Nu Gothic in Verse

A couple of months ago I found myself in a little basement room beneath a vegan café (what else?) near Covent Garden for a book launch. The Emma Press makes tiny, pretty and loving volumes of poetry, and other excursions into the realms of writing and publishing for no return. Various poets came up to the mike to read, either works from the book or other pieces, and by the time they'd finished I reckoned I was the only person in the room who wasn't a poet or a poet's friend or partner. It was jam-packed, but it was a very small room.

I bought both small books, the Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse, and Siofra McSherry's Requiem, a poem cycle framed around the texts of the requiem mass and the illness and death of the author's mother. Both raise the question of what you think Gothic is. Requiem's subject matter brings us face to face with pain and sorrow but that isn't Gothic in its own right, notwithstanding the cover's grinning skelly based on a carving at Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The anthology, in contrast, spans that skewbald combination of menace and excitement that sits at the centre of the Gothic web: tales of Golems, witch bottles, Bluebeard, 'the sweet/subtle tang of old skool Goth' open vistas into other realities, the suspicion picking at our sleeve that our everyday understanding might unravel any moment, and enjoying the idea. 

I most appreciated Charlotte Eichler's three poems: 'The Coffin Calendars', in the voice of a model posing for Polish coffin-maker Lindner's annual extravaganza of weird glamour; 'The Balloonist', about the death of Lily Cove at Haworth Gala in 1906; and a poem which imagines a convent of nuns keeping pet blackbirds and eventually their songs merging, which nearly got me misty-eyed. That third poem isn't in the book, or in Ms Eichler's collection Their Lunar Language, which I thought it would be as it concerns the relations of humans and nature. I wonder where one might find it.

Repairs and Renewals

"Some clergy have unrealistic expectations. Ministry is a costly calling."

These were the words which concluded the briefing notes from the last Area Deans' meeting with the Bishop, and which were communicated to the Deanery Chapter this week; some dissatisfaction with the working of the diocesan Properties Department had apparently surfaced and this was the conclusion. One of my colleagues has been waiting for two years to have holes in his roof fixed and yes, during heavy rain, does have to get buckets out; others report a reluctance to talk about matters such as collapsing driveways and the like. The 'cost' of ministry is usually thought of in terms of the modest financial recompense of the ordained life relative to other similar professions, the demands on time and family life, and the sense of exposure a clergyperson has, that sort of thing, not having to run around your house with saucepans when it rains a lot. It's not like asking to have a minibar installed in the bedroom. To have it put in these terms - well, it doesn't go down well.

My own experiences with Properties have been mixed. Last year my shower was packing up and on the brink of having it replaced by Alan, the plumber who's a member of the church, the thought suddenly occurred to me that it might be a diocesan responsibility, and so it was. They got it fixed very quickly. However, when I reported that I thought my little garden shed - the former outside toilet of the house - had what looked suspiciously like sheets of asbestos in the roof, sheets which were cracking and falling down, the person I was promised would come and have a look at it never did. I now just tend to hold my breath when I go to get the rake out. I wonder whether mesothelioma will be one of the costs of my ministry, in particular. 

Conversation Piece

The Antisocial Behaviour Officer from the local police sits with a mug of tea in the church office and discusses the action which is finally being taken against some of the troublesome youngsters in the area. 'You might think it's quite draconian,' he warns, and that's what 'banning from every railway station in England and Wales' does sound like, but it seems that some of them have been travelling far and wide to spread disturbance, not just here. He's an affable ex-Met officer.

Sally the church office manager tells me her dad is in hospital and his dementia has suddenly advanced. The family aren't sure what's going to happen, and she sees no alternative but to vary her working hours until things become clearer.

In the entrance area to the church, I find a young woman reading a Bible. Tearfully she explains how radically her life has gone wrong since I baptised her children seven years ago (I recognised their names rather than her). To me she seems articulate and caring, but she can only see negativity and 'evil' within herself, and thoughts of suicide grapple her and pull her downwards. She's frightened. She will try to come to a service.

After Evening Prayer I sit with a teenage boy in the church. He has quite severe anxiety attacks from time to time. He describes horrible visions of a hellish landscape which assault him occasionally, and something more positive - a sapphire-eyed white stag that stands in the snow, regarding him, and who has appeared when he's been really desperate. A version of God, perhaps, something pure and strong. 

Swanvale Halt Film Club: A Dog Called Money (2019)

It’s taken a long time for the third and final stage of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s project to reach the public. The Hollow of the Hand, the book of photographs and poetry, came out in 2015; the album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in 2016; and only at the very end of last year were most of us able to view the film, A Dog Called Money. I’ve finally watched it!

Over ninety minutes, the documentary follows the composition of Hope Six, picking out the experiences which influenced the way the songs developed – though not all of them, and not exhaustively, and not all the songs featured actually ended up on the album (we get versions of the junked ‘Homo Sappy Blues’ and ‘Age of the Dollar’, the latter jettisoned due to John Parish’s disapproval even though everyone else liked it (‘I wish just for once she wouldn’t listen to what he says’, commented one fan on thegardenforum.org). Episodes from Murphy and Harvey’s travels are interspersed with scenes from the studio at Somerset House, and visitors watching the musicians through the one-way glass. Harvey reads excerpts from her notebooks and just occasionally someone else says something – an Artangel employee taking visitors through the passageways of Somerset House, or Paunie, the lesbian gang leader Harvey and Murphy met in Anacostia. A few elements aren’t from their joint travels, but from trips Murphy made separately: an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria, a Trump campaign rally in the US, refugees on the Greek border with Macedonia.

There are lots of fantastic vignettes. Harvey meets an instrument-maker in an upstairs shop in a Kabul backstreet and gives up trying to explain to him where Dorset is. She goes to a museum of mines, also in Afghanistan, and reels off some of the terrible exhibits. She sits attentive at a raucous church service in Anacostia and looks a bit fazed at a very different one in Kosovo, though listening enough to quote the words of Fr Sava Janjic: ‘If you don’t have to break the branch, don’t do it. If you don’t have to kill the animal, don’t do it.’ A young woman is baptised at Union Temple Baptist Church; little girls learn Arabic at an Afghan maktab (at least, that’s my interpretation of what’s happening); tourists mill around the Washington Monument while a chap wees behind a tree to right of shot. Everywhere are mountains, traffic jams, birds in and out of cages, rivers, ruins, children, dust.

The trouble is, it’s all vignettes. Determined, like the book and the album, that observation, witnessing, should be the keynote of the project, the film presents images without context or comment. That this is the point is stressed by the very first shot, a little Afghan boy with his nose pressed against glass, and it’s echoed by Harvey’s wanderings, Murphy’s camera lens, and the faces of the visitors to the recording sessions. Having taken that decision, the film has no choice but to leave us in the same position, without helping us make the connections that would turn the succession of moments into a story. The US observation blimps hover with intent in the Afghan sky, but even the anger and sense of conflict which is shot through the album is absent here, any very political feeling dispersed by the amiable banter of the musicians back in London. It’s like much of Harvey’s poetry, so quiet and spare it’s easy to miss the significance of what she describes.

The reticence means there’s a lot that doesn’t get mentioned. ‘I’m the only woman here,’ Harvey points out at an Albanian village ceremony in Kosovo, leaving us wondering how it was arranged. That’s surprising enough, but surprise is hardly an adequate response to seeing her watching an ecstatic Sufi prayer-session at an Afghan mosque – how did she get to be the only woman there, a place where no woman would ever normally be? What did they say to make that happen? We have the familiar footage of the Union Temple Baptist choir singing lines from ‘The Community of Hope’, but not a word about the church’s own unhappiness at the political firestorm the song raised when it was released early in 2016. This isn’t really ‘the story of the album’ except in a very minimal way.

Of course it’s all delightful for Pollywatchers, but what about anyone else? It seems to me that you have to be signed up for the project: without reading the book and listening to the finished songs, it’s hard to fathom the film, and (notwithstanding a single introductory caption) if you don’t know who PJ Harvey is and who the old codgers playing instruments in the studio are, you may well be left adrift. One viewer on the MUBI website, where you can see the movie, commented concisely and brutally (as others have for twenty years or more), ‘get your head out of your ass’. That’s a nasty dismissal of one of the least self-regarding artists in the world, and Harvey does explicitly acknowledge the ambiguities of her position as observer: crunching through the debris of an abandoned house in Kosovo, she notes ‘a handmade rotting wooden ladder, a corn store. These were country people. And I’m stepping on their things in my expensive leather sandals’. Yet you can still wonder whether the project’s achievements have matched its ambitions. There is only one abiding message: the unity-in-variety of human experience, and human dignity against the emptiness of ideological (especially national) rhetoric. In the silence is the point. And you either take that, or leave it.

The Tale of The Trousers

It would be good to have a new pair of trousers. Marks and Spencer usually provide me with mine. This is what happened.

I go to M&S in Guildford (via a bus, I don't want to drive and the trains are cancelled) and find a pair which fit. I get them home and realise they are polyester and within a year will be as shiny as the plastic bags they spiritually are.

I return to the store. I'm on my way to see a friend and am in an awful hurry as I am trying to fit too much in. I find a pair of wool trousers in the right size and, at the till, hand over the polyester ones and pay the difference. 

Later, at home, I find that what I haven't noticed is that the new trousers are 'slim fit'. This means they are designed for the kind of young fellow who wants their legwear to look as close as it can to a pair of skinny jeans. If you wear them at my age you look like John Cooper Clarke or, worse now I think of it, Max Wall.

I return to M&S a second time. They don't have a pair of black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers in the store in my size. I go to the Orders desk who tell me to go to the Sales desk. At the Sales Desk the child who serves me says they don't do black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers at all, but they might have something called Tailored Fit. I don't know what that is, so I go to try and find a pair. There are none, but finding and trying on a pair of offensive blue checked trousers I discover that Tailored Fit is marginally less ludicrous than Slim Fit (there is also Skinny Fit which defies belief) so I return to the desk.

There is a long, snaky queue. I don't want to have to explain all this again, and so wait for the child I've spoken to before to be free. I wave a succession of customers past me, and one middle-aged lady simply stands in front of me and goes to speak to the child herself. Finally I can gain access.

'Tailored Fit seems OK, but you don't have any in this style,' I explain. 'Can you order a pair?' 

The child checks on her phone (I do hope it belongs to the store). 'You won't believe this, but they're out of stock.'

'Oh yes', I reply. 'I not only believe it, I was waiting for you to say it.'

Somehow my receipt had disappeared, and the best I could get was a credit voucher to the sum I'd spent on the unwanted trousers. I returned home, via the train, with nothing more to show for my efforts than a small bit of shiny paper which had cost me £54.

Future Forecasting

My nine-year-old self found James Burke’s 1978 TV science programme Connections absolutely compelling, at least the bits of it I saw. I didn’t have much of an idea what he was talking about, of course, and my knowledge had only incrementally increased by the time his subsequent shows were broadcast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the most interesting thinkers about scientific matters are not, strictu sensu, scientists, but those who can see science in a broader perspective: Burke’s first degree was in English, specialising in Middle English language and literature, not the most obvious way into a career examining and explaining science to the public. That’s what made the series fun.

The core conviction of Connections is that scientific and technological change does not take place in intellectual isolation, but that individuals take decisions based on their own motivations with no idea of what the results will be, and that consequently predictions of how change will pan out are nothing more than conjecture. Some people make accurate guesses, but that’s just luck.

That belief hasn’t stopped Burke having a good go at predicting where technological change will take the world, as I was reminded when he popped up on the radio again a couple of days ago with what I discover is his customary spiel about nanotechnology (which I’ll return to in a minute). As well as his exhilarating analysis of the history of science and thought, Mr Burke’s reputation as a prophet of the modern world rests on some of the statements he made decades ago about the effect of the onset of the digital society on how we behave. This year someone dug out a clip from the 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed and popped it onto Twitter to demonstrate how Burke foretold the chaos wrought in our political life by the Internet.

Note that what he doesn’t describe is how established political forces will manipulate that chaos for their own ends. Now let’s cast even further back to 1973, when Burke was presenting the series The Burke Special, a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of futurology almost all of which was wiped from the BBC archives. That year, the Radio Times decided to get him to make his predictions about what might be going on twenty years hence.

Burke’s world of the future is a world of databanks, citizens’ dossiers, identity cards, and restrictions on the individual. He believes the storage of personal information in databanks will be accepted, not resented, at least by the young … In 1993, ideas about personal liberty will probably be as different from ours as ours are from those of a century ago.  Citizens will be generally far less reluctant to provide information about themselves, because they will realise that it will help society to organise itself better: they will accept that they must live for one another, because if they don’t, they’ll be headed for anarchy. It will be an open, honest society, in which the distant hum and chatter of the machines will be as commonplace as birdsong. Computer-aided learning systems will provide every child with his own plug-in superteacher … each [computer in a factory or office] providing rapid forecasts on the effects of management decision-making.

You would expect some predictions to be right and some wrong, and you can set aside the timescale, but what strikes me most here is that where Burke was right, it was for the wrong reasons. Citizens share so much information now not out of altruistic consideration for one another, but because it enables them to buy things faster and because they’ve been softened up for it by social media, seeking an addictive rush of validation by Likes and Loves.

This brings us back to nanotechnology. I’ve spent ages trying to find James Burke’s recent contribution to what was probably an episode of Today in which he predicted over the course of a couple of breathless minutes what was going to be happening in 2030, but I can’t chase it down so you’ll have to take my word for it. He envisaged the development within ten years of ‘computers the size of dust’ that would manipulate matter at a sub-atomic level to turn any substance into anything else, mud into plastics and plastics into gold, straws that would convert polluted water into clean as you sucked them, and microscopic machines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air, ‘so that’s climate change solved, by technology instead of by destroying the world’s economy as we seem about to’.

Hmm, I thought. It turns out that Burke has been talking about nanotechnology for ages. In a 2013 discussion on Radio 4’s PM revisiting his 1973 Radio Times prophecies, he harped on the theme using almost precisely the same terminology as he did this year (nanoscale is ‘weeny-weeny’; making things out of ‘air, water and dirt’). It’s the same thesis he laid out in 2018 in his think-piece The End of Scarcity, a world in which all our existing political systems are rendered obsolete by ‘personal nanofactories’ making everything any individual could ever want from food to music.

As Burke points out, this is a future first glimpsed as long ago as 1959 by Richard Feynman in an impromptu lecture to the American Physical Society, ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, and it’s true that a team from Manchester University led by Professor David Leigh has indeed developed a ‘programmable molecular machine’ which can manipulate atoms. But note this: a ‘molecular machine’ is only a machine conceptually, and Professor Leigh’s machines are ‘programmable’ in that by the addition of a positive or negative electron they can operate in a right-handed or left-handed direction. Such machines are not ‘clever little nanobots’ as the good Doctor encounters on TV, which we might imagine as microscopic robots made of metal and silicone and capable of independent decision-making: they are artificial chemicals designed to do one specific task at a time. So far nanotechnology hasn’t got us any further than putting molecule-thick layers of graphite on a metal sheet, and we can’t yet envisage saying to a future iteration of Alexa, ‘Make me a strawberry milkshake’ and moments later the concoction will arrive. I’m not sure we can wait for this to solve our more pressing problems.

Mr Burke mentioned the plug-in superteacher this year again, just for good measure. Technologically I can’t see why that can’t happen now, with the knowledge we already have available: the fact that it hasn’t presumably means we don’t really want it to, and there are different constraints operating than merely what we can and can't do.

Future Facing

The New Year struck Swanvale Halt as it did everywhere else and even when you are on your own it is still worth marking the switch of the clock and giving thanks for everyone who means something to you - in my case, with a lantern, a couple of sparklers (one for me and one for everyone who was not there) and a little bit of fizzy liquid. It is small, but makes the point.