something bigger.

I wasn’t awestruck or anything. I crossed the road safely, thanks to that necessary instinct of looking after oneself. Above me was the motorway, a fine piece of civil engineering, a Leviathan in concrete. Then I caught sight of a cheeky graffito, carefully constructed in mosaic tiles. I looked for others, but it was a lone star.

Someone had taken the trouble to design a smiley star from mosaic tiles, and glue it to a pillar, for a reason, knowing that others would come along, and wonder what it was, and why. As I did. Maybe I found out too, from research on the Web I undertook later, but that’s neither here nor there.

How little we know: whence we came, whither we’re going. Whithersoever, we’re on our way. It’s nice sometimes to take a holiday from being yourself, and catch infinity in a moment.

Bach and Blackbird

I was driving to the supermarket in the rain. The CD player had come on, and was at no. 14 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, by the pianist Glenn Gould. It was the 1981 re-recording as opposed to his debut album in 1955 playing the same 31 pieces. This later version stands out for the dramatic variety of its tempi and its ultra-high fidelity: sufficient to capture his soft sing-along accompaniment (“groaning and crooning”), if you listen carefully.

There was a longish queue at the traffic light. It’s a point when you often receive the gift of someone else’s music, as the neighbourhood air vibrates in a mini-quake with its epicentre at a subwoofer fitted in the back of an otherwise undistinguished automobile. But the melody I heard behind Bach wasn’t Glenn Gould, nor was it someone else’s stereo. The rain was pelting down so I lowered my side window a mere inch, and then I caught it full blast: a liquid torrent of improvised notes. Above the newsagent’s shop I saw the singer: over the roof, above the chimneypot, atop a bent TV aerial, stood a blackbird. It’s been well attested, after measuring the decibels, that town birds sing louder than country birds, precisely so as to be heard through traffic noise.

For all that I love Bach, I found myself turning him off to listen to the live performance. The lights went green and we moved on but I left the CD off, realizing that if I had to choose between the banning of Bach and the extinction of our beloved native bird, I could not say “Bye, bye, Blackbird”. It would have to be “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come Bach no more”. Drastic; but just as your mind can hardly tell the truth, so can your body never lie.

“Bye, bye, Blackbird” was written by an American in 1926. I’ve heard on the Wiki-vine that it wasn’t really about a blackbird, but a prostitute planning to pack up the game, go back home to Mother:

Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye blackbird,
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet, so is she,
Bye bye Blackbird!

In any case the blackbird I’m talking about is not to be found in America. I’m sorry for those who haven’t had the opportunity to hear his voice. You can keep your “Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square” and even your “Ode to a nightingale”. Why not click here to discover this black bird with the yellow beak? Hit the black button on that page to play his song, before you come back here to continue reading. I like to keep the bedroom window open so to catch his street song from a chimneypot or telegraph pole in the hour before dawn. Except Friday nights, when my own species may stagger home at any ungodly hour, and never mind who knows it. The blackbird’s improvisations never repeat themselves, and he pauses at the end of each phrase, to listen for the reply of any other within earshot, and it’s like two musicians jamming.

Do we in literature or lyric find worthy homage to the musical inventions of this fabulous (yet not endangered) bird? We do. He has inspired the best description of an infatuation in 20th-century literature, in the novel Wolf Solent, by John Cowper Powys (1929). The eponymous hero, a highly-educated young gentleman, is smitten with Gerda Torp, beauty of the village, daughter of the local stone-cutter, who woos him with birdsong. I’ll try and pull together the relevant threads that span a hundred close-packed pages.

Solent first goes to the house of Mr Torp on his employer’s business, to order a headstone for a grave. He’s struck by Gerda’s looks and for her part she gave him a glance that resembled the sudden trembling of a white-lilac branch, heavy with rain and sweetness. He makes a return visit: the parents leave them alone together, shy and silent, till he breaks the ice with a pick-up line she would not have heard from other boys in the village: “I suppose you’ve often been told that you’re as lovely as the girl who was the cause of the Trojan War?” The girl’s passivity reminds him of a great unpicked white phlox in a sun-warmed garden. He suggests a stroll and they escape unnoticed from the house, off to the meadows and copses surrounding the village. She gives him the slip in the gathering dusk, fails to answer his echoing cries. All he hears is a blackbird, in the dark twilight of hazel stems. . . . It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart’s tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery. But then he realizes instantaneously by a kind of sudden absolute knowledge, like a slap in the face . . . that Gerda was the blackbird! For she knew a wonderful way to whistle, in imitation of its song.

They meet again, another twilight. Wolf wants to lead Gerda to a hut deep in the woods, whose floor is softly furnished with dry bracken. She lightly resists: “Not now,” she said. “Let’s talk.” For she is the offered bait, and marriage is the trap. All it will take is a little manoeuvring. Now she says:

“Did you like me directly you saw me, that day in my house?” He doesn’t want to talk about Helen of Troy again to this simple girl so he replies, “I liked you best when you were whistling to me.”

I should say that Wolf has already become entangled with another. She’s Christie Malakite. Her face has not launched a thousand ships. She’s the daughter of a widowed bookseller, living with him in a seemingly unnatural relationship. But she’s an intellectual equal to Wolf, and fascinates him profoundly. Despite this, despite Gerda’s existing boyfriend—grocer’s boy Bob Weevil—the mismatched pair Wolf and Gerda tie the knot and live in wedded bliss for at least six weeks.

Which proves what mischief may come from mixing up the rain-drenched white lilac, the white phlox in a sun-warmed garden, and the blackbird’s song.

Glenn Gould on a bench in Toronto, a photo by askinimages on Flickr.

Film Noir

One of the most stylish and effective films I’ve recently seen is The Man Who Wasn’t There, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Set in 1949, it tells the story of Ed Crane, a small-town barber, who doesn’t enjoy his job, discovers his best friend has made him a cuckold, yet faces life with an eerie impassivity.

One day he cuts the hair of a travelling salesman, whose dodgy toupee, sales pitch & general demeanour would raise the suspicions of the average person, but Crane is not average. He convinces himself that the salesman’s proposition is a good one. Like a trusting child, he’s eager to buy into a new-fangled technology, dry cleaning, for the measly sum of $10,000. Now, how can he get his hands on that kind of money? He thinks of a way. This is where things start to go inexorably, inextricably and ineffugibly downhill, in the manner of a Greek tragedy.

Except that the genre is known as Film Noir. Instead of the unities of time, place and action, as in Greek drama, the classic Noir format involves a lot of cigarette-smoking; a major police investigation with various false trails and little real progress; a rugged hero who usually shows little emotion, but whose facial bone-structure shows up well in studio lighting;—and black & white photography.

Amongst the bonus features on the DVD version of The Man Who Wasn’t There you find an interview with the cinematographer Roger Deakins, who waxes lyrical about black-&-white. He lists a number of films which have influenced him, including In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Humphrey Bogart. So I watched that too. It’s set in Hollywood, where Bogart plays a much sought-after screenwriter, whose artistic temperament can sometimes flare up in violence. Naturally there is lots of cigarette-smoking. It becomes a major prop in the foreplay of seduction—placing a fresh-lighted cigarette in the young lady’s mouth, for instance. Studio lighting contributes to showing Bogart at his most handsome, and, at certain points in the plot, his most ugly. The dénouement depends on the bumbling police investigation reaching its conclusion too late; failing to prevent the tragedy careering headlong towards its ineffugible* conclusion.

Now we cut to some on-location stills, in the Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire, England. On several Spring days, I’ve been out walking, amidst April showers, taking my new camera along. It is lovely to be surrounded by nature, embedded in its substance and depth. Every picture I snapped was gorgeous with fresh greens, but portrayed something flat and disappointing. So on a hunch I tried black-and-white.

Click here, or the picture above, for a Flickr-hosted slide show†.

Why does black-and-white, “grayscale” to be precise, give a better sense of depth? What makes it more exciting, crisper? Is it merely my imagination? Well, as for the latter, without imagination there is no seeing at all. “I Am a Camera”, said Christopher Isherwood, but he lied for poetic effect. We are better than the camera. We must not surrender to its offer of colourful cornucopias. The more realistic the artificial representation appears, the more we let imagination doze, and pretend we are seeing the real thing. Paradoxically, the stylized artificiality of Film Noir frees the imagination and touches our soul; whereas the realism of colour movies, especially in 3D as in the recent conversion of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), keeps the imagination shackled and earthbound, in mechanical fear and primitive wonder.

You may disagree, and if you do, Variety Magazine is on your side; but to me, less is more.
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* Ineffugible: my new favourite word, from Rupert Brooke. See comment #21 on previous post.

† When running the slide show it’s best to click Options and make sure the three square boxes are unchecked. You can click a round box to select slow, medium or fast.

Binding a joy

Photo by Vincent: click to enlarge










He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

This verse of William Blake is never far from me, internalised, imprinted upon my unconscious, and a work in progress. There is joy in being alive; breathing fresh air; having an intact functioning body; being usually not oppressed by worry and misfortune; being in community with my own species and with all of Nature, I mean the rest of Nature, for I am of a piece with it, a fully-working part of a continuum, a functioning whole. My nature is to touch joy and cherish it, take it to my bosom. Still, it’s not enough. There is the urge to capture and preserve this joy, to share it, to find words to preserve its form and colour for posterity. As if it wasn’t going to last, as if I should store up the surplus grain in case of lean years to come; in case somehow there is a shortage of this joy. Well, everyone thinks there is a shortage. The evidence is everywhere, like a drought; interspersed with the odd flash flood.

I’m pretty sure that when Blake wrote the words, he too was struggling with the meaning of what he said. As a poet, he wanted to take that joy, both its presence and its absence, and fix it, bottle it, like essential oils fixed within a perfume. That’s what poets do. And if ever a poet glimpsed eternity’s sunrise, and said which way to look for it, and felt the pain of what stands in the way, in the heart of men, in society, in the cheapening of humanity brought by the industrial revolution—William B was in that number.

How do you bind to yourself a joy? We all know the materialistic ways: the sweat of your brow, the cunning of your brain accumulated into money and property. We give thanks for these, for human life is fragile. We know all the traps. But I like to give those lines the most literal reading possible. When I try to capture the image of a butterfly or bird, the moment I expose my camera lens in its direction, it flies off. The photo above was an exception. Insects are sluggish in cool weather. This one wanted to rest its wings on the brick wall, was very reluctant to move. But why would I want to photograph these winged creatures anyway? I can get any number of such pictures on the Net. Maybe it’s a displacement of the hunting instinct. Is this “binding to yourself a joy”?

I do normally take a camera when I go on a walking trip, but most important is a voice recorder, so I can capture as best I can any sensation, feeling or thought. It’s so difficult, though. The sum total of all the inputs, the complete specification of my sense of now, comes all jumbled together in a second; and it cannot be held static and coded into words, because the next second something else happens. Why do I want to codify it into words anyhow? Well, words are more versatile, quicker and easier to learn than painting in water-colours for example. The camera never even captures what I see with these two eyes. All it does is jog the memory, like one’s soliloquy into a voice recorder. That little device is useful for birdsong, too. They’re all souvenirs, little reminders of the atmosphere to take away, and write about, and leave as illegible scrawls in my notebook, abandoned.

I guess what I’m talking about is an important part of the poet’s skill-set. Wordsworth wrote about it in quite a technical fashion: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity”. Perhaps he returned from his outings in the Lake District with little mementoes, such as a freshly picked wildflower: “A violet by a mossy stone, Half hidden from the eye, Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky”. Or he would take along a notebook and pen: not easy, for the fountain-pen had not been invented, and even the steel nib was scarcely known. Perhaps he used a pencil. Graphite was first discovered in the Lake District. I found a link here to a poem he scratched with a slate pencil on a stone: STRANGER! this hillock of mis-shapen stones Is not a Ruin spared or made by time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st,
etc etc; but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his normal modus operandi.

What really blew my mind in the poetic business of binding to oneself a joy, or possibly kissing it as it flies, but at any rate capturing it in words forever, was a prose piece by the English poet Rupert Brooke, whose name is instantly linked with his sonnet “The Soldier”, which begins If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. He did in fact die in a foreign field, aged 27, of an infected mosquito bite, and was buried in an olive grove on his way to fight in Gallipoli, in 1915.

Two years earlier, he took a trip to Canada and saw the Niagara Falls, writing about them in letters sent to the Westminster Gazette, from which I wrest the following excerpt:

Sit close down by it, and you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance, the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot on towards the verge.

But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of disaster the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it, and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and houses, and so vanishes.

When I read the piece, it first made me desire to see the Falls for myself. But then, such was the excellence of his description, just under 2000 words, that it had precisely the opposite effect. I didn’t want to see them at all! For if I did, I’m sure I’d come away with less than he witnessed, feel less than the way his words moved me, from beyond the grave.

And that’s the kind of writing that I envy, that’s what puts me in awe. How he managed to reconstruct the experience. And Fernando Pessoa—coming back to him at last after the botched attempt of my previous post—says that it’s a tricky business to make his reader feel what he felt. If you try to say straight what you feel, if you try to achieve a “close fit” between your experience and your description, you won’t get it across. Your own inner experience is so unique to you, that no one else could feel what you feel in the same terms. So you have to convey it by some analogy or metaphor that your reader will comfortably recognize. As he’s fond of saying, the only way to tell the truth is to lie.

Hats off to Rupert Brooke, he wasn’t just a pretty face; and Wordsworth, and Blake, all the dead poets. And what about you and me?