they come and they go
fleeting wet bullets
my bed has left me
for another bed
the world has lost eternity
clocks are now winding
towards a new paternity
i wait within the ward of maternity
for mother to give birth to me
so that the idea of him
will return
midnight in the soup cans of desire
the taps have stopped dripping
love is cold
i am stuck like ketchup
waiting for her
to give me a slap
and release me from
the gravity of our affair
sometimes it is enough
to sit and cry
and stare
sometimes the night
is stuck like this
and who knows
who is dying
by chance
it is raining in dublin
all we can think about
is love
a soupçon
is enough for now.
Brendan McCormack is a writer from Dublin. He now lives and works in West Cork. He is an environmental activist and was part of the successful ‘Save Our Skibbereen’ campaign and ran as an Independent in the local elections of 2019. His first collection of poetry, ‘Selling Heaven’, was published in 2012 by Burning Apple Press, NJ, USA. A second collection was published in 2014, ‘Phuckle – Irish Auf English’. He has featured in anthologies such as ‘The Gladstone Readings’, 2016, and ‘Songs for Julia’, 2014. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2009. He is currently working on a novel, ’88’.
The pages of the city
unfold its secrets
like holding vellum to the light,
a palimpsest of the past.
Who walked here on sacred ground?
What foundations lie under
that coffee shop all birch and glass?
You may see
a piece of broken railing,
the bronze of a sword.
This step led to an open door –
kettle’s on, teacake still warm –
a girl, flaming hair and rough linen.
The open space above you
was a window:
a woman called children to dinner;
there, that corner,
a man waited for a lover
who never arrived.
Take a minute.
In the blank spaces
look into the light:
you can see footprints, a torn letter in the wind,
a field of buttercup and burdock,
willowherb and silverweed
underneath the paving.
Watch your step, consider
what marks the trail you leave behind.
Lynn Caldwell’s work has been published in The Irish Times for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award; Dedalus Press’s anthology WRITING HOME; FLARE; and The Antigonish Review, and has featured on Irish radio’s Sunday Miscellany. She was a runner up in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award 2017, has a BA in creative writing from the University of Victoria, Canada and blogs at http://kennedystreet.wordpress.com.
Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) foresaw and forewarned about the development of emerging digital technologies, virtual realities, and massively powerful corporate entities that control data.[ii] As a result of information overload and digital distraction, a deficit of attention and meaning has become more pronounced. Our present digitally-accelerated culture is akin to that which Jean Baudrillard outlined, where ‘there is more and more information and less and less meaning.’[iii]
This creates a challenge to remain present – as a seemingly-infinite cascade of data continually threatens to undermine the stability of the present. A culture of information saturation mediates social relations in digital space and the ‘meatspace’ of the physical world – a relentless barrage frequently driven by the force and logic of late-capitalism and the free market – where profit is the highest good.
These mediated dimensions of reality relentlessly seek to commandeer our attention and shape our perceptions (Cambridge Analytica, etc.). Is it possible to be free in this context? How to live with our extended technological prosthetic nervous system without it dictating the focus of our lives? How to resist corporate conglomerates that monitor and accumulate data to convert this into capital and power?
In order to resist the extractive and manipulative aspects of these hyperrealities, space is needed to comprehend experientially where we are at – so that we can remain autonomous. If we can recalibrate our connection to the digital spectacle, we may disentangle ourselves from it and gain the freedom to address some of the global issues we face: climate change, ethnonationalism, inequality, neo-imperialism, and so on.
‘The purpose of all art is magical and evocative’, said William Burroughs, a means to evoke ‘the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious’, and where a concert can be ‘a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy’ connected with the engagement between audience and performers as well as the use of repetition and volume.[iv] The role of sound in altering consciousness subtly and profoundly fascinates me, especially in electronic music, minimalism, and underground rock.
Burroughs’ development of the cut up technique (with Brion Gysin) resulted in experimental art and writing that sought to engage and alter conscious also – to break the spell of a consensus reality generated by mass media imagery. I endeavoured to refresh and update these aspects in my own work.
In this context, I devised an ecstatic, multisensory experience titled Digital_Ritual for amplified and processed voice, electronics, tape, and visuals. Perhaps, it is possible to reconfigure consciousness through the same digital technology that engenders the ‘continuous partial attention’ that increasingly disperses and divides our attention.[v] This counter-magic includes digital-lysergic imagery from digital and Internet culture: GIFs, esoteric Instagram hashtag searches, laptop and smartphone cameras, occult Facebook groups, and endlessly scrolling screens.
The intention here is to re-orientate, rather than disorientate, a participant. Both audio and video are subjected to minimalist techniques of composition: repetition, stasis, steady pulses, and variation of sonic fragments. The acoustic and psychoacoustic components of sound are enhanced in the music by using a just intonation tuning system – where all intervals are tuned in whole number ratios. There is improvisation, randomness and noise to engage consciousness also.
Musically, the focus is on density, rhythm, texture, and timbre rather than common-practice voice-leading or harmonic progressions. This evokes an esoteric (‘hidden’) aspects via the subconscious effects of provocation of ANS responses. The techniques used engage autonomic nervous arousal (ANS) of psychophysiological (body and mind) processes: affect through density and volume,[vi] perceptualization via timbre,[vii] and rhythmic entrainment from steady pulses held at length.[viii]
This is intended to evoke, and to learn from, what Gilles Deleuze terms, ‘the affects, perceptions, and sensations to which we can be subject’ – rather than being concerned with communication of a fixed, unitary meaning.[ix] A profound experience of what it is to be alive is as resonant and significant, if not more so, than a conception of why we are here.
Judith Becker outlines that ‘the strongest version of happiness in relation to musical listening and an example of extreme arousal is ecstasy.’[x] The ecstatic often bends and blurs our constructs and boundaries to provoke consciousness to new states by bringing us to our conceptual – the sublime – and sensorial limits. Thereafter, the reception of a work is differentiated and enhanced by a participant’s consciousness.
Creating experiential spaces and states through art allow us to know how it is to be alive in all its weirdness, wildness, wideness, and wonder on a deeper-than-surface level. To expand consciousness beyond those narrower modes of operation which dominate when we are engaged in our daily struggles for survival, or our endless scroll through our myriad screens of cascading data.
/// Recalibrate attention to the fullness of now /// Experience the inexplicable /// Reset the operating system ///
[i] Joshua Rothman, ‘How William Gibson keeps His Sciene Fiction Real’, The New Yorker, 16 December 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
[ii] William Gibson, Neuromancer, London: Victor Gollancz, 1984.
[iii] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
[iv] William Burroughs, ‘Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, and a search for the Elusive Stairway to Heaven’, Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975, reproduced in Jon Bream, Whole lotta Led Zeppelin: the illustrated history of the heaviest band of all time, Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2008, pp. 166-167.
[v] Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft consultant, coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in 1998. For an overview, see Eileen Wood and Lucia Zivcakova, ‘Multitasking: What is it?’ in Larry D. Rosen, Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier (editors), The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2015, p. 406.
[vi] Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, ‘Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music’, Frontiers in Psychology, July 2014, Volume 5, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00790/full, accessed 15 February 2020.
[vii] Cornelia Fales, ‘The Paradox of Timbre’, Ethnomusicology Winter 2002, University of California: Santa Barbara, 2002, pp. 56-95.
[viii] Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will, ‘In time with the music: The concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology’, 2004, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/experience/InTimeWithTheMusic.pdf, accessed 19 February 2020.
[ix] Gilles Deleuze quoted in David Kelly (editor). Encyclopedia of Aesthetics V.1, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 518.
[x] Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 79.
On the LUAS, she counts thirty cranes spiking the skyline. She hasn’t seen this many since 2007. The entire journey into town, she keeps her face visible; she doesn’t care who sees the scar snaking from her cheek to the bridge of her nose. Under her jacket, she grips the hunting knife, reassuringly heavy against her rib.
She gets off at Westmoreland and heads across the river to the northside, cutting down a side-street that leads to the Pro-Cathedral. The cathedral, or the heart of the city, Gavin once called it. She keeps her head up and her pace brisk, ignoring the eddy of activity around her and the odd looks she gets for the scar.
On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.
The heavy timber doors creak open, puncturing the silence within. Gavin stands rock-still up near the altar, a bar of garish light spilling slantwise over him from the beaten-gold apse above. She recognizes his stance. Barefoot and stripped to the waist, his prized kukuri knife slung across his torso from a scabbard, he looks like some sort of urban savage. Even that far away, she can feel his gaze on her, assessing her face and movements. He could be grinning; he usually does when he sees her. Forcing the door shut, she mutes the city’s roar.
The Pro-Cathedral is more like an art gallery than a place of worship. Gavin told her he hadn’t set foot in it since he was a kid. He’d hated the smell of incense, the bone-white texture of the pillars. He doesn’t mind it too much now, though; grim-faced statues of saints and garish Stations of the Cross seemed to console him. She’d never been inside it before. As she moves among the pews, she sees they are alone.
Mass has long since emptied out. Not a lone parishioner left; she expects to see some still scattered amid the pews, heads bowed and hands clasped. There isn’t even anyone lighting a candle at the back. No danger of being seen or heard. It’s better to meet in places such as here, where no audience can assess them. He walks down the nave, meets her halfway. Coils of scarring – mementos from previous duels such as this – ripple on his chest and arms. Some she’s dished out to him personally, little welted tokens of her dexterity and skill. Of course, there are others she doesn’t recognise, fresher and angrier-looking; clearly given to Gavin by opponents who aren’t her. She notices him smiling as he advances.
“Howiya. Fancy seeing you here. How’s that keepin’?” He nods at her scar.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” She stares and his smiles broadens.
“And I’m glad y’are. Thought I scared y’off there.”
“You wish, Gavin.”
“Y’have what we agreed?” She nods, unzips her jacket to reveal the leather sheath slung across her waist. The pommel of her Damascus steel blade catches the light. He eyes it.
“Let’s get to it, so,” he says finally. She glances up at the light pouring through the apse and walks backwards, keeping her eye on him. He turns and walks thirty paces back down the aisle, drawing out the kukuri as he goes. He seems to fill the entire cathedral, his movements tight and regimented like a soldier at parade and a flicker of misgiving darts through her. He almost seems to be planning each move as he snaps the kukuri this way and that.
The kukuri hisses cleanly and flashes in the dim, dusty light and as he cleaves the air, the blade’s white arc blurs with the whirl of his strokes. She expects he’ll either accidently cut a notch off one of the pews’ varnished oak or dislodge it, but he’s too nimble.
As long as she’s known him, Gavin has jealously guarded the kukuri. He’s owned many knives in the past, some new and some antique, some acquired locally or online, and others collected in far-off regions where knives rank as works of art and skill with them is in high demand. She’s seen his full armamentarium of Bowies and Swiss Armies, butterflies and sharpfingers. He often takes better care of these implements than he does his own body. He once boasted that, if he’d the time and resources, he could ensure his knife collection would last for centuries after they’re both gone.
But the kukuri is his pride and joy. He keeps it in a handcrafted leather sheath, and no one, not even her, is permitted to touch it. It’s a combat weapon, trademark of the Nepali Ghurka tribesmen who made it famous. The blade is stainless steel and razor-sharp, hand hammered to a black, thermoplastic hilt. It can be cleaned, sharpened and repaired. Formidable in its simplicity, it can cut through any material she cares to name. Even when it’s no longer suitable for the job, Gavin will not discard it. The kukuri cost him a mint when he bought it online, and a single slash from it could lop her head clean from her shoulders.
She has been careful in her own choice of weapon: the Damascus was bought second-hand from a vendor in town, its bone hilt smoothed to fit her grip. Her collection of blades isn’t nearly as extensive as Gavin’s, but she’s taught herself well with each of them. After much consideration, the Damascus is her best bet against the kukuri. She’s spent each evening of the week practising in her flat, once she is sure her flatmates have all fallen asleep. She is loath to go anywhere without it now.
He faces her, and his grip tightens with a neat flick of the wrist. His other hand is held out, open. She removes her jacket and shoes, to leave them bundled on a nearby pew; her own scars, mainly on her arms and ribs, are now in plain sight. She shivers a little at the chill wafting over her. She scans the nave, calculates how limited her movements are actually going to be. Then she draws out her own blade, raises it, and walks up to face him. Of the two of them, she has the longer reach while Gavin has speed. He also has an exposed forearm, the tendons waiting to be severed. She notices them first.
They meet like this once a month, and never in the same location. That way, neither of them is at an unfair advantage on familiar ground. Once they duelled at the end of the pier in Dun Laoghaire, at her suggestion; another time it was in a building site behind Gavins house. Once they agree on the place, there is no going back. Under no circumstances will either of them withdraw.
Their rules are few and fair: there are only ten minutes to fight. He will fight with only his kukuri, and she with her Damascus steel. No nails, fists or teeth allowed. No point in even trying to emerge unscathed; getting cut or sliced is inevitable. The wounds must be inflicted cleanly and whoever draws the most blood wins.
The last time they duelled, she’d been a hair too slow dodging his slash, and he’d given her the scar on her cheek. She remembered how he stood back, eyes glazing, in admiration of his handiwork, even as blood dribbled down her face. He helped her dress the wound afterward. She went home and practised knife moves in the dim of her flat, swearing to herself she wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
This is their strangest arena so far. It’s always been out in the open until now. Manouvering will be difficult, unless she manages to back him up towards the altar. She sees her chances of that as being about even.
He lunges, lightning-quick as a dancer, swinging at her forearm. His body becomes a fever of movement, limbs snaking and dashing at her, the force of his attack bringing her to heel. Were she still a novice, it would have happened too fast for her to even react. But she’s trained herself hard, and well. His curved stroke narrowly misses her. He chops at the air, butchering dust. The kukuri falls hard and heavy, and Gavin gains ground.
She parries with the flat of her blade, blocking his blows and stabbing, to drive him back somewhat. Their steely clangs and clatters echo through the cathedral like the shrieks of ill-fated souls. To anyone else, that sound is murder on the ears. To her and Gavin, it’s sweet as an aria.
She lashes out in between his blows, her blade nicking his sternum. It’s not a deep cut, certainly not enough to warrant victory for her, but enough for Gavin to grunt and stagger backward, dazed. He glances down, and his free hand locates the laceration as blood starts seeping down his chest and onto the tiles. The splashes, too, echo loudly and they both stand back, appraising each other and the damage. She sees his smile is askew and can hear his heavy breathing. Holy through his own blood, she thinks.
“Nice one”, he says, with something like approval in his eyes, and raises the kukri to resume the salvo. But his strokes are sloppier and his breathing has gotten heavier. He tries hacking again, in a downward arc, but she dodges and his blade is stuck fast, lodged in a pew near the front. He wrenches his knife free, but a few noticeable notches are left behind in the wooden bench. Gavin grits his teeth and spits, approaching her with fury in his eyes.
He’s starting to break one of his rules, the one he told her when she first picked up a blade: never get angry in a duel. It blurs concentration, makes you clumsy and more likely to be beaten. He’s no less dangerous for it, though. Droplets from the cut on his chest spray over the pews and floor; his feet leave prints in his wake as he swings and keeps missing. He flails now, aware slightly that a shift in the air has occurred and he is no longer at an advantage. Weakened, he wards off her advances on him, blocking her riposte somewhat, but it’s not enough. He forces her back a bit, but she charges, and he lists against a pew, grabbing on to it to catch his fall. With raspy breath and mouth agape, Gavin steps forward, blade lowered, staring wildly at her. His empty hand finds the nick and the blood pooling around it stains his fingers. The cut runs deeper than either of them thought. His face now registers something alien, for he has no facility to fathom defeat.
I heard Sir Geoffrey refer many times in his Oxford lectures (2010-2015) to our current situation as one of ‘plutocratic anarchy’. I suspect that, like many, he was fascinated and frustrated by the oxymoronic sight of ordinary, ‘common’ people persistently voting for, excusing, and admiring those who would subject and exploit them.
People voting against egalitarianism, that sort of thing. People claiming to hate élites and experts, while lauding fatuous celebrities, mendacious politicians and tax-avoiding oligarchs to the skies. What the hell! It’s a job to keep calm, it is. What’s happened to intrinsic value? After such gnosis, what forgiveness?
Hill is, in this Book, much concerned with our chaotic, self-defeating times, but he’s concerned too with cultural instances of last words, late testaments, final goodbyes and deathbed flourishes. The barbarians may be at the ruined gates, but the professor has brought ashore and stored (in his memory) a whole load of good stuff for us. He’s passing it on.
The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin is a Last Supper, a séance, a cénacle, a ‘Scipionic Circle’ (see poem 128), a consistory. Just look who’s been invited, look who’s turned up!
What are they talking about? They can’t be serious. Stuff about ‘fate’ and ‘genius’ and ‘intrinsic value’, and ‘poetry’ and ‘gnosis’ and ‘hierarchy’. And, what’s this, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) – ‘the Augsburger’ – and his ‘epic theatre’, Brecht who once versified the Communist Manifesto in Lucretian hexameters, and named Brueghel’s Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) a ‘great war painting’ (see 123) – well, ‘it is vital that we | resurrect Brecht’ (124). Christ!
Bertolt Brecht
Final Words?
How to categorise this weird offering, its preposterous form? Is it a biographia literaria (Coleridge)? A tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza)? A religio poetae (Coventry Patmore)? A Day-Book of Counsel and Comfort (George Fox)?
Does Hill intend for us to think this is epic theatre? He refers peevishly to W H Auden’s political poem ‘The Orators’ in poem 158: ‘The nearest we get to epic theatre is ‘The Orators’.’
Of this 1932 poem (G.H. was born in 1932), Auden wrote: ‘The central theme of ‘The Orators’ seems to be hero-worship, and we all know what that can lead to politically.’
There’s plenty of hero-worship in The Book of Baruch, plenty of wrestling too with the betrayal of the working class (31), and the embarrassments of the Tory tradition: ‘Tory, to me at this latter day, is both rabble and oligarchy’ (261).
Is Milton’s Paradise Lost epic theatre? I guess so. Milton’s all over the place in The Book of Baruch; amidst the civil war of austerity-and-Brexit, anarchic plutocracy’s generous mess of potage, Hill takes comfort in the compensations of falling towards the grave.
We might more readily expect a Last Will and Testament, I suppose. GH was in his 80s, and whilst he always seems to have written as if he thought he might die tomorrow, well, this is more obviously an apostrophe to those who would survive him. The poem numbered ‘47’ begins, perhaps, with an old man muttering to himself:
If this is going to be your testament best press on with it.
A testament – leaving stuff to someone, testifying to having existed; let’s also remember that GH is masquing himself as one ‘gnostic Justin’, who may understand ‘testament’ more grandly to mean a covenant or new dispensation of some sort, (for those who come after), a scripture, even.
Well, William Blake’s engraving (plate 14) for his America: A Prophecy (1793) is the jacket image, after all. (And Justin appraises that engraving too – see ‘170’: ‘his beard imitates mine in my mock senile portraits’. Sir Geoffrey threatens to get senile on us, but there’s exquisite method in this discombobulation, I suspect).
‘America is an early radiant work if we simply let the illumination bathe us’, a voice declares. I propose that we take time to consider the professor’s last things, and bathe in the illuminations and recriminations that Hill-Justin has to offer?
A Great Gift
So; a generic hybrid. A testament, a covenant, a witness statement, a testimony, a symposium, a reproach, a mockery (Pope’s Dunciad is a lost friend). H’m. I’m only fussing over this because I feel that GH is bequeathing all us ‘poetasters’ – ok, I admit it – a new form to play with.
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. You might say he’s just teasing us with being mock prophetic (as well as mock senile), but that’s ok too, isn’t it? Look at the long lines – they don’t even end at the right hand margin, do they?
Folded back into hanging-indent paragraphs, like a manifesto or, (actually), a stanza from Andre Breton’s ‘Ode to Fourier’ (see 179), or, I should say, looking remarkably like Rimbaud’s lineation in Une Saison en Enfer.
Who’d ‘ve thought it? GH makes something of this source in 167, raving about Rimbaud’s (and David Bomberg’s) part in the invention of ‘modernist poetry’, through an instinctive concurrence, apparently, with the philosopher Berkeley’s redemptive notion ‘that particles are units in the mind’s energy’. (This stuff may need some work doing: you could try D J Greene’s 1953 journal article, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Anti-Newtonianism’.) It’s all part of a thrilling defence of poetry for the 21st century; and look out for Kit Smart (‘no hoodlum’, 28) throughout the poem, and the product of his season in hell, Jubilate Agno.
Not obviously poetry then, but beyond prose, certainly. A 21st century Walt Whitman, for sure, inventorying what’s excitingly referred to (47) as ‘the untenable sanctities of abiding things’. Beyond grasping, out of kilter, implausible, but we do know such things, don’t we?
Certainly, [Listen to me – ‘Certainly’!], an old humanities professor might know a thing or two about what’s worth preserving, what might stay us, what abides, what might redeem the time, dare I say. Is this about redemption, after all, HaShem’s ways to man, and is it now delivered by these here genii and their gnomic achievements?
GH reminds us, for example, of the poet Thomas Nashe’s ‘finest poem thrown away on a dull drama’ – remember that invincible line?
Brightness falls from the air
This from a poem in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600), a comedy. Well, if poems can do that…
‘old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge’
The thing about testament and prophecy, we might remember, is that they’re inevitably political and more or less obviously, satirical, (you can’t get away from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, the other mockers – Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’, for instance). Oh, yes – and also theological. Sorry. Well, just think Søren Kierkegaard, if it helps – his many pseudonymous personae – Johannes Climacus, that sort of thing.
Come to think of it, the title of Johannes Climacus’s 1846 work is perfect for GH’s book: Concluding Unscientific Postscript – ‘scrapings and parings of systematic thought . . . divided into bits’, as its epigraph notes. So much I have known, and know, don’t you know? Unbelievable stuff, ‘untenable’, beyond my grasp, inordinate, but something there, let me tell you. I’ve seen things, as the replicant says before expiring in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner. Peace be upon him.
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. I’d like to try it too; who knows, my children might be grateful to their poetasting father, when he’s gone? I’m not as old, nor as learned, nor as wise as GH, nor would he have deemed me a poet, but there’s plenty to encourage me here: ‘Poets with old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge bring good seed to tillage’. (126) And then, later, he writes:
– With always an encyclopedia on which to rest my left
– arm, I do not have to resort overmuch to erm. (256)
Seems to be down to knowledge, then, and not, erm, inspiration (or genius?) Phew! I can do this. The gnostic Jonathan. A gnostic poetaster. Let’s see.
Geoffrey Hill 1932-2016.
Automatism
What else? How to get started each day, overcome the embarrassment and inferiority of the poetaster? Well, I can tell you, GH recommends the practitioners of automatism.
Robert Desnos is our (hu)man – ‘far and away the best of those Surreal men’ (139). I have to look into this. Peter Stockwell’s book The Language of Surrealism is certainly helpful. He writes: ‘in principle anyone could engage in automatic writing’, and refers to a ‘meeting on 25 September 1922 [the year of ‘The Waste Land’, and of Ulysses], in [André] Breton’s studio on the Rue de Fontaine in Paris, at which [René] Crevel, newly arrived from a spiritualist séance, suggested using the same technique for writing.’
Apparently, Robert Desnos was proficient in writing during a ‘self-induced trance-like sleep’, ‘in which striking images were often expressed with dense echoic sound-effects of alliteration, rhyme and punning.’ He wrote, for instance: ‘Mots, êtes-vous des mythes et pareils aux myrtes des morts? [Words, are you myths and similar to the myrtles of the dead?]’ This was published ‘in Littérature in December 1922 . . . under the name Rrose Sélavy (a pun on eros, c’est la vie)”. And these good mots duly make their appearance in Baruch – check number 139. Is this the discombobulating method?
There has to be something in this for the gnostic Justin, right? I can’t prove this – (Go-ogle doesn’t know, for heaven’s sake – how agnostic is that?) – but I think the line quoted in poem 73 of this Book of Baruch: ‘To run on empty is to achieve a sort of hallucinatory abundance and clarity’ – I think this must be a translation of something in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and that Breton is the ‘Parnassian and … sassy man’ also mentioned there, (not Hopkins, who is above that, as we know).
André Breton in 1924.
The paradox, the oxymoron – they’re pretty surreal, aren’t they? GH always had plenty of time for the paradox, the oxymoron; and the cryptogram too, I’d say; all is surreal in such verbal tourbillions (Robert Graves’ brave word; see ‘On Portents’, and appraised by GH in one of his lectures). And – just in passing – there’s plenty of focus in Baruch on ‘codes’ – ‘the codes from London were always that absurd’ (89) – and the weird poetic lines/codes in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (‘a cultural film of established acclaim’ (139)), and – would you believe it? – Alan Turing’s turned up (227).
There is something in this. Let’s remember, those codes did mean something, (to those in the know, to those in the Résistance (89) or the Widerstand (255), for instance, God bless ‘em). People do solve cryptograms, don’t they? Poetasters are with the resistance too, right? Codes for a consistory. Like Polari, or Yiddish.
But how much cryptic and recondite erudition can the nation – those to whom we bequeath all this – tolerate? (See 163) The poetaster will do well to remember how her work may be received; words of warning: ‘Poem as inaccurate | prism inaccurately decoded; progressively derided; making honest | decent people appear stupid; all the pretence of a séance’ (163).
But take heart; let’s not forget that final mystery about which the mystics advise, and via, apparently, this same automatic writing (see Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism) – look at this in poem 40, our professor musing on ‘intrinsic value’ and John Donne’s final writings: ‘our grandest poetics | perform their mystic dance of savagely disputed provenance.’
Hallelujah. Hill-Justin notes, approvingly, ‘Rouault’s mystical aggressive passivity.’ And has a mystical experience of his own, with ‘[d]ense holly trees’ (221). This is, after all, ‘’Geoff’s Mystery Tour’, perilous self-entertainment that would have | delighted my Aunt Nell, the bright one of our family.’ (178) This delights me: ‘All the mysterium of God is in the measure of time.’ (183) Who knows otherwise?
Form and Process
So much for form and process? Worth pausing here; because I want to say that (what used to be called) the content of this mock-prophecy is absolutely fascinating too, no doubt about it, I’m ashamed to admit. So I’ll come back later, if you don’t mind, to this thing about form and genre and provenance, this ‘All Souls’ Night’ (Yeats) summoning to a final showdown, a last reckoning.
A little bit about the content, even though the Professor insisted this is of no interest if it hasn’t got ‘technic’, (also Yeats, (and Ezra Pound)). But we’ve established the technic is automatism, isn’t it, the subjective-made-objective, the mask which is self-portrait, the sensibility-register. The anti-lyric, too. See 182: ‘The form I choose is monologue though with frequent episodes of multi- | voiced fugue.’
Firstly, if you’re the sort of person who likes to hear, say, Sir Geoffrey Hill choose his favourite bits of music, (he was once on Radio 3’s Private Passions, where the ‘Coventry Carol’ played alongside Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star-spangled Banner’), well, this will be a revelation, (as prophecies are supposed to be, no?)
Here – this is important to say – you have to simultaneously hear, as counterpoint to various musical miracles, the bells in Wren’s churches crashing to the ground during the Blitz. This prophecy is ‘loud with falling bell-chambers’ (10), ‘bells, a last | cascade of thrashing, mangled squeals’ (36), ‘bells falling and bawling’ (2); and ‘the toppling creel of half- | melted bell-metal’ provides a great metaphor for automatic writing and this whole book: ‘astonishing collocations of syntax and semiotics’ (36). Hill-Justin listens, too, hoping to “cough up the phlegm of a poem”, to
The mingled throps and thrangs of bell-ropes and bell metal, mangled and _ muffled songs, when you stand beneath the bell chamber, hearing the _ ropes grunt and clamber. (72)
We might recall the opening lines of Yeats’ séance poem, ‘All Souls’ Night: Epilogue to ‘A Vision’’:
Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Souls’ Night
The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, designed by Christopher Wren.
I think it’s midnight for GH too, and HaShem’s in the tomb, and Tennyson’s ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’ is a distant memory, (lacking some ‘obduracy of the mind’s address’, apparently (69)). When Hill-Justin tried to compose music himself, he informs us, he failed: ‘My piano compositions failed because I could not compose a convincing | ground bass’ (249). He succeeds here, with Wren’s crashing bells.
We should remember GH didn’t want to be a poet, after all:
I would have prayed to excel in mathematics and music if I had prayed at all; _ envying Wren and the musicians of the Chapel Royal; passacaglias and _ Purcell; for that is where the mind stands to itself, albeit in hell. (25)
Well, look – listen! – the music of Purcell does seem to come out on top here. (When GH was invited by The Economist to read his Clavics and work-in-progress at the Purcell Room on the South Bank in 2011 – ‘What! Six daybooks, already?’ we all declared. (Actually, seven now.) – GH closed proceedings with the most menacing and atoning rendition of Hopkins’ sonnet ‘Henry Purcell’ you could ever dread to hear.) GH seems to agree with what Hopkins says of Purcell:
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.
Wow! (Plenty of derogatory stuff about ‘moods’ as the domain of mere poetasting in Baruch, be warned.)
And Hopkins is a key presence at the table – this cénacle – throughout. In 176 Hopkins and Purcell are linked via Purcell’s ability to create ‘sprung rhythm | two centuries before ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean fire’ which its | rediscoverer – a devout Purcell admirer – felt duty bound to keep | hidden lest he should bring notoriety upon the Society in which you do | as you are bidden.’
Odes and Welcome Songs
Let’s see which bits of Purcell are playing at the Feast, on ‘the wind-up gramophone’ (137). Well, it seems to be his Odes and Welcome Songs (185; 187; 188), and this is what Hill-Justin says of them: ‘these ‘welcome songs’ feature a benign vision for the future of the | kingdom in accordance with divine nature’ (188).
He goes on to express extraordinary gratitude and estimation (189): ‘Tell him his saddest | music well-betides us, elides all but our last, worst fears.’ Plenty of compensations, then, even after a referendum and all history’s idiot repetitions.
So much for content? O, but look out for, nevertheless, Schubert’s Quintet (70; 253), Handel’s Saul (79) – ‘how profound the accessible can be, | given mastery” – Thirties jazz – “accurate music appropriate to heaven” (36) – Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (130), ‘L’hymne de l’Union Européenne’ (140), symphony number 9 by Malcolm Arnold – ‘old Malc’ – “that final untri- | umphing lento of twenty-odd minutes”, “its near subliminal song” (197), and Ralph Vaughan Williams:
I bless the marvellous ‘Five Mystical Songs’: although strong music cannot _ even begin to mend wrongs, it is, in some way I wish I could well relate, _ analogous to the Pentecostal tongues. (85)
Ok. So – poetry – this poetry – aspires to the condition of music, yes? Well, I’m not sure about that with Hill-Justin, after all. Set down this, set down this: ‘Not | music. Hebrew. Poetry aspires | to the condition of Hebrew.’
Of course! Now we’re talking. This naughty apophthegm is ripped from Hill’s 2000 prophecy, Speech! Speech! (poem 20). Such wisdom bears contemplation. (Well, I’m reading Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century as back-up).
And I was always told the three archetypes of the human condition to be Faust, Don Juan and Ahasuerus, don’t you know. [Whilst we’re here, Wikipedia keeps us informed that Kant himself refers to the legendary Ahasuerus, wandering Jew, in his The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. I’m reminded of Hill’s long-time interest in Peirce’s ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’. – Sorry – am I going into séance mode?] And what about Lear as archetype too (God’s spy)? What about Falstaff (God’s clown)? Our prophet is all these.)
Hill-Justin – the poet-prophet – as Ahasuerus. Exiled, unhoused Adam. Well, this did preoccupy John Milton at the end of all his hopes and dreams. Where did it all go wrong? And Milton’s all over The Book of Baruch, as I say. ‘Latterly, led by the hand in his good grey coat, a blind good looker, looking like | a Quaker.’ (18)
Supremely non-conformist, speaking truth to power, aficionado of peace. And a reader – don’t you know – of the Hebrew scriptures. Geoffrey Hill, Hebraist, (there was a quotation in Hebrew for The Triumph of Love (1998), wasn’t there?) He refers mysteriously in 96 to ‘the | inexorable semitic-semantic code.’ Is this that ‘God’s grammar’ thing, again; isn’t that from John Donne? Still, the still, small voice.
John Milton 1608-1674
Love Supreme
The gnostic Justin, we think, was ‘Jewish-Christian’, and, excitingly, considered a heretic by Hippolytus, (third century). And look at this:
But because I am not a Jew I desire to know all that was said when, once a year,
__ the high priest convened in holy fear with the Ark of God.
Hill’s naughtiness and perspicacity, his agile-mindedness and contrariness and impetuosity all remind me, at least, of the Hebrew prophets. It’s a familiarity with HaShem (her omniscience and inordinacy), a longing to hear HaShem’s voice (in the gathered silence of this Quakerly meeting), which makes Hill’s encyclopaedic mind, too, into a psaltery of praise and vexation and vexatiousness. Isn’t this the Hebraic mindset? Forgive me.
Hill repeats this sense, actually, of exclusion from, what, the chosen race? In 216: ‘I am not a Jew though I married one; and I subscribe to their iron scorn.’
Jewish cultural illuminati are prominent and are revered. Besides the anonymous authors of the Gnostic Bible (40) and The Book of Job (86), there’s Simone Weil, of course, Robert Desnos (very much so), Len Rosoman and his commentary on the epicentral Mad Meg painting (is it a pogrom?) by Brueghel; David Bomberg too, Celan, Tzara, Gershom Scholem (think his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)), the Mandelstams, Gillian Rose (quoting from his late friend’s Judaism and Modernity, wouldn’t you know; must read this), Sandy Goehr (his co-eval), even Leopold Bloom; the Jewish century, I’m convinced.
We see ‘Willy Brandt at the | Ghetto memorial’ (77), consider ‘the topic of Jews and usury’ (186), never forgetting strains of antisemitism in ‘my grievous heroes’ (186; 111; 177). And a strange and riddling identification: ‘Ich bin Dreyfus, an old man who walks with a cane, thus – ‘ (189). If poetry aspires to the condition of Hebrew, then I suppose the poet’s task is both to resist and to aspire to scriptural authority for herself. A bit much for a poetaster, truth be told.
Anacoluthon!, as decency demands. Yes, even Love Supreme has to come to an end. Let me finish, please. We’ve got the Hebraic mindset then, the surrealist automatism and discombobulation, the musical passacaglia – and we’ve also got pained awareness of the betrayal of the working class (and the European mindset, bien sûr), the death of intrinsic value (O, no it’s not!), there’s Hill’s gnostic ‘back garden apple’, his parents’ suffering and his childhood, poet-soldiers and – pilots, (Eric Ravilious, d. 1942 (242)), war photography (Mathew Brady (247)), divination (everywhere), and Coke (1552-1634) and Grotius (1583-1645) laying the foundations for international law, as all great poets do, too. Mind you, let’s be clear:
The waters recede: neither covenant nor creed. (236)
This great prose poem, divine table-talk, is endless. You can’t stop loving it. As Ezra Pound wrote of Wyndham Lewis’s work in 1917 on illustrations for Timon of Athens, (and quoted in Baruch, 229), we hear everywhere the prophetic “fury of intelligence baffled and inspired by circumjacent stupidity.” But this fury is never unmixed with “ ‘summer’s sovereign good’” (from, is it, the last poem Hopkins wrote?) and (though not “irrefutable”) “evidence of cosmic cadence” (256). How GH loved this all, all this wisdom, all this folly.
Love you, Professor. Lead the way.
Intrinsic value that I care about is as tenuous and wiry as a bit of great verse. (163)
It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears.
I first heard the story of Gene Shepherd after receiving a 46th rejection slip for my novel.
Shepherd was a New York radio presenter who broadcast regularly for twenty-two years. What interested me about him was that he created a best-selling book which did not exist.
Because he thought disc jockeys were just an extension of the music industry, Shepherd played no music on his show – except the occasional tune by himself on a kazoo or a nose harp; otherwise he talked non-stop from midnight to 4.30 every morning. He had 50,000 loyal listeners for whom he first invented the term ‘night persons’: insomniacs, airline pilots, night watchmen, burglars, lovers and those who lived their lives while their fellow New Yorkers slept.
One night he told his listeners that they had a great advantage over daytime people: they thought for themselves. He argued that daytime people’s lives and tastes were dictated by rigid work schedules and especially by arbitrary consumer guides called lists: the ten best-dressed women; the twenty richest men; the thirty best songs; the fifty best novels.
‘How many of you’, he asked, ‘ever voted for the Academy Awards? Who actually decides these things? Who makes up these lists?’ His concern had begun in a bookshop when the assistant haughtily told him that the book he had requested, a minor classic, did not exist because it was not on her publisher list.
The Conspiracy
One Summer night in 1956 Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist. After several nights of listeners phone calls he opted for the suitably tempting title, I, Libertine, by an imaginary author, F. R. Ewing, and an imaginary publisher, Excelsior Press, which, for prestige, they would describe as an imprint of the ‘Cambridge University Press’.
Over the next few nights he distilled his listeners’ ideas for background material to the book and its author. The writer would be called Frederick Ronald Ewing, British, of course. His CV would include a spell as a Lieutenant Commander in the North Atlantic fleet, a BBC radio broadcaster, a regular contributor to the London Observer and he would now be a settled civil servant in Rhodesia.
He also must have a charming wife named Marjorie, a horsewoman from the north country. The imaginary book, I, Libertine, would be described as the first volume of a trilogy on the subject of 18th century Erotica.
Besieging Bookshops
Shepherd now urged his listeners to descend on their local bookshop over the following days and ask for the non-existent book. The results were hilarious.
The New York bookshops were besieged by Shepherd’s conspirators who reported their experiences on air. Shepherd had predicted that the first caller to a shop would be dismissed, that the second would be told the book was on order; but that a third inquiry would result in telephone calls to distributors who would then besiege Publishers Weekly. It all happened exactly as he had predicted.
One listener reported on a snooty bookshop assistant, the kind, he said, who gave the impression that he might himself be Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer. The assistant had the habit of dropping remarks like ‘Proust never really matured’ or ‘Joyce, a bit overrated don’t you think?’ When the customer asked, however, for the non-existent Fred Ewing’s I, Libertine, the same assistant brightened up: ‘Ah, Ewing’, he said, ‘it’s about time the public discovered him’.
Going Global
Airline pilots listening on shortwave got the joke and brought word of the imaginary book to Paris, London, Rome, even to Honolulu bookshops. Soon everybody was talking about I, Libertine.
Gene Shepherd and his listeners kept the intrigue going for eight weeks. One student reported that his end-of-term thesis on Frederik R. Ewing’s equally non-existent pre-war BBC Radio 3 broadcasts on the History of Literature had been awarded a B plus.
The student’s examiner had written in red ink ‘Superb research!’ The student mournfully told Shepherd on air: ‘Maybe my whole education’s been phoney. Now I think maybe even Chaucer didn’t exist.’
Another listener rang to say she mentioned the book at her bridge club. Three ladies claimed to have read it, two of them disliking it very much.
A fundamentalist church in Boston actually banned the book.
A New York gossip columnist, Errol Wilson, wrote: ‘Had lunch to-day with Freddie Ewing and his wife just before they set sail for India. Freddie said he was surprised at the popularity of his book’
Finally, the inevitable: the New York Times Literary supplement carried a review of the non-existent book. As a result I, Libertine appeared on the nationwide best-seller list and Gene Shepherd’s project was complete.
But he was now getting nervous. What if the President of the U.S.A. referred to the non-existent book – this was, after all, the paranoid fifties. Might Shepherd be hauled before The House Un-American Activities Committee, for making an ass of the Commander-in-Chief?
House Un-American Activities Committee.
Busted
When a journalist rang in to tell Shepherd that he too was a ‘night person’, that he knew the whole story and suggested that it might be time to reveal the deception Shepherd jumped at the chance.
The Wall Street Journal carried the entire bizarre story on its front page. It was reproduced word for word across the world – even in Pravda, the official Soviet news agency.
Shepherd was inundated with phone inquiries from newspapers in six countries. But in America the story was spun very carefully. ‘Radio DJ deceives the public’ was the usual headline. This, as Shepherd protested, was untrue. His entire listenership had simply demonstrated how hype and PR could manipulate the public. But his was an unpalatable message in the self-proclaimed home of individualism.
The story ended not too badly. Before the expose, a paperback publisher named Ballantine had asked the Wall Street journalist for help in tracking down Ewing with a view to buying the paperback rights to the non-existent book.
Shepherd joined them one day for lunch and the journalist introduced the broadcaster as the real Frederick Ronald Ewing. Ballantine was astonished but retained his focus. He said: ‘Of course, you will now have to write the book’ And in six weeks the broadcaster and the journalist did so. The real book became a bestseller and they gave the proceeds to charity.
Moneybutton
However Gene Shepherd had long been resented by the advertisers on his radio show – he tended to make fun of the commercials with the introduction ‘Here comes the moneybutton’ – and they gradually sidelined him into doing hour-long broadcasts.
No longer was total freedom of the airwaves available to him. He ended his career presenting his show on college campus radio while he churned out books, for one of which he invented the slogan: ‘In God we Trust – the rest pay cash’. Gene Shepherd died in 2002.
I now await my own novel’s 47th rejection slip, but thanks to Gene Shepherd I care a little less whether it comes or not.
The light that streams across the universe
Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
Where midst the flux of fields and particles
Eternal wisdom older than the stars
Unweaves her web of possibilities
The patterner experiments and plays.
Bright pearls arranged according to the laws of chance
Or unknown logic, now ingathering
Dark threaded galaxies where furious force
Sweeps stirs and scars the dust of earlier worlds
And in continuous creation builds again
Forms that persist beyond the death of stars.
I too shall praise the heaven’s magnificence
Honour with awe its ever abundant power
That once with measured force spread out the sky
To be a bound and roof upon our world
And a protection to the fragile Earth
I dreamed we built a home for everyone
There where I danced beneath the moody sky
We gathered gifts from the untamed wilderness
And put our passions together to prove our skill
I piled turves around the tallest tree
To form a seat and meeting place for friends
And all around
We planted seeds and hope in the dark ground.
A craftsman wrought a jewel long ago
Welded of words and of lines laid true:
From older songs he hammered out his tale
Of courage and of loss, of king and earl
Of men and monsters, a memorial
An elegy of an imagined past.
This that the war geared Danes far in days long gone
Gained fame in story, glory in war
How that the Ethelings harassed their enemies
Tribute and treasure took from tribes all around
So that the gold giver strong in his growing band
Folk wielder, wide ruler, strong in command
It pleased the peoples’ king to plot a towering hall
Gathered the workmen there from every land
To build the glad mead hall wondrous in workmanship
Famed amongst every folk, glorious and grand
Glad in the glee of hall, song mead and feast
Welcome to give to all, stranger and guest
He shared God’s wealth with all, except the common land
Care for the young and old , while shall the hall still stand.
Fast came feud, the dragon crawls along the rock
Brother by brother slain, who from his dark tower gazes on his hoard
The works of man overthrown, and grimly the dragon guards his greed
Nothing of worth remains, while treasure proud he broods of doom
War without end, he who is now the wyrm was once a man
He will devour all, and in his banks and barrows guard his pride.
All of our wealth they bury deep, they who were human once are monsters now.
Until a hero would come who had learned all the language of birds
Who had seen how the hazel nut falls who had found out the strength of a wolf
Who far from the friends of men had drunk of the spring and the well
And boasts he will reforge the shattered past.
Because I knew two fat and greedy slugs
Had crept into my garden to destroy
And everywhere they’d been they’d left their slime
On everything I did and still do love
So I must wander in the wild lands
Of my imagination flying far
Beyond each seen hill. into each dark wood
In endless exploration travelling
And trace each little river to its source
There is no river running round the world to bring us back
To step and step again on our own land
And see it for the first time: river run
River run, river run, always new under the sun
River run to the sea, river run, river run.
And then my mind moves on
To Homer’s heroes weeping by their ships
Who in the pain of war
Or washed by slave girls
Sitting in high seats
Would eat their roast meat and their mixed red wine
Gold jugs and silver basins, gleaming oiled skin
And think themselves like gods
As some blind singer skilled
Sang of their war achievements and their crimes.
The old man now remembering his loss
In his imagination finds his home
Trickster and fighter once, teller of tales,
Sacker of cities,
To meet again the weaver of his dreams.
An old man now imagines his return
That trickster, trader, sacker of cities, king
Teller of tales of whom once tales were told
Will find his way again still with deceit
His youth disguised now only by old age
To meet again the weaver of his dreams.
He will imagine what the swineherd said.
That happy is the lad that had no need
To be a hero.
Odysseus had taken all the boys
To fight in wars for Agamemnon’s glory
He’d let them kill the cattle of the sun
And brought back none.
And now the arrogant young lords
Devour all and never leave a scrap
Till everything is gone.
They taunt and mock the poor.
And drive the needy stranger from their door.
And if the king returns he’ll do such things as will be told in story
He’ll bring a bloody climax to their deeds
Renew himself
In all the joy of action….
Then I awoke in a fair field of folk
And let the leaves of memory fall through my skull,
The bare and distant trees where few birds call
The ferns and dead leaves by the waterfall
And the grey lichen on the granite wall
We go to hear the sermon of John Ball
For Much the Miller will grind small small,
Because I know that winter is delayed
While all the colours of the evening sky
Still gleam and fade.
David Hillman was born in Launceston, Cornwall where the poet Charles Causley was then working as a teacher. One of the children of Ron Hillman, a postman. David read widely and explored the countryside on foot but restricted by his family’s poverty he had never been more than fifteen miles from home until he left at the age of fifteen to get involved in politics and study. He obtained degrees in Physics Maths and in Modern History in Brighton, Oxford, and Liverpool, and has spent many years teaching in Oxford including some quite challenging environments. He considers himself an apprentice poet, now in his early seventies.
Ireland is a funny old place. I’m not sure we’re prepared for the rough times ahead. We’re soon turning one-hundred-years old – which is basically puberty as far as nation states go.
We’re riddled with latent energy – mostly guilt and anger – from the past, just as the future is becoming an unstoppable force. It’s hard to take pride (in its literal sense) in a past so troubled, so instead we focus on the defining moments of history.
Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.
The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?
Access and Capital
This existential discrepancy between the lives we lead and the art that is presented back to us is a discombobulating force, particularly for a nation so unsure of its footing, and in deep crisis. The usual heroes notwithstanding, mainstream radio too often provides us with local music that has been commodified and sanitised for a global market; an idea from elsewhere with a soft Irish focus which tells you that we mean you no harm; a people and an island made of random edges too often represented by a smooth, diluted version of an imported algorithm.
Our music industry is thriving only when we appear to be competing internationally, when our output raises sufficient capital to attract the attention of the people who really should have been paying attention in the first place. And of course, one can argue that it was always thus: that artistic edges have been shaved off in exchange for access and capital. But now technology has turned a razor into a meat grinder and flipped the supply chain on its head.
How can music that requires more than one listen (or even thirty seconds to get going) compete in a marketplace that monitors audience response in real time? How does structurally-reactionary art gain access to those very structures that it is critiquing? How can art that does not factor in commercial concerns – such as advertising, revenue, and so on – hope to succeed in a hyper-capitalist market place? These dilemmas are present across the musical food chain as specialist organisations continue to crumble in the face of ever-expanding technocratic machinations, mostly deserted in a media landscape that has been slowly absorbed by the global monolith.
‘As vibrant and as vital as it has ever been’
There is a line in the sand now. Just as successive generations decide where progress begins and ends – I am seeing people decry the absence of ‘great music’, ‘protest music’, etc., etc., or the crushing, cyclical canard of the current generation not being up to scratch.
It is all out there and it is not hard to find. Music is as vibrant and as vital as it has ever been. However, the access points are frequently controlled and poisoned to the point where people can unironically use a web browser to complain that music stopped when Kurt Cobain died or something.
Every year I see five to ten live acts who literally flip my brain on its head – and that’s after a lifetime of working in music and going to gigs. Audiences are smart and if you treat them like adults and show them the limitless possibilities of music then they will respond accordingly; treat them like objects to generate revenue at the mercy of capital then we end up roughly where we are now.
‘Nobody really gives one solitary shit abut us’
I grew up thinking everyone hated the Irish (via the UK media). From my late teens and onwards, I was lead to believe that everyone absolutely loves the Irish. But it was only when I realized that in the greater scheme things, nobody really gives one solitary shit about us that I began to understand my own identity, and where I plugged into the world both personally and artistically.
I started to learn how not to blink. The idea remains interesting with or without an audience; trying to plug directly into the capitalist monstrosity that the music industry was becoming was a recipe for electrocution.
Everything at the same time is no place for small, different things that need time and space to breathe: gig announcements competing with missing dogs and wellness memes for the surreal oxygen available in the greatest pile-on the world has ever seen. Thousands of years of localized learning and practice reconstituted as instant global spaghetti.
The challenge is to stay focused as an artist, and accept that a sub-subsistence existence in a lifetime of participation in the arts is now not just a distinct possibility, but a likelihood. And that the preservation of tradition and the space for new ideas to emerge and develop could well be an increasingly thankless and costly road.
It is not all bleak of course, not by a long shot. I don’t believe in golden generations, or lists, or any terms that attempt to run complex historical realities through a tabloid filter – I do believe in community and, right now, there are defiantly-specific, strong, and vibrant communities across genres appearing all over the country (with experienced, thoughtful documentarians capturing what is happening).
Uncompromising acts have muscled their way onto a bigger stage by the sheer force of their own momentum and billionaire-owned radio has been compelled to accept the odd blemish in their playlists. Collectives that are popping up in major cities and beyond, call the world as they see it, saying bullshit to rock mythology and transparent hype. This is the hope that I plug into when I wobble and wonder what the hell I am still doing in music.
‘Twenty-first century music promotion is weird’
I’m in my forties now and while I have plenty of energy and love for music, it has become increasingly tough to generate sufficient internal optimism to keep promoting touring acts. The contradictory force of the show itself being the panacea to hopelessness, and also, a source of profound anxiety right up to that point, is something that I wrestle with nearly every day of the year.
As Irish cities and towns are squeezed tighter and tighter and the cost of travelling with luggage continues to climb, inevitably, ticket prices for shows go up and the associated pressure increases. You try to reach people but you are literally shouting over Donald Trump. You shout louder and you realise that you are shouting over the latest tragedy to have befallen the city so you back off and then immediately feel guilty for not promoting the show properly. Twenty-first century music promotion is weird.
That’s the job so I can’t really complain, but at some point the space in my head is gonna be needed for reflection rather than fretting, and I’d also absolutely love a shot at music just as a hobby again. And if I cannot get out of this fantasy industry then I would, at the very least, like a shot at effecting structural change for the good of musicians. Almost nobody speaks for musicians any more.
For more information on Vincent Dermody’s work, see:
Alternating Current Festival, Dublin, 13-15 March 2020:
Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me about my connection to Christopher Hitchens. Such enquiries are clearly predicated on our common concerns. I suspect at one level my own modest bohemianism and libertarianism has invited comparison. Although we share an unbridled enthusiasm for talking Hitchens was, however, also a great listener, something I am struggling to get better at.
I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.
I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.
Despite a dreadful personal lifestyle in conventional terms, his achievements and outputs – to use a terms whose origin in economics he would have despised – as the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over thirty books, were nothing short of phenomenal. Lifestyle excesses did not undermine his craft or genius.
Non-compromised Intellect
As a man of letters, Hitchens is the last in the line of a Belle Époque tradition requiring a confidence trick that Voltaire, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, Albert Camusand, truthfully, few others have pulled off. These were all men who operated in a space of utter independence and autonomy; as journalists not beholden to anyone; as non-compromised intellects, projecting intelligences greater than any academic-for-hire.
Hitchens himself was a generalist and synthesiser, a man of substance, far removed from the letter writer to a newspaper dismissed as a crank by those who control the message and form the opinions in our dumbed-down zeitgeist.
He played a role for which there is no job description, as it really does not exist, for he himself defined it through sheer force of will. Self-selected and self-ordained, he was truly a law unto himself.
It helped that the power brokers adored his transgressive presence. Walking on the wild side, he was a unique, larger than life character. Albeit toadying up to the powerful ultimately mars his legacy.
He was fortunate to receive the adulation of Americans, and of course he panhandled to them. They loved to debate with this antichrist of an atheist.
Perhaps they believed such a troubled human being seemed ripe for religious conversion, which of course he never succumbed to. In fact, the very religious doctor who supervised his dying days was anxious for a death bed conversion that never came, all of which is splendidly documented in his book Mortality (2012).
He might not like the comparison, but it seems to me that like many sincerely committed religious people he held an innocent faith that public debate matters: that serious argument around fundamental questions counts, and continues to shape public opinion.
Support for Invasion of Iraq
Hitchens’s blinkered support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on hatred of religion in all its forms, and Islam in particular. He thus stands complicit by proxy in endorsing U.S. terrorism.
Hitchens failed to acknowledge that the US was acting as a terror state. When President Bush’s chief legal advisor Alberto Gonzalez described the Geneva Convention to be ‘quaint’ and ‘obsolete’[i] it opened to the door to the torture carried out in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Guantanamo Bay.
Having said that at least Hitchens had the good grace to undergo the torture of waterboarding himself under controlled conditions, that he wrote about in a famous Vanity Fair article, declaring ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture.’[ii]
I happen to share Hitchens’s hatred of extreme religious fundamentalism and jihadi terror tactics, but am not oblivious to their origins, and the even greater danger posed by the maniacs on the far-right of the Republican Party in the U.S.: that triage of evil, Post-Truth, moral relativism and religious fundamentalism that Noam Chomsky has pointed to.
U.S. Republican extremists, unlike anarchists or deluded and fragmented Islamic jihadists possess true wealth and power, making them really frightening.
Moreover, on account of his British upbringing Hitchens was not exposed to the Catholic fundamentalism I have encountered, which is in some respects the worst, and certainly the pettiest, of all.
Attack on Bill Clinton
There is much to be said in favour of Christopher Hitchens. He was after all, the great Satan to the religious right, predicting, along with Richard Dawkins, the rise of religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. He saw it all coming.
Indeed, Clinton was the beginning of the end. Bubba is like a fractured image of Trump and Steve Bannon and precursor to their redneck populism. With his forensic mind, Hitchens knew a spin merchant when he saw one.
Bill Clinton with Donald Trump c.2000.
Hitchens recognised Clinton as a Populist vulgarian, and ultimately a betrayer and subverter of the liberal cause. He could see that Clinton’s lack of spine, principle and integrity would allow the Neo-Cons to undermine the liberalism he claimed to stand for.
Clinton is a hillbilly product of an educational system prioritising policy wonking. Today we see far too much emphasis on graft and data retention along with carefully managed communication, which is the obverse of true argumentation. Thus discussion and debate is confined within ever-narrowing parameters.
Hitchens’s commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason and truth unquestionably dictated an intense dislike of the purveyors of Post-Truth nonsense.
Hitchens was not, however, as critical of U.S. neo-liberalism as he ought to have been, and his departure from Marxism led to obsequiousness towards the establishment. This ideology, or ‘false consciousness’ in Marxist terms, is laying waste to the world and Hitchens should have seen it coming.
Perhaps the cognitive dissonance, can be explained in material terms by this intellectual Marxist being on the neo-liberal payroll. He was where the money was, representing the opposing, other times supportive, viewpoints on Fox News. Yet he remained danger to all comers, a white knuckle ride on an unruly horse.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
In a sense Hitchens was intellectually mediocre, not unlike Jordan Peterson in that he pandered to the corporate market. The neo-liberal banqueted intellectual, who keeps it safe and ted-talky. Anything can be resolved by one market under god. Well no it cannot.
Thus, by side-tracking to Islam, supporting the Bushman wars and demonising Clinton he perversely and indirectly served Republican interests. His Marxism twisted and bent like a tattered cover effectively brought endorsement of U.S-led neo-liberalism.
Hitchens had an opulent and luxurious lifestyle, and I believe it blurred his judgment. Money can corrupt anyone. Indeed, a character in Martin Amis’s book Money (1984) was ostensibly based on him.
He liked to be indulged, flattered and entertained, and craved an audience too much. The scoop was all important. A neediness to be the centre of public attention was an obviously failing.
Hichens’s unscrupulous lifestyle, alcoholism and opportunism, some say, is also fictionally documented in Tom Wolfe’s iconic 1980s novel The Bonfire of The Vanities (1987). The fictional character that emerges is far from sympathetic.
That is not say he was not mostly correct in his arguments. We should judge the ideas rather than the man, who must have been difficult to live with.
Above all, Christopher Hitchens maintained the idea of public intellectualism, and was a champion of any cause he firmly believed in. He was like a successful Ignatius F O’ Reilly railing against a Confederacy of Dunces (1980), operating in what Gore Vidal termed ‘The Republic of Amnesia.’
Interestingly, Vidal anointed him as his successor and dauphin. But perhaps unsurprisingly they had a falling out, given there is little of the austere Brahmin in Christopher Hitchens.
Though he might bridle at the suggestion, Hichens is more like the smooth-talking William F. Buckley, the architect of U.S. neo-liberalism, at least in personality terms. A fractiousness and emotional incompatibility between Buckley and Vidal is also easy to detect in Best of Enemies, a recent documentary about their famous debates and interchanges during the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election.
Gore Vidal, 2009. Image: David Shankbone
A One-Off
Hitchens’s sheer force of personality and will is unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Even his enemies would concede he was a one-off, a public entertainer of such colour and intellect that he was guaranteed to give a performance, and unlike in Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist (1922), the public never tired of it.
But the heroic lifestyle, involving so much booze, and stage fright no doubt, killed him prematurely. We can, however, draw a few lessons from his intellectual legacy.
First, to be vigilant to public discourse being hijacked by spin merchants, quacks, false expertise and imbeciles that we now seem to be buying wholesale.
Secondly, to listen carefully to those who speak consequentially and even cause the necessary offence. These kind of people are being obliterated or subsumed by mindless internet chatter, and sound bites. As Hitchens famously said: ‘My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to defend it against anybody, anywhere and if you do not like it stand in line while I kick your ass.
Thirdly, to recognise that our moral compass of truth is being lost to a religous fundamentalism that appears to be winning.
Fourthly, we must question the pillars of society just as Hitchens interrogated the roles of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to devastating effect.
His book on Mother Theresa is in fact incendiary. The title the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) is a pun of true genius containing a veiled attack on Catholic attitudes towards sexuality, and so called charity.
Hitchens fillets her to show how the ostensible compassion and charity was really a mask for leaving people to die in appalling conditions, without adequate support mechanisms or proper treatment; in short demonstrating that she was a hypocrite.
Master of the Polemic
Excessively religious people like to be seen to be good as opposed to doing good. Tokenism holds sway. Many devoutly religious people I knew were all in favour of the Innocence ProjectI founded in Ireland; that is as long as it did not interfere with their interests, and of course funding was out of the question.
Hitchens was the acknowledged master of the polemic, and revived the tradition of the public essay. In this sense his easily digested and short books – beautifully written, precise and pungent – are not just in the line of his great hero George Orwell, but owe a debt also to the tradition of 18th century Anglo-Irish letters, encapsulated by figures such as Jonathan Swift or William Hazlitt.
His work could also be profoundly serious, at which point he ceased to be just a polemicist. His public education text on The Rights of Man (2006), juxtaposing Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is a perfect summary of the values of the constitutional Enlightenment. It condenses a lot of learning and is far better than many large treatises on the subject that go unread and unremembered.
I sense that he appealed to his contemporary audience as a generalist confronting legions of specialists. His ranging intellect contrasted with the products of an educational system that no longer permits all-rounders. When he engaged in his ideal forum of public debate he simply knew too much, and was too articulate with a ready supply of historical and literary allusions that dumbfounded his critics, putting the political spinmeisters on the back foot.
He achieved glory by unconventional methods, to put it mildly, and it must have astounded him that a third class degree, admittedly from Balliol in Oxford University, brought him so far. He bucked the specialist trend.
One Man Show
I wonder whether such a ribald, Rabelaisian figure of jollity and deadly accuracy could gain traction with an audience today. Where would his footholds to glory lie? His unruly lifestyle in these censorious times would probably ensure that he never got past first base.
At one level it was all a kind of performance. A one man show that went on and on. The clown prince. But what a show it was.
What his opponents lacked, and he possessed in spades, was depth and interdisciplinary context, and above all else a genius for sharp communication and barbed wit. He used words to nuclear effect and with antennae raised to the fraudulence and hypocrisy of our times.
He is sadly missed, for our real foes of Post-Truth, moral relativism and the repudiation of Enlightenment values hold a vice-like grip over public consciousness.
I suspect he was also a little big man, a voice that just had to be heard. Perhaps his oversized personality was a compensation for social maladjustment, and even Asperger Syndrome or similar. Like Oscar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) he banged on for the sake of the marginalised and those classified as deviant.
It was the transposition of his erudition and learning in a practical sense to the issues of his time that also defined him. Given the context in which he operated, his life was a minor miracle. A last popular gasp of learning and context that gained traction and a mass audience.
He once said that our lives only have meaning to the extent that we give them meaning, which is not to condone his attitude towards the women or the booze.
There was a craving for middle class acceptance for which he had to overcome an inherent vulgarity and crassness. America suited him as a pundit and pugilist of an anti-intellectual vulgarity, who could speak at their level. Being of a kind, he recognised the flaws in Clinton.
He was never quite an English gentleman. Never officer material.
In America he was one step, in savvy terms, above the vulgarity around him but still appealed at a frat-boy level. For in the kingdom of the blind man the one eyed man is king.
The thing that is currently occupying my attention is a new album that I’ll be releasing in April of this year. It’s a duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, a follow-up to our 2014 record ‘Laghdú’.
Dan is a pretty big influence on me: the instrument I play, the 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle, was something he dreamt up. He commissioned a Norwegain luthier, Salve Hakedal, to make the first one in 2010. You could think of it like a cross between traditional Norwegian hardanger fiddle and the baroque Viola d’Amore. Five of the strings are bowed, and the remaining five are sympathetic strings, their purpose being to add resonance to specific frequencies, like a selective in-built reverb.
The instrument really comes into its own when you tune it such that the harmonics of the bowed strings all start talking to each other and the sympathetic strings, and this means that we deviate from the standard practice of tuning in fifths. Tuning this instrument in fifths leads to paradoxes for tuning the sympathetic strings, and in any case it feels so much more alive in an ‘open’ tuning. These open tunings will be any combination of fourths, fifths, major and minor thirds and sixths, octaves and maybe the odd seventh, and each tuning possesses a character and colour of its own.
We call these alternative tunings ‘crosstunings’, and we like to write music where each of our instruments is tuned to a different but related crosstuning – this means that each instrument contains a different set of possibilities, and can play combinations on notes unavailable to the other. Our term for this is ‘complementary crosstunings’.
I find these alternate tunings to be a great tool for writing new music: it’s as though you’ve switched around the location of the letters on your keyboard, so that by typing your familiar finger patterns, you get new words for free. Or by adapting existing material to the new tuning, it obtains a new flavour through that particular prism.
laghdu Artwork.
We have been collaborating with the designer Rossi McAuley for the artwork on both albums, and the discussion for this latest album has been fascinating to me. We asked Rossi to reimagine what album artwork might mean in this age of digital downloads and disposable CDs.
The artwork he is producing has been liberated from the constraints of being a package for a disc and he is designing a triptych of posters for us, with a new visual musical language that expands on traditional notation to include information about the harmonic relationship between the notes.
I’ve been writing little computer programmes for myself to play with this notation and get a better understanding of how it works and how to read it. Below is an example of one set of complementary crosstunings we use.
‘Notation’
I like how our title ‘the Fate of Bones’ makes me think of musical notation as a skeleton, to be fleshed out every time we turn these symbols into sound. That title comes from a passage in W.G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ where he speaks of no man knowing the fate of his bones once he is dead. I guess the same goes for those things we leave in our wake, and part of Rossi’s idea is imagining somebody happening upon these posters in a hundred years’ time and seeking to communicate something to them, long after we and our music have been forgotten.
The artwork is also partly inspired by the Voyager Golden Record in this regard, in its aim to communicate ideas in distilled graphic form across distances of time and space. It’s important to us that this artwork be functional rather than just a thing of beauty: somebody literate in music should be able to decipher concrete ideas from studying it over time. This triptych of posters will have another function: it will form part of our performance of the music on the album, kind of like our ‘set’ on stage, which we will interact with for specific reasons.
One of our pieces, ‘Thirteen’, will be written out across all six sides of the posters, and will demand a certain choreography of us as we play it from the score. And each time we need to retune our instruments to a new set of complementary crosstunings, the triptych will provide us with the information we need. But it will also serve as a kind of meditation device as we tune, and in this regard it is inspired by Patrick Scott’s Meditation Tables.
We’ll be releasing the album in April, and perhaps we might share a few singles over the month or two leading up to it. It’s quite a unique thing, I’m looking forward to sharing it with the wider world.
