Gothic Conversations in the Netherlands

As a distraction from current events, though we could discuss those and their resonances for a long while and may well yet, here is an offering from a different world. A couple of weeks ago our friend Dr Catherine Spooner was in the Netherlands – s’Hertogenbosch, to be exact, at the Den Bosch Design Museum – to talk about their exhibition ‘Designing Darkness’, which examines something we have long been interested in: the links between the Goth world and the wider Gothic tradition of which it is a part. Catherine took part in two discussions: the first, a two-hour marathon chaired by Ama von Dantzig (hard to know how to characterise her: ‘cultural and development researcher and organiser’ might be a summary) and involving a number of other speakers; and the second, a one-on-one conversation with curator Tomas van den Heuvel. Here they are, should you want to look them up.

The participants in the longer talk, apart from Dr Spooner and the two ‘official’ speakers, were academic Nick Groom from the University of Macau, though joining from his house on Dartmoor; Trae and Dani Ashes who run Goth podcast ‘Cemetery Confessions’, from the US; Mel Butler (who we’ve met before) from Yorkshire; and, in person, Lisa der weduwe from the Museum of Youth Culture in London. The talk covered four broad areas – ‘Goth and the ‘80s’, ‘Victorian Gothic’, ‘Belonging’ and ‘The Future of Gothic’, which seemed a bit arbitrary to me and which certainly strayed all over the place from their appointed limits, but also came up with all sorts of interesting thoughts and insights. The interaction between Goth and Gothic was a constant theme, illustrated when Nick Groom called attention to his S.O.P.H.I.E. lanyard – the campaign group set up in the name of murdered Goth Sophie Lancaster.

In the first section, Lisa der weduwe described the Goth-related photos in her museum’s collection, and its appeal for further information related to the experiences of first-wave Goths, while Dr Groom gave his memories of actually being there – a very individual experience, as he remembered it, mediated by fanzines and tape-swapping rather than attending venues which later became mythically famous: it was more than ‘a few tiny clubs in London or Leeds’. It’s a different story from the one that usually gets told. Mel Butler, on the other hand, described actually moving to Leeds in order to join the Goth scene there, and finding that she’d found her ‘tribe’, a place of safety. Dr Spooner then commented on the worldwide spread of Goth, and the development of specific local forms. The discussion on ‘Victorian Gothic’ elaborated on the genre’s history (not just ‘Victorian’, in Catherine’s account) and the role of literature, including Gothic’s ability to filter the ambiguities of empire and progress.

The discussion of ‘Belonging’ brought in Trae and Dani who waxed very philosophical. It was here that we got into the knotty and interesting area of identity and the way Goths’ self-conception is changing. The two podcasters pointed out that while Goths in the ‘90s tended to conceive of their sense of identity in ‘essentialist’ terms – that Gothic was something you felt inside and then externalised – they now tend to think of it as something more performative and complex: ‘interior and exterior in a constant conversation … constantly bringing forth through bundles of objects and interactions’. As they pointed out, this exactly parallels shifts in the politics of gender and sexuality, which is both fascinating and yet, at the same time, only what one might expect. As for ‘The Future’, everyone talked about the dynamic potential of Goth and Gothic (despite, perhaps, the small numbers of actual Goths there are about at the moment). In response to the question whether Goth had lost its radical edge, Dr Spooner argued that this depended entirely on context: there were plenty of settings where Gothic affinities still, and always would, present a challenge to established and complacent understandings and authorities.

For her one-to-one with Tomas van der Heuvel, Catherine sat at a table spread with copies of her books (which we have talked about on occasion) and elaborated on some of the themes of the earlier discussion. Pressed for a definition of the Gothic, she deferred to her old tutor Chris Baldick, who stated that every Gothic novel expressed three aspects: ‘claustrophobic enclosure in space, and fearful inheritance in time, developing into an increasing descent into disintegration’, and made reference to the ‘travelling tropes’ of Gothic identified by Roger Luckhurst which we have only just discussed here. They talked about the exhibition itself and agreed that the question ‘But is it Goth?’ helps you ask and answer other questions, and Catherine complimented the inclusion of commercial Goth schmutter, as well as the high-end designer-wear and handmade clothing and accessories that such displays usually concentrate on. The fakery of Gothic, Gothic camp, the growing influence of folk horror on Gothic (I recently discovered completely by accident that Catherine has been writing for Hellebore, a folk horror journal I bought as a result of reading about the Hexham Heads – but that’s another story) and mutations of Gothic that focus on the future, all made an appearance; as did Catherine’s next project, an account of the white dress in Gothic. If that book ends up including PJ Harvey’s white Chalk dress, now in the V&A, you will have to blame me …

well. That’s a lot to take in and you’re probably better off watching the videos. When trying to account for why the Design Museum should have staged the show in the first place, Tomas van der Heuvel argued that ‘design is something you do yourself’ and so the idea of designing an identity was worth a museum of design examining. He was less convincing as to why it was Gothic they chose, but I suspect what may have happened is that an initial interest in how those weird people in black put their ‘design’ together broadened out into an awareness of what Nick Groom quite rightly called Goth’s ‘vast hinterland’ in the Gothic tradition as a whole. That leaves the matter of identity. I see what Trae and Dani mean when they point out the fluidity and performativity of Goth, but I have to recall my own deep and abiding macabre fascinations which extend way back into my young childhood and which I have always insisted propelled me in a way I experienced as virtually inevitable towards the Goth world rather later than most people enter it: for me it was very definitely an internal itch that I then externalised. So I remain, I’m afraid, stuck conceptually in another age!

War Stories

Normally on my day off I wouldn’t venture to the church unless I absolutely had to, but yesterday it felt too isolated to say my prayers at home, and I went down to open up the church building. Some other souls were clearly drawn to do the same as I found candles alight when I went to close the doors again at the end of the afternoon.

All conflicts, whether between neighbours or states, have an interminable history and you can never reach a starting-point, never reach an original act to assign the primal blame. I have seen left-wing people online recounting the various crimes of NATO which explain why Mr Putin has begun a war, and there is really no end to this. I reminded myself of how catastrophically dreadful the Russians’ only experience of democracy and a free economy – under Mr Yeltsin – had really been, and how, so far as I can see, the West had a chance to change the safety and security of the world permanently for good, but chose to make a quick profit instead. I was also reminded by someone else that the distorted shape Russian capitalism took was directly related to the way the Soviet Union used to function, corruption allowing the system its only element of flexibility. There’s no start to the story: it goes back and back to Prince Vladimyr of the Rus, and so to Kiev.

The aspect of President Putin’s statements about Ukraine that intrigued me most was his rhetoric about ‘de-Nazifying’ the country. It raises the question of how far he actually believes this narrative, which to anyone else looks like a ludicrously incredible cover story for destroying a democracy, albeit flawed – aren’t they all? – because democracy anywhere nearby threatens to expose his thefts and frauds: the knowledge all authoritarians fear, that the day is not far off when their head will be carried through their capital’s streets on a pitchfork. Of course the Ukrainians, whatever else they may be, are not Nazis, but the story Russia tells itself suggests they might be. Russians, so the legend of the Great Patriotic War goes, stood and suffered as good as alone against the Reich, surrounded by vicious breakaway states who seized the first available opportunity to persecute them in the aftermath of Blitzkreig. The pattern plays itself out again, they believe. We in Britain might recognise this story, because it’s uncomfortably close to the one we have too often told ourselves. Ours isn’t as extreme, because we haven’t had the same extreme experiences as the Russians have, but its outlines are similar and like all such national myths blends truth and falsehood.

Every national history – like every history of a person – has things to celebrate and things to deplore, but the tendency (as with people, so with states) is to elide them into a single story of mingled glory and victimisation, to justify your current enmities and outrages. Beware the politicians who tell you this: they have their own, malign purposes, and will hurt you, and those you care for.

Home Sweet Home Inspection

Clergy houses, like churches, are supposed to be inspected every five years by a surveyor to check their state. The Quinquennial Inspection of a church is always a somewhat nerve-racking event as someone from a local architect’s practice turns up, walks around tutting and making notes, and then sends in a report listing the appalling number of things you have to deal with, broken down into ‘Urgent’, ‘Within the next five years’ and ‘Desirable’. Sometimes matters acquire a different importance with time: we had our last Quinquennial in 2021 and the architect then didn’t seem at all exercised by the presence of masonry bees which his predecessor had been very worried about. Inspection of houses is a different matter because the inspection is supposed to identify jobs the diocese is responsible for doing, not you, and you can, comparatively, relax when they happen.

The friendly young fellow who came to inspect Swanvale Halt Rectory yesterday noted first the gate by the drive which, I told him, had been broken since long before I arrived. I wasn’t sure fences fell under the diocese’s purview anyway, as I know a nearby colleague got so fed up waiting for anything to be done about his that he roped in a passing troop of Royal Engineers to sort it out. We had a couple of interesting exchanges about the age of the building and its odd concoction out of a Victorian cottage and a 1930s extension, and what a shame it was that chimneys, now a pretty obsolete building element, were being taken down rather than repaired (‘I like a good chimney’). He confirmed that the building is in good order although the roof of a bay window could do with some work, there are a couple of cracks that need watching, and the pillar I thought held up the garage overhanging roof and which was earmarked for attention in the last inspection, doesn’t actually perform any practical function at all. The boiler belongs in a museum of heating technology, but I’ve known that for a long time. 

Thankfully the inspectors never seem to spend much time in the far reaches of the garden. This time round I have escaped yet again being told to pull my follies down.

Cuddington and Stoneleigh

By the time you get to Cuddington, you’re well into the outer London suburbs, and it feels very much like the Diocese of Southwark rather than Guildford. St Mary’s, Cuddington, has a dramatic situation: you ascend up a long, straight road in Worcester Park, The Avenue, and gradually approach the apsed east end of the church, spiky and redbrick in an acute angle between roads. Cuddington had a church in the Middle Ages, but that was demolished and lost, leaving it in the odd position of being a parish with a patron and a (lay) rector but no church. An iron church was erected in 1867 and, nearly thirty years after that, the current ambitious building appeared, mainly paid for by one lay sponsor. This gentleman, Charles Smith, was a wealthy furrier who had left Malden church after ‘a disagreement with the vicar’: it would be nice to know more about him, because St Mary’s is an odd case. Its predecessor was served by priests from the Additional Curates’ Society, a Tractarian organisation, and the church looks like a pretty Tractarian building, its chancel gorgeous with encaustic tiles, mosaic, gilding and marble. Yet somehow for much of its life it has thought of itself as Low-Church. Once, in fact, during discussions about the reorganisation of parishes in the area, St Mary’s earnestly requested not to be lumped in with the Cheam churches to the north as it was the only one locally serving the needs of low-churchpeople: that might have reflected more its view of Cheam than anything else. Its main service on Sunday remained Sung Mattins all the way through to 1973 and the very full parish history I was kindly given a copy of hints at conflict in the 1940s with an incumbent who saw the future of the church differently; when the Sacrament was first reserved in 1961 there was quite some disquiet at this ‘high church’ innovation. Cuddington now is slightly on the Catholic side of middle, hence the maintenance of the aumbry and the presence of the statue of St Francis.

St John the Baptist, Stoneleigh, is a daughter church of Cuddington, founded along with St Francis, Ruxley, in the 1930s and both named after the incumbent’s sons! I found it really exciting, a dramatically simple but - structurally, at least - emphatically Catholic space (look at those sedilia) bound together by broad arches, white walls and a blue floor. The small side chapel (not, I think, a Lady Chapel as such) has the Sacrament reserved; there are twin ambos, a fashion we see in many churches built at this time; and there is a welcome green stack of the English Hymnal in a cabinet. I bet they don’t use them, any more than, sadly, they use that glorious massive altar, big enough, as my old vicar Fr Batley used to say, ‘to sacrifice an ox’, preferring a spindly little table even though the old altar can easily be seen from anywhere in the church. But Stoneleigh church sits in the midst of an unsuspecting 1930s housing estate, a defiant statement of another and heavenly reality.

Storm and Tempest

The wind battered Swanvale Halt yesterday as it did most other parts of the country. At the Rectory I eyed the trees, but got away with nothing worse than a tile fallen from the garage roof. Meanwhile, down at the Steeple House, we escaped the fate of St Thomas's, Wells, and suffered only a couple of branches shed from the cedar tree at the back of the church. Rick the verger and Jack who heads the gardening team were able to deal with them pretty readily.

A poster blew off the noticeboard and I found it in a far corner of the churchyard. This afternoon it had disappeared again, and this time was nowhere to be found. Well, if that's the worst we get ...

Reorganising the Bishops

When he attends Morning Prayer at Swanvale Halt, Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, often brings a subject which is at the top of his mind to throw in my direction, which can be useful as he takes the Church Times and I don’t. ‘Have you seen anything about this latest report on reorganising the House of Bishops?’ he said this week. ‘They’re planning to have bishops as Church spokespeople on Brexit and the like.’ I’d been aware some news of this sort had been doing the rounds as there had been ribald remarks among friends on LiberFaciorum about bishops’ pensions, which related to the same report, but this specific matter was new to me.

The idea of ‘a bishop for Brexit’ was indeed what caught the imagination (and attracted the derision) of the non-Church media, but the actual document turns out to be less crackers and more dispiriting than that. It ponders the role of bishops in the modern Church of England, beset by financial, cultural and organisational challenges, and how the episcopal office might be exercised in a way which meets those challenges more flexibly and effectively. Much in the manner of such consultation documents it throws around a variety of ideas, including shrinking the number of dioceses, ‘enhanced regional structures’ whatever that means, early retirement and fixed terms of office for bishops, as well as those ‘specialist’ bishops to speak into particular topics; and, again much in the manner of such things, it remains to be seen how many of them may survive. The Church Times was mainly exercised by how few people had seen the document – the bishops themselves! – and demanded wider discussion.

There is a theological paper accompanying the document which hasn’t seen the light of day beyond the House of Bishops: its absence doesn’t help dispel the impression that it’s very light theologically, and the trouble is that our current bishops don’t think very theologically. They talk about being pastors but behave like managers. The document has a whole section on ‘missionary bishops’, mentioning the Celtic Church (remember what we said here about St Samson of Dol a while ago) and, in a more modern mode, the role of the Bishopric of Islington which since 2015 has worked rather well in establishing new church communities in the Diocese of London. It even cites the Flying Bishops who oversee trad-Catholic churches as a helpful example. But I am becoming suspicious of the whole language of ‘mission’ which seems to have little practical effect. The paper mentions that ‘leading God’s people in mission’ is part of the Ordinal for bishops, and so it is, but words like this appeared nowhere in the old Book of Common Prayer and crept in to do their mischief when Common Worship emerged in 2000, so we have had two decades of bishops ‘leading their people in mission’ and precious little to show for it. What I suspect will happen is that rafts of new bishops will conceive of ‘leading God’s people in mission’ in terms of writing reports and issuing goals, targets and objectives, not, say, baptising people, preaching, or going to live as hermits in derelict Roman forts like St Samson did; that is, telling other people how to ‘do mission’ rather than, in any remotely practical way, doing it themselves.

Apart from the occasional circular letter I haven’t had any interaction with our bishop in about three years: ‘good thing too’, you may cry, but even given the pandemic, it does make you wonder where the office of pastor pastorum really is.

Echoes of a Past Present

To most people, February 14th was Valentine's Day, or St Valentine's if you are more religiously aware. For Fr Thesis and other good Anglo-Catholics it was the Feast of SS Cyril & Methodius, while to Professor Purplepen it was the Eve of Lupercalia. My chief observance of the day, however, was the anniversary of the release of Let England Shake. As dedicated Pollywatchers await the publication in April of her collection of poetry, Orlam, telling the story of a young girl growing up in the Dorset countryside - which the publishers Picador rather ambitiously claim will 'renew English poetry' - we are sure the maestra is preparing new music, as she has had herself photographed for Instagram with a guitar and a variety of what knowledgable souls say are very weird pedals. Perhaps it even relates to the poetry. But for now we must content ourselves with the old stuff.

War, the bloody meat of Let England Shake, never goes out of fashion, and the album's dense lyrical tapestry of references from Flanders Fields and Gallipoli, Jamaica and Kurdistan, Ireland and the Peninsular War, that both locate and dislocate the history of human conflict, are as relevant now as ever. The past flows through us all, and on into the future. The last song is 'The Colour of the Earth', taken from the words of an Antipodean soldier remembering a fallen comrade. PJH wanted Mick Harvey to sing it - she joins in later - and only after the recording did he tell her that his own grandfather had been at Gallipoli:

Louis was my dearest friend

fighting in the ANZAC trench

Louis ran forward from the line

I never saw him again

Yesterday, after listening to the album again, I found myself looking up the video on Youtube, one of the ones shot by Seamus Murphy. At first PJH, Mick Harvey, John Parish and Jean-Marc Butty sing the song a capella in the lane near Eype Church where the recording was done, followed by the album version accompanied by Murphy's images. 

In the comments I found this:

PJH's music continues to have - sadly - a terrifying contemporary resonance. We can only hope that Mr Putin is a rational kind of crook and that his administration is not secretly as chaotic and makeshift as the Johnson one seems to be, because powers with the capacity to destroy civilisation shouldn't mess about with one another. Slips and miscalculations just might lead to more human damage than just that of a small and nasty war.