The Road

Warning: contains spoilers

I’ve not read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but last year I was introduced to his work. I read Outer Dark, which I’ve written about before, and Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is an extraordinary, unrelenting descent into the kind of temporal hell that the fortunate amongst us will only ever fear, never experience. Its biblical language, sense of creation being somehow corrupt at root – a kind of inverted gnosticism – is operatic and visceral; its depictions of savagery are unflinching.

I am easily frightened by post-apocalyptic movies. The first hour of 28 Days Later, Day of the Triffids, the parts of Threads I managed to sit through, even scenes in I Am Legend leave me nervous, claustrophobic and aware of the vast, overpopulated urban space surrounding me. I remember, years ago, alone and drunk, watching Things To Come late one night and feverishly wondering where I could get my hands on a firearm.

So, when a friend asked me if I wanted to see the film of The Road, I said yes – with reservations. Post-apocalyptic McCarthy? Did I want to start the weekend preoccupied with planning escape routes from Clapham or wondering how best to transport water on foot? As another friend told me this week: “Since I read The Road I keep a store of food and supplies in my house. And so do three other people I know.”

Strange, then, that I spent the film in a growing state of relief that nothing truly frightening was going to happen and – at the same time – increasingly disappointed that the film seemed to have demurred from taking me where I was so afraid to go. What were the problems?

Certainly not Viggo Mortensen, who gives the kind of egoless, intense and self-eviscerating performance that seems his default level of commitment to any project. I noted several close-ups of his dirty, stubbed fingernails – almost identical to several shots of his hands in Lord of the Rings; as if the filmmakers are saying: ‘Look, this guy’s not Hollywood. He gets his fingernails dirty. His fingernails!’ Top marks to Viggo.

And a mature, sad performance from Kodi Smit-McPhee as Viggo’s son, a character who presents the first problems. The child has been, we’re told, born into the apocalypse. He knows nothing but scavenging, grief and hunger. Yet he approaches each new threat with the whimpering surprise of a boy in Chelsea who just got addressed by a poor man through the open window of his mother’s parked SUV. This isn’t Smit-McPhee’s fault, but the screenplay seems not to account for the adaptability, the survival instinct in children. The boy never runs from danger but has to be dragged or carried by Viggo. If I was a nine-year-old apocalypse boy, I think I’d know how and when to run. When one reads of children living in horror – from Cockney mudlarks to child soldiers, shock and timidity are not their defining characteristics.

Another factor that seemed to soften the horror is the soundtrack. The kind of melancholy plinky-plonk piano one associates with films about people with perfect teeth coming to terms with things. It soothes, insists that our core experience of the film should not be despair, but a kind of mellow reflectiveness. When the credits rolled and I saw the soundtrack was by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, I was stunned. Cave should have left his Boatman’s piano at home and invited the Grinderman over for a bathtub gin and axe party.

The landscapes, the vistas of annihilation, are stunning, beautiful in a way that robs them of misery: one admires the desolation. But the filmmakers have chosen to wash the visuals with the kind of grey-sepia filters that have been popular for too long now. At times I felt I was watching the world’s longest, most depressing Guinness commercial: ‘he pushes a shopping trolley, it’s what he does…tick follows tick follows tock’. That the early flashback scenes to Viggo and wife Charlize Theron are coloured like an advert for some meadow-smelling detergent suggests that the apocalypse was nothing more than a re-branding exercise on the part of some capricious celestial account manager.

And one thing an audience member can guarantee is this: a film that gets funding in Hollywood will not feature the dismemberment and consumption of a brave little boy whose dad happens to be Aragorn, Son of Arathorn. Some Mad Max-styled Judge Holden would not appear, dandle him on his knee then cut his throat (the boy, not Viggo). If they died, it would be nobly. And so it turns out. Viggo dies his old viking’s death at the sea’s edge (a beautiful ruin of an ocean, sludge grey with no hope of seeing sky. Just like Norfolk, which makes me happy). The boy mourns and then…there’s a man coming! It’s probably a cannibal. No, it’s Guy Pierce. With his wife and two children. And a friggin’ dog. One with sad eyes and floppy ears: The only sacred form of life in Hollywood. Do they kill the boy and eat him, fuel for the hopeless road? Do they sadly explain that food is already scarce enough without another mouth to feed and leave him there alone? I’m not going to spoil it.

2.30AM.

I’m lying in bed, awake. I’ve worked out that, if we headed south, then north east around London, rather than trying to head through the city, it would be the safest route. Sachets of porridge are lightest to carry but we would have to find water as we moved. A friend of mine used to be in the army. He lives close. We should head for his house first then to Norfolk, where I know the land…

More new-fangled than an ape…

That the internet is a singularly wonderful thing was again proven for me when I renewed contact with a schoolfriend I’ve not seen for almost twenty years. Of course, this happens all the time. That’s what Facebook’s for, who cares, etc…

Ah, yes, but this friend has a secret identity.  He is Organ Monkeys. And he sounds like this:

ORGAN MONKEYS

I love Beefheart. I once spent several weeks only listening to Trout Mask Replica. I wanted it to become so familiar that it would become my default setting for ‘normal’ music and thereby transform every subsequent auditory experience into some avant-garde trip. I love Funkadelic, the squelchy bass and keys, the exuberance and, like Beefheart, the courageous wisdom that humour can deliver a serious message. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense changed my life when I was 13, replacing any latent idea of becoming an author with dreams of jerking around in a big suit with Bernie Worrell getting up on his bad thing behind me. I also love Ivor Cutler, the gnomic (and gnomish) surrealism, the darkly child-like wordplay and the concision of his vision. Organ Monkeys, I think, shows all these qualities and (Joe, correct me on this if I’m wrong), he plays it all himself.

Further, he builds banjos. I urge you to visit his site and learn of his quest. Here’s an appetiser:

I looked for an old guitar. I needed one which was really really bad. Eventually I saw a white acoustic hanging on a guitar shop wall. “METALLICA” was stencilled in tiny writing on the body…

The guitar shop guy didn’t want to sell it to me as it was so bad…I said “it’s OK” in Japanese and did my best to mime sawing motions with sound effects. He looked a little bit shocked.

Read more here

Jibbs McAllister – Lost Master of the Zydeco Fiddle

For much of the material in this essay I am indebted to online musicologist ‘Sean’, who also brought Jibbs McCallister to my attention.

In October 1972, 37 years to the day last week, a temporary worker brought in to the Yazoo offices to catalogue a job-lot of donated shellac sides failed to extinguish a cigarette correctly and, in what has now become known as the Great ’72 Barn Fire (although it was no barn but a lock-up in the West Village), an entire department of Yazoo’s archive was destroyed. It could have been worse, or so many have observed. Once the smoke cleared, almost all the destroyed records came from the section named ‘Problematic’. These were the scratched records, the poor performances by forgotten jug and hoss-tube artists, the discs without labels and, famously, a near-complete set of White Star shellacs by Jibbs McCallister. Rumours persist that this was no accident.

Jibbs who?

Exactly. McCallister is as forgotten today as he was notorious in his time. In the categorisation frenzy of the 60s folk revival Jibbs was most commonly referred to as a Zydeco fiddle player but even this apparently simple piece of information crumbles when examined. The reference originates from a taped interview with folklorist Stuart Palmer. Palmer asks Jibbs what style he plays and Jibbs, slurring, apparently replies ‘Zydeco fiddle’ but recent digital analysis has suggested he may have said ‘psycho fiddle’ or even ‘zygote feel’ although the latter theory has few adherents within professional studies (Greil Marcus excepted).

Jibbs claimed variously to have been born in Peu Menteur, Croix Saint Nulle-part and Beletteville in Louisiana. His race was never successfully established and Jibbs appears to have adjusted his mannerisms according to his audience or in relation to the various legal and criminal representatives that dogged his travels. His only recorded reference to race is a claim that he was ‘one of them injuns’. In what is believed to be the earliest representation of Jibbs, in an etching submitted as evidence in a court case by illustrator Esau Mallory titled ‘The Last Time I Saw My Good Hound, Nutmeg, Alive, Jibbs seems unambiguously Caucasian although this may be due to the conventions of the time. The etching is reproduced above.

What is agreed upon is that Jibbs developed an extraordinary style and idiosyncratic fingering, visible on a post-war amateur film from Jukin’ Sam’s. Or so goes the received wisdom. True, Jibbs developed some ingenious techniques and posterity has been kind and attributed this to the desire for musical innovation but the fact is that Jibbs wanted to unsettle his rivals. The fingering was altered to confuse and he would detune by a quarter-tone so that anyone trying to play along would sound incompetent

For this reason, Jibbs’s influence has not been wide. Those of his contemporaries who were not put off by these strategies were often physically threatened. In a non-released cut from his only Library of Congress session, Jibbs breaks off from the middle section to Sweet Lindy Be My Undertaker, shouting ‘don’t be peepin’ at my goddamn fingers,’ to John Lomax. The sound of scuffling follows.

This unfortunate incident introduces perhaps the biggest reason for McCallister’s historical occlusion. He was renowned for what Lomax would later describe as ‘a belligerent, drunken lasciviousness and avariciousness that almost deterred one from the charm of his fiddling’. There were ugly fights over billing at Newport ’64 where, as Dave Van Ronck observed, ‘It’s a brave man who pisses in Dock Boggs’s banjo’.

In an extended version of the Jukin’ Sam’s film currently in private hands, Jibbs – despite the darkness of the venue and his obvious state of inebriation – appears to be manipulating his instrument in a manner that perhaps renders it spiritually unsuitable for the following number, Lord, Let the Jesus Guide Me. The visual evidence is backed by Stonehand Pikes who confirmed that Jibbs had indeed developed a variant on the ‘play it with your teeth’ trick in another case of obnoxious one-upmanship; Eck Dunford and he had been drinking but fell out over a woman. Eck was chatting to the lady after the dance when Jibbs barged over and allegedly shouted ‘forget the lily-boy. I can play Wake Up Jacob with my pecker’.  As Sean observes:

“Jibbs was so bawdy he made Big Joe Turner’s metaphors of balls and lemons look like Sunday morning programming. Evidenced by his versions of “Pinochle Bar-B-Que” and “Chitlins and Gravy”. Of course between the Yazoo fire and the ‘59 Baton Rouge First Baptist lewd record and book burning, these recordings are now as rare as a Quarrymen acetate.”

Despite his extraordinary talent, Jibbs was perhaps the only old-time musician to have bad blood with John Lomax. Jibbs misunderstood the purpose of the Library of Congress recordings and, having railroaded several hundred miles, arrived on Lomax’s doorstep clutching a .34 and demanding money. There was an altercation during which, allegedly, Gibbs grabbed a young Alan Lomax by the hair. Had Lead Belly not intervened, events could have become truly violent. Subsequently, during the early 60s folk revival, Alan actively opposed the search for Jibbs, apparently doctoring Carl Bleikwitz’s maps and muttering that Jibbs was ‘one motherfucker who should never be rediscovered’.

But there also rumours of a Robert Johnson-style unholy pact. Stonehand Pikes again, from a 1940 Lomax interview:

‘Well, ev’yone knowed Jibbs can’t hardly play and he can’t get no brown, black nor high yellow neither so he goes down to the crossroads like they says to do but the crossroads, way he telt it, was full of banjy players, so he walks along a little way and there sure nuff is an old gentleman sitting by the track with a fiddle. So Jibbs offers the feller a share of the heat in his pocket but clobbers his head instead an’ runs off with the fiddle. Fine one. And from that day he played fine, too.’

Lomax: ‘Do you think…did Jibbs think…was that man he saw the devil?’

Pikes: ‘Was he what? No, man. Just some poor sunvabitch. Jibbs was a asshole.’

Still, when asked why he excluded Jibbs’s definitive recording, a racially-divisive version of Train on the Island, from his Anthology of American Folk Music, the esoterically-minded Harry Smith claimed that Jibbs was ‘numerologically corrupting’.

Even Jibbs’s death is mysterious. The last documentation of his life is an arrest record from 1968 for ‘attempting harm upon a fellow street musician with a modified musical instrument, possibly a violin’. One rumour suggests that he ended his own life accidentally, a victim of E-string related autoasphyxiation. I heard another version at a Greil Marcus symposium. Marcus can be very obtuse but I think it had something to do with bathtub gin and a Confederate ghost.

What happened

I posted this on October 2nd, in a rather distracted state. I may remove or edit it but will let it stand as it is for the time being.

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Just over two hours ago I was sitting on the terrace that overlooks the hundred-metre gorge of Ronda, eating supper with my beloved and her mother. We had been watching a family of wild dogs that seems to live amongst the cacti on a narrow ledge high on the cliff. A mother and perhaps eight pups, they troop in a line along ledges that are barely more than kerbs. We watched a wide-winged bird of prey circling above, spooking the swallows, or smugly gliding lower, frightening a giant flock of rock pigeons from their cliff face roost. We’ve noted the cycle of life, here, something one rarely notes in London. Now it’s October, clusters of starlings have begun to swerve back and forth across the gorge, between old and new Ronda. There are red-beaked crows that slide past in cool formation, dipping with the synchronicity of an aerial display.

The tourists, too, have their cycles. They flock in the morning across the bridge, as the first buses arrive, but lessen as the evening comes in. As we ate there were fewer, but still a steady stream, some stunned mid-wander by the vast, grey-scale mountains and the dizzying distance between the bridge and rocks and stream below. They crowd, lean over, take photos. One woman seemed, although it couldn’t be right, to be crouched atop the grille that curves outwards so that tourists can see straight down, arms out behind her like a diver. Then she jumped.

A short, high squeak, like someone leaping into a swimming pool that’s too cold, and then she was out of sight.

I’ve given a statement from the police station, over the phone to a woman who spoke English. Whilst waiting for my turn in the interview room I searched my tiny Spanish guide for the words to describe what I’d seen. I drew diagrams, with lines of sight and possible distances. They didn’t need them so I’ve brought them home, folded, to open by accident one day. My statement is useless, I saw nothing but a distant, nameless figure disappear. Now, it’s official.

Walking back, I met our landlord’s wife, who lives on the floor below. She had her three-month old baby with her, tiny, in a high-wheeled carriage. I helped her carry the child to her door then said good night.

It’s amazing how many clichés run through your head when you see something like that. I don’t know if I should write about this but, with her public death, this woman has sent little ripples through the lives of everyone who saw her jump. She wanted to be seen.

Give me the glass, and therein will I read…

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while; how to frame and explain what seems a rather esoteric idea. It goes something like this…

If I had been born in the Netherlands during its Golden Age, if I had studied painting and produced work for the exploding population of middle-class merchants seeking work of less religious and more domestic themes, and if I had I been a genius, I could have painted something like Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing. I could never have painted Vermeer’s Wine Glass.

If I had been developing television series for the BBC in the 1980s – and had been hugely talented – I might have come up with something like the Singing Detective; I would not have been able to conceive Smiley’s People…

I glimpse in these first works, dim and incomplete, qualities that are deeply and personally felt, superior reproductions of my own semi-conscious preoccupations and sense-tones: I see aspects of myself expressed better than I could ever say them.

And this is not the same thing as admiration or enjoyment, or even quality. I stand stunned before the works of Proust, Fra Fillippo Lippi, Miles Davis, as acts of skill, as vast intellectual and emotional accomplishments, yet I do not encounter myself in their works, I am located outside the perimeter, gaping in. Passages of HP Lovecraft, on the other hand, echo to me the histrionics of my own prose, and sometimes even my gloomier suspicions about the world. It unnerves to identify more with the tormented Rhode Island racist than with, say, a genius such as Joyce.

We don’t choose the works in which we recognise ourselves (I say we, assuming that others may have the same eerie experience). A work resonates with private truth or it does not. In Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum – the film when I was a child, the book as an adult – I found what seemed the perfect ensign for how I imagined the best my fiction could aspire to, not because it was the best I’d ever read but because I sensed, radiating through it as a kind of palimpsest, qualities that felt intimately familiar. For the good and bad.

There are some geniuses that can produce both kinds of work: King Lear, for me, reads like my darkest, most pagan inner voice speaking direct, human truth. Julius Caesar, whilst magnificent, seems beamed from another thought-world entirely. Titian and Dylan also achieve this, I think.

These thoughts are instinctual and inconclusive; could we each amass a tribe of these avatars, on a separate shelf, and say ‘over there is the great work, but here is the work – good and bad – that explains me to myself’? And if you could do that, would you show anyone, or would you box them in the cellar?

The naming of cats is a difficult matter…

Warning: this post contains dewy reminiscence and less-than-critical personal analysis

There is a window to the right of where I sit. Just below there, I can see a small sun terrace belonging to the neighbours on the floor below. But beyond that things fall away for another hundred metres into a gorge; two plateaus are linked by the Puente Nuevo, which leashes Ronda’s old town to the new. The old town – which perches opposite me across the gorge, is one of Spain’s oldest settlements. There are signs of habitation going back to 2,500BC. The architecture is a palimpsest of Moorish, Counter Reformation and modern tourism. Beyond the town the mountains, currently paled in a morning haze quite unlike the unfiltered all-day sunshine I had expected.

I’m not sure why I’ve included this information, except maybe to illustrate that I’m far from home, which may explain one of my current preoccupations.

We travelled here from Weeze airport near Düsseldorf, just across the border from the Netherlands. It was a quick flight but, coming after several weeks of sofa-surfing with friends and family, we caught the bus from Seville airport to the centre of town with a sense of newly-relaxed exhalation. I remember the moment precisely; we had passed through the rotating door of the budget hotel we were to occupy for the night before moving on to Ronda and, smiling at the dried flowers and twigs – giant pot pourri – sealed into the glass between the compartments of the door, I felt a tingle of excitement that all had gone well and soon I would be somewhere in the town, drinking a beer with my beloved and marvelling at the tiny, inconsequential differences between nations that still, to my untravelled eyes, seem so telling, alien and thrilling.

It’s not an unusual occurrence that, when required to produce a document of some kind – especially when in a hurry or a queue – I must go through a burlesque of pocket patting, bag emptying and deep-breath-taking. But by the time I had refilled my luggage from where the contents had been strewn out in front of the check-in desk, carried it up to the seventh-floor room, unpacked again, practiced my new exercise for not automatically leaping to the worst conclusion, and double checked everywhere, it was clear that I’d lost my wallet.

Not a lot in there; cash card, some receipts, birth certificate, beloved’s business card, a beer-bottle label with my face on it from a film festival in Amsterdam.

We racked up €17 in calls from the hotel room phone, a small price to pay for such an acute insight into the workings of Spanish customer services. Four times I was put on hold and cut off by the airport English-language call desk; then I was given a number to call Ryan Air which resulted in a speed-talking Spanish recorded message that took my money then cut the line. There was no answer at the lost luggage desk so we stomped out and caught a bus back to the airport. No one was there except a friendly but unhelpful woman at the information desk. Amongst the overtures for assistance that I made, I remember saying this: ‘The only thing I really, really want to get back is the birth certificate’. This surprised me, later. I hadn’t known that. But there was a rising sense of dismay, of something just out of reach yet impossible to recapture; something lost that really need not have been.

I cancelled my card and held over further investigations until the morning. But the sensation of stepping light into a new adventure had evaporated. I went to sleep ashamed to have caused such pandemonium and awoke with the heaviness of knowing I would need to spend more money talking to more people that didn’t want to help me to recover something that, by now, could be anywhere. The airport told me it was Ryan Air’s responsibility. Ryan Air told me that they were not responsible. It seemed a simple thing, even if the loss was my fault, for them to just look for the damn wallet. I became inordinately aggrieved at the world’s indifference. My self-recrimination was worthy of Torquemada. But why? The card was cancelled, we had money, and the wallet was no treasured possession, why did I still care?

It was the so-little-thought-of piece of paper, folded in four with faded red lines and decorous lettering – the formal effect ruined by the wonky type-work and bald information of the entries – that tugged at my thoughts. I can’t repeat the information it held because I don’t have it to hand and I can’t remember precisely what it says. Except that my name is Corin Kim Gilchrist, there is a registered address in Southampton that neither of my parents would ever remember if asked and, under my father’s name, ‘None’ or ‘Unknown’ or ‘Not known’. That part wasn’t true.

I was reckless to carry it with me; I could see my beloved struggling against a tide of ‘I told you so’. It must have been all she wanted to say, but she only said it once (perhaps twice). I hadn’t realised it meant so much; this small proof of nothing, a square of paper almost thirty-five years old that bore no relation to and gave no extra proof or sovereignty to my existence yet now, in this Seville hotel room, was becoming the most important object in my life. I agonised that I could never know the street I’d first been carried home to, however brief our stay. I was oafish and clumsy; this document had made it through years of squatting, social housing, passed from box to drawer-bottom to wallet to passport across half-a-dozen chaotic shared south-London homes and yet it, magically, had stayed with me.

Until I’d first needed the thing – I forget what for – in my early twenties, I had thought my name was Kim Gilchrist. Corin – my father’s choice – had gone out of the door the same time he did, when I was too young to notice or recall. It revealed the true entity I was, not the name I used myself, not the name on my bank account, my National Insurance, the voters’ register, the name I gave employers, landlords. I had an occluded, secret identity and this was the only proof. Now it was gone.

Corin comes from Corin Redgrave, my father told me a few years ago. He’s not a theatre goer and could give no other indication as to his choice other than he liked the name. Ignorant that I was named after an actor I had acted since a child, in school plays, am-dram, then studying in university and working sometimes as a director. I can speculate that Redgrave’s parents took the name from As You Like It. The name may also have its roots in Corineus, a legendary king of Britain who I researched for some time for a novel some years ago, not having noticed the connection to my own secret first name.

Kim, my mother’s choice, comes from the Rudyard Kipling novel. She told me that, in the book, Kim is called ‘little friend of all the world’. Many would laugh, rightfully, cynically and from sore experience, that this hardly applies to me. I read Kim, finally, seven years ago. There is a character called Mukherjee, which startled me at the time, as that was the name of the band I played in. I am now – in aspiration and daily habits at least – a novelist.

I was told a story – apocryphal, as it came from my father – that he and my mother bickered over my name even as I was carried to the font, where my grandfather waited. True or not it illustrates, perhaps, a condition of instability regarding identity, a condition I now focussed on this document of a name legitimised by baptism and state. This was why, 35 years later and stuck in Seville, I could not let it go or accept that paper as lost. I tried to transform the loss into a symbolic event: it represented a break with the past, with the tyranny of unremembered influence, an opportunity to remake myself as the man I am, not a reverberation of the child I’d been. Bollocks and sophistry, of course. I really wanted it back.

God bless German efficiency.

A lady from Weeze airport called my beloved’s mobile – they must have found the number from her business card, which I carried also in my wallet. It was safe and I found myself babbling that the birth certificate was the most important thing, the only item of real value and I was so glad to know it was safe. I thanked her again and again as if she’d saved some valued limb from amputation. It’s there now, waiting to be brought to me. But I’ve learned something weird. The things we define ourselves by are not only our actions, how we love and are loved in return, our work, haircuts, spiritual and intellectual lives, dietary peculiarities and morbid imagined secrets but also scraps of unthought-of bureaucratic ephemera. I’m more lucid about the whole affair now but, eight days ago, if you’d held out to me my birth certificate in one hand or a new-recovered manuscript of Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio*, I can’t in all confidence tell you which I would have chosen.

*The discovery and loss of Cardenio is a fascinating story. The tale is taken from one of Don Quixote’s novels-within-a-novel. Don Quixote is one of my favourite books. When in Berlin I bought a t-shirt of Picasso’s sketch of the Old Man of La Mancha. I was well pleased with it; hip yet classic and representing double-genius. Now, wearing it in Spain, I feel like some sucker-tourist.

The Beachcomber

I had forgotten about the beachcomber. I had forgotten about his long coat dragging through damp sand; his insolent beard, gorsey and stained as tide-abandoned foam. I had forgotten his permitted perimeter; the way he granulated then seem to wink out of existence, leaving me alone, a child at the land’s edge.

Father died not how he may have wished, with patrician dignity and surrounded by acolytes, but sat upright, propped against a folded bolster pillow – do they make those anymore? – and arguing about walnuts with my aunt Dorothy. Someone, she explained to me over the phone, someone, knowing him diabetic, the idiot, had brought him a bag of the things to nibble whilst he convalesced from a midsummer cold. Dorothy is eighty-eight and two years my father’s junior. She had assumed the role of matron, cook and chief-taster during his mild infirmity. She had been scolding him for such reckless disregard for his health when he raised a finger to reprimand her – I imagine with some erudite and withering epigram, probably in Latin – then tipped to the right, as if the raised finger had suddenly gained appallingly in weight, and stayed there, like a tree that inclines a few degrees but can fall no further. His last words were ‘these nuts are none of your concern’. As I say, not how he would have wished to go.

Dorothy, for all her querulous caretaking – she’s eighty-eight, I tell myself, give the old bird a break – is not one to ignore humour when it’s cantering around the room waiting to be acknowledged, black as a Spanish bull. She laughed when she told me down the phone of Father’s passing, laughed about his final words. And I laughed, too. Silly old goat. He’d always seemed to me as one in secret anticipation, primed for the moment when his wit would coincide with audience and circumstances to provide him with a killer put-down, the kind of thing everyone seems to think Churchill was so good at. But he always bottled it; when confronted with a gauche in-law’s Elton John-themed charcoal sketches or the egregious mispronunciation of Van Gogh, the most he would allow was a wry smile and raised eyebrow, indicating that he had thought of something dazzling but that etiquette denied him the pleasure of speaking. However, ‘these nuts are none of your concern’, it now seemed, was his actual punchline. Like the Great Gonzo raising his trumpet to give a mighty, singing blast, only for the bell to fart and bubble.

Continued here

What I see from the window, before it gets dark

The sky assumes an equal portion with the buildings, perhaps a finger more, making the window half empty of sky. At this moment it is a blue – no surprise – that recedes sunwards into striated white gold. The sun is warm, edgeless, but appears more as its own reflection seen in frosted ice. I’ve watched it crest its hill and now it slow-rolls its bend down the other side towards the rooftops, behind which it will sneak, as if too bashful to snuff in full view.

There’s a balloon on Wihelm Strasse, where the Nazi ministries stood. It takes tourists up for a view of the city and I can see it, a straight line from here to there, in the middle of the window. Once, the sun and the balloon, both descending at once, became hemispheres together on the same rooftop, a double sunset. It reads: Die Welt.

The rooftops sprout chimneys, little turrets and glass pyramids and domes. There was a man up there, with three children, roving from rooftop to rooftop as if it was an initiation or there was some creature to be hunted.

The buildings are high with wide, windowless walls of crumbled, Babylonian brick. You could project a film onto them. There are narrow fissures, like arrow slits or indications that another, less durable building was once attached with shallow struts. Birds nest in these slits. I see them quarrelling in and out. The neighbouring wall is covered in flattened globules of plaster, as if a carapace had been ripped away. They’ve suffered wounds that haven’t healed well. One of these wide screens is pure white, another is of dark, grey-red brick until near the top where all the bricks change to a new colour and I imagine the day they ran out and had to find some more, or when the top fell off and a new one hastily-assembled, the foreman complaining, ‘but they won’t match’. The reply, I’m sure: ‘It’s Kreuzberg. No one cares.’ The magpies dive from the top and fall like black raindrops; they fall until you think they’ll smash and then hook upwards into flight. They do it every time, as if playing at what it would be like to be flightless. As if daring one another.

The head of a horse chestnut tree nods into view, close to the glass. Its leaves glow lime with sunlight. It sways and dips and gives a rustling, rush of voice with every stroke of wind. I just noticed a small, new-budded conker. This anchors the summer, predicts a fall. There’s only concrete below. It’ll never grow.

The swallows are beginning. They flit to the present from the gables of my grandmother’s house, where you could watch them dip from the air and squirrel into their tiny nests; they skim here via evenings on Lake Trasimeno, where they clouded above the water, tracing halos and loops. Their elegance was a put on. I imagined them rending and chewing their way through the plankton-thick haze of mosquitoes, just hatched, soon dead, that boiled above the water. Swallows are hunters, ever-feeding black lines, spiralling parentheses, and they’re collecting now, ripping insects from the air, leaping between narrow thermals like plate-spinners from pole to pole, climbing and arcing with such certainty that I think if you traced the lines they scribe on the air and read them back you’d learn something so joyful it would punch you to the floor.

The crows, too. The first animal I saw from the window of the train from the airport was a crow. It wore a grey jacket and I assumed it had some irregularity of pigmentation, but they’re all like that here. And they are numerous; grey-jacketed with clerk-strut and slow wingbeat. Like a livery worn only here, pride of the city watch.

Last night, when it was dark, I saw two bushes, growing from the bi-chrome roof, outlined against the nicotine sky. They dipped towards one another and seemed to be kissing, reeling back, then kissing again. Dancing, perhaps. Or lovers recoiling from an embrace but magnetised once more, over and over. Now I see that these aren’t bushes but the twinned tips of a single tree, five storeys. They taper together to the trunk then to the roots. I want to say it’s a poplar, to hide my ignorance, but I know it isn’t.

When I see a painting, not even a good one, from another time and place, a singly-observed, unoccupied moment in history, I sometimes feel a kind of grieving thrill; at time’s audacity, that I could never, never, see that place as it was seen; that I can never watch the artist’s hand moving from palette to board. And what’s strange is this: watching the swallows, the lime in the horse chestnut leaves switching to deep red-wine-bottle hues, I feel that ache again. Even though these are my hands moving over the keypad and I’ve missed nothing. But the scene is already departing, as will I. It’s glorious, that sensation, and appalling.

Soon it’ll be dark and the apartments will light up their little advent calendar windows and I can watch, blurred and from a distance, the humdrum miracle of human life as it cooks its meals, strolls from room to room or stares out, perhaps at me. Each action will be unrepeatable and instantly lost. It’s the saddest, most awe-inspiring thing.

‘It is required you do awake your faith…’

So speaks Paulina in the Winter’s Tale. She is about to unveil a statue of Leontes’s wife, Hermione. He is responsible for her death and has been grieving for sixteen years. Within a few moments the statue will appear to come to life, reuniting the pair in a very unfashionable kind of reconciliation. There are textural hints that this is a piece of trickery for Leontes’s benefit, not magic; but the feelings that a good production of the Winter’s Tale can provoke in an audience suggest that something more powerful than an appreciation of good stage-craft or an eccentrically-handled spousal reunion is being experienced.

Depending on who you believe, Shakespeare was getting on a bit when he wrote the Winter’s Tale; he was one of the last playwrights old enough (or geographically placed) to have seen the Coventry mystery plays before their suppression in the 1570s. Hermione’s secular resurrection feels saturated in the mysticism, self-conscious theatricality and promise of redemption that must have infused both the mass and the festival performances of the old faith.

The use of magic and, equally, of unlikely and emotional restitution, often involving the ‘resurrection’ of one presumed dead, are obsessive themes of Shakespeare’s late work.* The ghosts of church ritual won’t die, sure, but nor will the magic itself, or the audience and the artist’s need to assert its power, even its supremacy.

Pier Paolo Passolini said “If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

My statement might read: “I am an unbeliever who has a need for a belief.” And I find it in our collective ability to create art.

Such a desire for magic, faith, wonder or joy in art is routinely dismissed or exploited. And it always was, not least by the church. As a critical starting point, this is probably correct. To enter a state of wonderment we must often surrender our critical faculties and many of us probably aren’t willing to do that for, say, Cirque de Soleil in Vegas, a mass in St Peter’s square or the revelations of the divine feminine contained in the Da Vinci Code. But I, at least, need art to offer me these moments. And I want to experience them with my critical faculties intact. I want to read a book, watch a play or listen to piece of music that will lift me up in joyful rapturous wonderment without dropping me out at the other end feeling daft, conned or coated in dimming fairy dust.

There is art that offers a kind of personal revelation – the closest thing childless secularists such as myself are allowed to come to the full-on Gnostic soul-shock. It’s there in music, from Spem in Allium to Tears of a Clown; in the visual arts (that’s me in rather rapturous appreciation of a medieval Madonna and Child in the picture above) and in theatre.

But do we find these qualities in literature, where irony, melancholy and the intellect rule, where an accusation of sentimentalist is only beaten by plagiarist as the word any author would least like to see appended to their name, how can that magic, that potential for genuine – not the paltry, mealy, equivocal part-redemptions of so much literary fiction – redemption survive?

I’ve found it in Don Quixote; in the humour of the digressions, in Cervantes’s compassion-cruelty towards Sancho and his master. Everything is Illuminated had a similar effect when I read it; laughing at – and with – the characters, whilst tipping further towards atrocity and disappointment. In a dark, cold way, Nabakov can send chills of wonderment through me; his daredevil mastery of language, the audacity of such wit and beauty being used in such repellent contexts. Yet these are more gasps of amazement at the authors’ skill, wit or sense of beauty and none of these offer hope or redemption. Even Don Quixote’s death, with the old knight’s friends gathered around his bed, left me disappointed as he returns to his senses and renounces his errantry. I would have him die in the arms of a loving if entirely non-existent Dulcinea; the joyful counterweight to Lear, cradling an imagined-breathing yet dead as clay Cordelia.

It’s least present where it’s promised. Life of Pi told me it would make me believe in God. By the last page I didn’t even believe in tigers. Perhaps the joy experienced in literature can only be melancholic, so tinged is most great work with an awareness of what someone described as Shakespeare’s great subject, time. And a novel, rather than a painting, which freezes a moment, thwarting time, or music, which renews when played, or theatre, where the dead resurrect each night and step forward for applause, perhaps a novel, which must tell a story and must end, is of all these art forms both the most modern – thus the least rooted in church ritual – and the least capable of inspiring in us that illusion of magic and redemption. Or am I wrong?

*

Incidentally, my own entirely subjective and unscholarly theory for this is that – regardless of his relationship with his own daughters, troubled or otherwise – Shakespeare, as a writer rather than a father, somehow went too far, by killing off Cordelia in King Lear. Notoriously unfounded in either Holinshead or the anonymous play that precedes Shakespeare’s effort, Cordelia’s death adds nothing to the story other than to definitively destroy all hope. Nahum Tate certainly thought so; in his popular ‘improved’ version, Cordelia is cut down from the noose and marries Edgar. My feeling is that WS did help to would himself with this cruelty. In the Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Pericles and Cymbeline, daughters are (after much capture by pirates etc) protected, loved and rewarded; they win through, marry-for-love, are proven right, have adventures and always end up hand in hand with daddy. For what it’s worth, I sense atonement.

Got No Sugar Baby Now

Outer Dark insists upon its own nightmare, exhibits the logic and fractured narrative of a fever-dream and exposes the reader to scenes and images lifted from some hillbilly Disasters of War; except without the war or the disasters, just the threat. The inhabitants of this outer dark are too diffuse, too fated to bother with anything as motivated or focussed as atrocity. Until the last chapter, anyway.

I would compare it to Heart of Darkness but that novel at least has a sense that the darkness has a point of entry. From the moment the two protagonists of Outer Dark listlessly perform the birthing of their incestuous child and then the father, Culla Holme, takes the infant out to die in the woods, we are not invited to witness a descent or burrowing into some dark place, as Marlow allows us to travel. The darkness is everywhere. Heart of Darkness offers up such memorable observations as this, off the top of my head:

“We live as we dream: alone’

Clear statements based on new experiences suggesting that, whilst Marlow is undoubtedly heading towards the horror, the horror, there are other places. In contrast, Outer Dark gives us exchanges such as this, which follows a discussion of the ‘mulefoot’ hog’s place in Old Testament laws on cloven feet:

Makes ye wonder about the bible and about hogs, too don’t it?

Yes, Holme said.

I’ve studied it a good deal and I cain’t come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.

No.

It isn’t a frightening novel. How can there be tension when there is no safe place from which the reader can be ambushed? Like Titus Groan or, even more, Titus Alone, the world we’re presented with is sick in essence, corrupted at an atomic level; it’s too alien, the language too flamboyantly gothic for any bad deed or turn of events to ever shock us. But it is a successfully contaminating novel, as one can only assume the author intended it to be.

I’ve encountered this blank-faced Appalachian nightmarism before; in the music of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and, more particularly, in the songs of Dock Boggs. Boggs recorded a handful of sides for Brunswick in the late 20s. Boggs’s short first career (he was amongst those ‘rediscovered’ by enthusiastic folk scene folk in the 1960s) was similar to many of his contemporaries’ but his songs were not. Greil Marcus gives him a dignified, compelling portrayal in Invisble Republic but it’s one Song, Sugar Baby, where Boggs gives a contemporary voice to the fantasia of Outer Dark.

Just as Outer Dark takes for its heart a broken, doomed family – the baby is lost, the mother/sister escaped and hunting the baby, the brother/father hunting the mother/sister – so Sugar Baby communicates a similar, if more domestic sense of unbearable ties and unbearable divisions.

Over a banjo that always makes me think of dancing skeletons and meant – first time I heard it – that I would never laugh at the instrument again, Boggs threatens and mocks his scolding partner. Marcus describes him as singing ‘like the bones are trying to escape from his face’, or something similar. I have never heard a song that so perfectly captures the tone of male domestic shame and rage. Boggs parrots a nagging voice.

Who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song?

Who’ll rock the cradle when I’m gone?

His response is far outside the boundaries of any other early folk recordings I’ve heard and, whilst lacking the dramatic extravagance of Holme’s solution to domestic ennui – leaving the baby out in the woods to die – Boggs’s is the same in spirit; both self-pitying and cruel:

I’ve done all I can do, said all I can say

I’ll send you to your mother next payday

Christ, Appalachia must have been the pits. The song, like the characters and landscape of Outer Dark, is both defeated and savage. When I next hear Dock’s banjo staggering and leering out of the speakers I will likely picture the sea of mulefoot hogs that stampedes a ravine-path towards the end of Outer Dark, many of the animals spilling into the river below, taking a drover with them.

Outer Dark presents us, like Heart of Darkness, with a journey through a land where Ovid’s Plague of Ageina seems to have been taking place so long that everyone at first started treating it as normal and then absorbed it, made it part of themselves. It is dotted with ever-more decayed and impotent institutions, an enthusiasm for arbitrary punishment and foam-flecked magical thinking being the only dynamic or uniting social forces. And in that, at least, we can find some common ground with Holme, Rinthy and Dock.