The rope.

I say that I remember, with complete clarity, how and where I stumbled over it. On a warm self-absorbed Saturday in April, I was on my knees in the Toc H bookshop near the Hythe Bridge, searching through a fourth or fifth box of tattered paperbacks with that special kind of tenderness that the book-lover reserves for the old and infirm.

(True romantics, of which I count myself one, can never pass up the untold possibilities of an old shoebox or orange crate parting at the seams with dozens of blanched dreaming spines, but they soon learn, as all romantics must, that care and caution are the real safeguards. All of us have at one time or another left most of a book’s cover adhering to its neighbour, or had a particularly thumbed specimen discorporate over one’s shoe. Suffice to say that if I ever do happen to make myself a paper doll... well, nevermind.)

I’ve found all manner of things, kneeling beneath trestle tables or at the feet of overstuffed bookshelves, breathing in that low-key dream smell of cheap paper, old ink, mould and spores. The Death Ship by B.L. Traven. Barrington Bayley. Gerald Kersh. Elisabeth Bowen. All messages in bottles, all drifting in the pale tide. It’s one reason to worship the moon, I’ll say that much, to be grateful for the tide.

A.L. Curtis was not a name that I recognised, but I never can resist someone who has the advantage of me, especially when his words come in cloth covers. The cloth had lost most of the title a long time before I’d gotten to it, so I eased his book free and laid it carefully in one palm. It opened a little too easily, and I shifted to steady myself. No sudden movements: very well. I turned the endpaper back. A.L. Curtis, it said, A Study of Recent Progress In Rope & Knot Magic. First printing. New York, 1926.

Sometimes one cannot help but recognise the hand of serendipity. Moments before it smacks you in the teeth is always a good time for this, so that as you stagger back spitting out blood and splintered enamel you can at least form the outline of a knowing smile. I had something like that smile on my face as I crossed the river. The book was wrapped in vinegar-paper under my arm, fat and weightless in the way that truly old books become.

But one of my main complaints with contemporary society, while I have your attention, is the simple poverty of expression afflicting many of our young people. People of A.L. Curtis’ generation had standards and reservations, what used to be called common courtesy. They did not parade the streets forcing unwelcome intimacies on strangers. They did not, as a rule, even drink to excess. But people these days, generally speaking, you understand, people these days just don’t know how to be nice. At the Toc H bookshop that was never a problem, I should clarify, but other places... other places I had come to feel less and less comfortable with.

Here is what A.L. Curtis had to say on the matter of other places:

It can be seen that even the most perilous entertainments developed by the American illusionists pale in their characteristically base impact when considered with the infamous so-called Rope Trick of the Indian fakirs, whose young male assistants are frequently dismembered or otherwise disappear without trace at the climax of this dubious entertainment, which, as I have found, is equalled only in its questionable taste by the conundrums it presents to the aspirant performer and by the numerous unreliable accounts of its exact proceedings. [Curtis’ emphasis. He continues:] Many Western spectators appear to have wilfully confused memories of what may, considering certain reports, be an intensely distressing spectacle.

This last passage had been underlined in pencil and marked approvingly: ‘Yes!’

I fancied I could detect the influence of imperialism here, but perhaps it was just the armchair. It was a high wing-backed thing that seemed to exert psychoactive influence over whatever I read while sat it. Once settled in this munificent work of furniture, books would read as if the sun had never set on the empire.

(At one point in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the emperor and his narrator settled peaceably in hammocks, conversing without speaking, as if each might only exist in the other’s imagination: what I am attempting to suggest is that this chair was clothed in the same cloth. (For all that I know, it still is.))

So, in any case, I got up and walked around the room. As I passed by the door for the second time, I picked up a large plastic bag with string handles, lifting it with some difficulty, and spilled its contents out onto the dining-table among all the maps and pamphlets.

Nothing that looks like rope looks should be quite so heavy. But rope does, or is, and in spite of my distrust--not helped by the braiding of royal blue and hot pink--I had been assured that this was, in italics, the quintessential stuff. I picked it up in one hand. It was wound in a fat figure-of-eight, sixty metres of it. Rope.

As anyone who has ever held a snake will tell you, holding rope of any kind feels nothing whatsoever like holding a snake. A snake feels alive--unless it is dead, that is--and beneath its scales, the thing will yield and shift about your touch without so much as your say-so. Snakes have their own agenda. Rope does none of these things, but there is something similarly uncanny about how it weighs in the hands, something that fouls the senses. I imagine one gets accustomed to it with regular exposure, fits of metaphysical introspection at 15,000 feet being unwelcome, but I have not, myself. And then--well, here is what happened:

At five o’clock the following morning, I locked the door behind me and climbed the stairs as lightly as I was able to the highest landing, where a small doorframe set into the wall admits the intrepid into the lower parts of the roof itself.

With care, one can almost stand up straight here, although I have never lost my terror of slipping from a joist and plunging one great clumsy hoof through the ceiling below. (At one time I had this recurring nightmare of falling a very great distance through space: losing my footing, I would find that the plaster and lath yielded not to a room but a great inky darkness through which I would continue to fall. After a matter of minutes I would crash through a tiled roof, into an attic, and just as quickly into darkness again. In my dream, this fall would last so long that I became able to mark birthdays since it began.) However, at the end of the building, where the roof descends to meet the floor in another meeting that makes the eye ache with wrongness, there is another door, a door fastened by a pin on a chain.

Outside the roof levels out for a few square feet at the end of the building. Friends of mine have used the place to get high before now, following some complex reasoning that the ideal environment for consuming intoxicants is the cold place spattered with bird shit that rewards the uncoordinated with an eighty foot drop onto pavement. A steel box resembling a newspaper dispenser holds a rope ladder, for emergency use. (It occurs to me, writing this, that I have no idea if it is still there: by now it may well have been used.)

In any case, I had brought my own rope. I'd loaded it into my wickerwork laundry basket and dragged it up here alongside me. It seemed to weigh as much as I did.

It occurred to me at or around this point that I had devoured A.L. Curtis' book, or the parts of it that interested me, in the space of a single weekend. By my standards, this counted as uncommonly swift.

Let me be clear: what I mean is that I had sat and read the twenty-one pages of his account and theory of the Indian rope trick, making thorough notes, and when I was quite satisfied that my preparations would be adequate, I had cut the pages from the binding of the book and methodically sliced them along the diagonal into thin regular strips.

(I have found that diagonal cuts are most effective at encouraging the fibres to separate, especially with older books. It is very important to ensure that all of the words are divided. It's a symbolic thing, I suppose, moreso than a practical consideration, although I cast a blind eye to the indefinite articles. A little too much like hard work, that. Betrays a lack of faith. Symbolic things.)

In the wreckage of my kitchen, I had then filled a stockpot with water and set it to boil. Once it was on a fine, rolling boil, I added two sliced onions and five tablespoons of vinegar before feeding the fragments of manuscript in a handful at at time, stirring slowly. By this time it was around two o'clock in the morning: there is an ovoid alarm clock with radium-green hands that sits on the kitchen counter which I inherited from my grandmother. I had figured that I would have around two hours remaining. It is important to keep stirring. After twenty minutes I saw that the fragments had begun to pulp and bloat, and I reduced the heat a little, putting a lid on the pot.

Over the next hour, I reviewed my notes and sat in my armchair, practicing knots. There are two in particular that Curtis emphasises, one being an implausible and seemingly pointless variation on the standard double sheet bend that he nonetheless is absolutely insistent about; I found that my hands kept deceiving me with vacant facility into tying the normal sheet bend, and so I kept practising it until I was quite certain of its movements. The second, he explained, should not be tied until the trick is underway, but I could see its movements clearly enough. It was an elegant thing: no arcana here. It didn't look especially dangerous.

Context is everything.

After another hour had passed, I had returned to the kitchen and inspected my word broth. The water ran thick and opaque now, and when I raised a forkful of fragments from it, I saw with satisfaction that they had become blank, flensed of whatever meaning my knife had left there.

I strained the contents of the pot into a bowl and set aside the pulped paper. It would harden and be spooned out into the waste disposal later, if I remembered. I laid a clean dishcloth over the bowl to draw out the worst of the steam. I couldn’t help but remember the first time. The memory caught at my chest like a boathook, and I had to sit down, at once, before I could die. At such times, gentle reader, it can be hard to maintain a sense of humour about one's past.

But it passed, as it always does, and when I returned to myself again, sitting by the empty litter tray among stunned clouds of newspaper, somehow I got up and carried the bowl in with me to sit at the dining table where I had left the rope. I sat back in the hard-backed chair and took a few deep breaths. The force of the memory had cowed me, and for a moment I felt like tipping the bowl out over the carpet, or emptying the thing from the window.

When I felt strong enough, I looked down into it. Whatever had existed of A.L. Curtis' thoughts on the rope trick gazed back up at me, swimming in its brave new ocean. In the words of that famous song, it was now or never.

I lifted the bowl up to my lips and drank it all, in steady patient gulps. When it has been prepared correctly, one doesn't taste the acids. They disappear. What you taste is just unlike anything else. It doesn't taste of paper, or ink, or any of the things you might expect. It's warm, and it's clear - well, fairly clear - but it's also heavy, but not in the way that honey is. It doesn't burn. It pushes its way into the body. It has the forceful weight of history. One might as well imagine what it feels like to swallow a month.

1926. Christ. I'd really done it this time.

And here I was, back in the now, still doing it, really doing it. As I stood and watched chalk lines were stealing out across the surface of the city, gable by gable, eave by eave. The Hythe shone brightly in the middle distance, refusing to belong. I felt unreal.

I zipped my jacket up across my chest and checked my feet. I'd worn the usual dusty trainers out onto the roof, but they had to go. I shoved them off one heel at a time and bent to pull up my stockings. Padded soles and arches. I rubbed a toe gingerly against the roof.

If everything was right, that is, if I had read and understood everything correctly, this should be fairly sensible. Esoteric, certainly, but perfectly straightforward in its own (hopelessly imprecise, perilous and unaccountable) fashion. What I couldn't entirely decide was why I was doing it. I seemed to move without motive.

I took a knife from my pocket and opened the basket. From the top of the coil I cut an arm-length, and then a second. These two I tied into an approximation of a loop - it had to be an approximation, Curtis had been very clear, not a loop itself - using the knot I had been told not to tie.

I closed my knife and studied the thing. It lay on my arm like nothing much in particular. I picked it up in one hand and swung it through the air; a cataclysmic event of staggering import did not happen. Very well.

I proceeded as planned. There was a tautness gathering in my stomach and my pelvis, but I took the severed lengths and tied them to the remainder of the rope. I had to stop myself halfway through, finding the usual knot beneath my fingers again, and undid it slowly, counting my steps. One, two. Three. I gave it a sound yank in both hands and set it down, satisfied, on the edge of the basket.

Curtis had mentioned that from the moment one completed this, it was important to be on one's guard for the unexpected. I did not remember this warning until several moments after I completed the knot, which is why I was not on guard when the end of the rope gave a jerk and shot straight up into the darkness, uncoiling from the basket so quickly that it crackled. Somewhere along its coiled length there must have been a hitch, as with a sudden choke the basket burst, most of it pinwheeling and sailing in splinters over the edge and into the empty road below.

The rushing stopped.

I looked up.

Curtis hadn't said anything about this.

The strange loop was now completely vanished from sight, not even a dot, while the remaining length of the rope described one long straight crawl up into the darkness. The other end trailed by my feet, hanging an inch or so above the roof.

(Once more, I found myself thinking that anything other than hot pink would have been a better choice.)

I looked around me. The city seemed darker now. I had barely heard the basket land, and I crept toward the edge just to see that it actually had, and had not simply acquired the taste for levitation from its contents. A sudden wave of vertigo rushed into me as I took the next step, and I felt an implacable push in the centre of my chest. No. I just couldn't take another step. It was the wrong direction. I could feel my stomach reaching for my mouth. I stepped back.

My head cleared with a few deep breaths, and it was a moment or two before I realised that I was leaning on the rope for support, one hand gripping it quite tightly. I looked down at where it rested, swaying lightly with my grip, and gave it a hard tug. It held.

I have never been scared of heights. When I was a young girl, for instance, I used to love to climb trees. Passionately, that is, and of course I wasn't supposed to. I'd fall out, now and then, and it would hurt - once I broke my thumb - but it was all so terribly worth it for that sensation of hanging in the higher branches with the swarm of life all about me, carried by the air like a spider. You can get a similar feeling in the water, swimming I mean, but it really isn't the same. Water has a certain quality to it, it has something akin to mass, one suspended in water is buoyant. Being in the air is really nothing like it, but most people have never had experience with it. Air will let you fall.

No sunlight where I was going. No swarm of life ecstatic. Or so I thought. I looked up again. It occurred to me then that predictions are fallible.

My jacket has deep pockets, and in one of them I had sealed a bottle of talcum powder and my gloves. I dusted and clapped my hands until they were ready, and strapped on the gloves. I tugged at my socks again and looked up. The boathook caught me again, blunt and deep. What was I doing?

For a certain amount of time I felt this deep, important ache push through my belly. I don't need to say that it felt like the summed total of every mistake, loss, frustration and disappointment that I'd bitten off and swallowed in my ridiculously brief life. I mean, people suffer, don't they? It just isn't news. It's not even especially meaningful. It's hardly, this is what I mean, it's hardly a matter of principle.

Oh, I thought, that, that’s what I’m doing, and reached out to grab hold of the rope. It swung just a little, enough to work with in any case, and I hauled my legs up off the roof and planted my feet against it.

There's nothing like it as a sensation, really. If you ever want to be assured that the material substance of your body is more plastic, heavier and far more separable than you ever supposed it should be, hanging from a rope is it.

I closed my eyes and reached up, inching as my feet struggled to seat themselves. You forget how, at first. This wave of panic settles in as you try to figure out how the hell to do it, choosing which limb to move at a time, which means choosing which limbs are left to hold you up in the air. It's painfully slow, and for a moment you are horribly tempted to look down, but you don't, because you don't want to see that you are all of four feet above the ground.

But this is it, you know. To a certain extent, that's how climbing works. You don't look down. You don't look up either, if you can help it. You merely dangle and climb as best you can, limb by limb, inch by inch if necessary. You understand that I make it sound easier than it is.

I won't try to explain what happened when I caught up with the loop. You'd never believe me, and besides, in the greater scheme of things nothing did happen: "I kept climbing, somehow." Things do drag at you. Even simple homesickness, looking down as one eventually can't help: all those sunlit dreaming streets, for instance, or the way the waters of the earth seem to lie still: it looks so whole, so benevolent, so detailed.

I could let go and give in at any time, should my spirit flag. As I have made my ascent, I have become quite blind, so that now I tell day from night by the warmth of the sun alone; but this much remains clear to me. The flesh can only do what it's told to, after all, and knowing in its chambers what we pretend we don't, it surrenders readily enough to the higher will.

This will be the lone achievement of my skill and knowledge, as a tree is the achievement of a seedling, and though I have long passed the point where I can see the world I leave behind, my memories seem to become clearer with every handhold. The air does not hold me aloft--it never will--but it does soothe. It's a condition to aspire to, which itself is something to do while waiting to die.

So I really do not exaggerate when I say that I can remember precisely how I fell forever through ceilings and rafters suspended in the darkness oceans of time apart; or that dear Marco's Venetian fables remain as vivid to me now as the unfortunate colours of the braid between my fingers; I do not even, as I have said, declaim to secure your attention when I tell you that I can remember with complete clarity how and where I stumbled across the book itself.

The book: I am sorry that I excised the pages, now. I am sorry, for that matter, that I left the kitchen in the state that it was in. When I say I am sorry, though, there is an abstraction at play here: it is not that it pains me to have done and not done these things. I suppose what I am saying is that I see simultaneously how they were necessary, in the immediate sense of the word, and not necessary, in the sense that a sense of perspective is not necessarily the same thing as a sense of scale. All of us go up the rope someday, of that I am certain: we all go climbing up to the moon.

I could have waited; but I was tired of waiting.

Public Writing

A story opens at the nape of Alec’s neck. It winds its way across the skullish hump of his shoulder down into the soft cleft beneath his arm. In the morning light, beside him in the bed, I sometimes study it. I trace the unfamiliar words as they weave themselves between follicles. Commas sprout unsuspecting hairs. I try to make sense of the story as it grows across his body, but the words – some of the letters in fact – are unfamiliar to me.

Some people conceive of themselves as a unitary part of a greater being: Alec is experimenting with public writing. Earlier today, in a second-hand bookshop, he encountered a well-thumbed architectural guide to the smaller churches of Zürich. It was a surprising find. Two aisles away, I was attempting to justify the purchase of a seven-volume edition of Burke’s essays, but I heard his exclamation through the shelves. He had found amid the swart, sanserif text pressed out in two dense columns, large black and white photographs of places he had known. Until that moment, he had not realised he had ever visited Zürich.

Sitting, as he is, in the café with his laptop; Alec has become the thing that disgusts him most. Sitting at one of the tight, red tables, vaulting inwardly out, fingers to the keys he is proclaiming he has some purpose in the world. Some point of being that is not only reasoned, but addressed. By sitting here, Alec is declaring himself. He is an object: a spectacle. Though nobody can read what it is he writes, he feels a certain guilt in this act. Like the words hidden beneath his t-shirt upon his body, he feels the admonishment of eyes both seen and unseen. Mainly they are unseen eyes. For those about him in the coffee shop do not look at Alec. He is just another person at a laptop. Alec is just another one of those guys.

One of those churches – he wishes now that he had bought the guide – one of those churches in the book, he had stumbled upon quite by chance whilst looking for the house where Joyce had lived while writing Ulysses. He remembered that now. There had been a museum in the house. A museum, or a library, and he had not gone in because it had been raining. Or it was closed on Mondays. Something like that.

He had gone inside the church, however. It had been obscured from the street by a high privet hedge, the dark leaves glistened – that was right, it had been raining – and he had entered and sat in one of the rows of pale wooden seats; dining chairs, really. He had sat there for an hour while he made up his mind what to do.

The difficulty, Alec tells me, is that there are not enough places where one can sit. As a rule he has an objection to cafés. He sees the requirement of buying a coffee as a tax upon solitude. Churches are as bad, he says. In this country, churches are mostly closed, or the larger ones request a donation. Out of guilt – or politeness I suggest, though Alec argues that politeness is a symptom of guilt – he estimates that he has spent over £100 this year in visiting the major English cathedrals alone. This is despite not having any firm conviction or interest in faith.

Churches have another disadvantage, Alec says. He has noticed a tendency for the staff in churches to come and speak to him. “Where are you from?” they sometimes ask. “Have you come far?” The subtext is Christ, though they have a guilt – a politeness – about raising that too. Sometimes they tell him about the history of the building. I know all this, Alec thinks. Alec wishes they would leave him alone.

Cafés have the advantage in this. The staff in cafés rarely speak to him. They have little interest in making him feel welcome because, solitary drinker that he is, they are generally anxious for Alec to leave. He takes up too many seats; he claims a table for himself; and he never buys more than one coffee. He cannot afford to. He usually cannot afford the first coffee alone.

There are also libraries. Alec is not sure about libraries. To look at him on paper, he is a man designed for the public library system. He is predestined to grow into the thick, bottle-bottom bifocals of the reader in Periodicals. He should, were the world as he imagined it, be happy amongst all those books. He should fit in with the dispossessed that congregate there. He could grow old with a creased lending card in his wallet and die knowing the furtive pleasure in keeping books overdue from beyond the grave. Only Alec is not sure about libraries. They have the advantage of being free. Their staff is generally unobtrusive. Only libraries suggest a purpose. Libraries are there to be consulted. You go to a library, Alec says, in order to consult books. He has no need for books right now. Books stop Alec from writing. The exposure to books make Alec realise the world of things that he should be writing, the duty to the wider subject, the great expansive fullness of the world; and they make him realise his own diminutive stature: an ant attempting to write the universe. If he writes in libraries, he feels guilty that people will see him doing this. They will see him ignoring the world. His back turned bluntly upon all those Roman histories, snubbing everything else for his own ends.

In libraries he finds himself contriving excuses for his presence. He finds himself constructing alternate narratives for being there. Should anyone ask – which certainly they would never do – he likes to have reserved some alibi for why he is there in the public library. “I am just working on…” he is ready to say.

Alec has never got to grips with his local library. He has never fully worked out where things are, or established where likeminded people – for surely there are others like him – go to sit. He has wandered around reading the bright yellow labels sellotaped to shelves, and he has read them off – local government, business studies, law – and he has known them all to be inapplicable to him. The only place Alec has found to work in the library, the only reasonable place where his presence would not have been too obtrusive, his alibi not seemed too false, has been amid the Marxist criticism, for the desks there are large and the subject is reasonably within his ken. At the library he sits, with three books chosen by weight from the shelves, one of them propped open, passively ignoring the contents; and this, this might seem a suitable place for Alec in the world. It’s not where he is, but this, one might think, would be a habitat he might fit into. Only the section is walled on one side by plate glass, etched with the council’s logo and optimistic tag-line, and Alec has realised he is overlooked there by the people who use the vending machine. Nobody comes in to read Das Kapital, but there is a reasonable expectation that four times in every hour, somebody within the building will want a Twix or Um Bongo.

And so, Alec finds himself here today, sitting in the café at one of the tight red tables. He is here because I am next door having my hair cut. I had suggested that Alec had his hair cut too, but for the last ten years he has taken care of his own hair, keeping it short with electric clippers, unaided by a mirror. I have seen him sometimes in his flat, crouched naked upon the kitchen floor, feeling his way around that unnatural nut like some ancient philosopher scratching for truth out of his skull. He knows every lump upon that thin fleshy surface, the soft brown ponds of moles, the brittle ridges and craters of the bone beneath. He shaves himself hairless with his eyes tightly closed, blotting out the reality of his furtive occupation, blotting out his nakedness, his shame. Alec cannot have his hair cut by other people. He cannot live out the passive conversation that strangers require him to deliver.

I have asked him about this on occasion. He has a preference for machines and for solitude. Yet, though he claims to be unable to survive the hairdresser, every month or so Alec subjects himself to the tattooist’s needle.

“Alec,” I have said, “surely that situation is the same, is more intimate; the penetration of ink beneath your skin invades you more than the scissors’ blade against your hair.”

“It is not the mechanism,” he says, “the tattooist only writes what I tell him to write.”

After he had left the church he had walked through the rain. His guidebook told him that one of few places open in Zürich on a Monday was a museum of printing in the university. He had thought about taking the tram, but resisted. Alec does not like spending money. The museum was situated at the end of a long corridor, and he was not entirely certain that he was supposed to be there. It felt like he was intruding, bursting into an academic department that had somehow found itself listed in a popular guidebook by mistake. There was an exhibition of expressionist lithographs of the 1950s. He took it in and promptly left.

Every month, the story gets longer. Does he know how it will end? As I trace the words wending themselves across the divots of his spine, through the thick rivulets that arch between the ribs across his flanks, I ask him how much more there is to go.

Alec shrugs.

“It is just a story,” he says, “it’s no big deal.”

“What is it about?” I ask him.

He shrugs again.

“It is my story,” he says, “it is mine, and in my native tongue.”

Some words repeat themselves. Some appear to have capitals. I wonder if Alec will one day run out of room.

“No,” he says, “that will never happen.”

By an arrangement of mirrors, the woman is showing me the back of my head. It is not how I had imagined it. I had not realised how my head tapered into my neck. I have quite a thin neck. It seems vulnerable; obscene. I am anxious to pay and leave. Alec is next door, sitting with his laptop and he is experimenting with public writing. He will not be finding it easy.

The Boy Lunt

As a child Cameron Lunt was conspicuously proud of the fact that he could walk quickly; a point which, had it been remembered would have seemed ironic, when aged twenty-two he was knocked to his death by a reversing ice cream van. Nonetheless, the Boy Lunt could walk quickly. Walking quickly was his thing. He would practice at home; an uncompetitive child, he would practice in the sitting room with the curtains drawn. I can walk quickly, thought Lunt, this what I excel at: the pace of my gait. Circuit training around the three-piece, pacesetting by the pirouetting mechanism of the Windsor mantle clock. It became an obsession. This is my greatest endeavour, thought Lunt, this is the thing I can do.

Though it was, of course, not his thing; it was not a thing at all. Nobody in real life actually values that, there’s no need or reason to be able to tread a course around a suburban sitting room at high speeds. Many people would actually consider it a disadvantage in life; a risk; a danger to the Waterford Crystal and Doulton ladies in their perpetual curtseys. “Cameron,” they would have said in later years, “Cameron, what are you doing? Cameron, stop doing that. Just sit down, Cameron. Just sit down.” Cameron Lunt did not have a thing, that was his thing. Walking quickly is not a thing.

II.

I have begun of late to think that time is not the other axis but Being, the centrality of stuff, is pitched against some other force. What forms the view when looking back is not a sense of quite how far I’ve come, but what is left there, unplundered, cast aside. And call this what you will – call it fetishism, call it delusion, thread the thought with pins to place it – I find that time, labouring deafly in the bottoms of drawers, I find that time, rusting its scarlet residue through dusty papers, I find that time has come unsprung.

This is no attack upon those brave incorporealists who work so hard to convince us that all of this is murk and dust. Or less than that: that all of this is isn’t. I am convinced their work is honourable, and I am not to argue that they’re not right. At times sitting here, aware of the silence which creeps impastoed with that tidy sense of presence – and I argue that it is only a sense we have of silence – I find myself trusting them. That, believers or not, we are still locked in the long shadow of chiliasm, putting too much weight upon bodily form; trusting that matter matters, and as a result time becomes our measure of that which is.

Donne in his pulpit in St. Paul’s saw that:

These two terms in our text, nunc and tunc, now and then, now in a glass, then face to face, now in part, then in perfection, these two secular terms, of which one designs the whole age of this world from the creation to the dissolution thereof, for all that is comprehended in this world now, and the other designs the everlastingness of the next world, for that incomprehensibleness is comprehended in the other word then—these two words that design such ages are now met in one day [1]

of which he writes of the Christian notion of the Last Judgement, of resurrection; but that sense of time contracting, I cannot but feel that that is everything, everything that is now. Notice that word ‘design’ that he uses: “one designs the whole age of this world”. What a curious task we have given ourselves that we must design our own being. That man, not content with the appearance that he exists has chosen to design himself anew.

You might argue that man is merely seeking to understand his presence in the world, but these two terms: ‘now’ and ‘then’ they are instruments of his own invention. So when Donne writes that these terms ‘design’ the world now and the world after, it is surely man who is making that design. Of course for Donne, this is simpler, for Donne there is a God who has designed all. But if we are without God then we face ourselves with a great responsibility; why have we chosen to design the world in these terms?

We have built this construct of history as a narrative; clothed ourselves with a notion of progression; liberally impastured or placed in ample cattle sheds this fatidic view that things happen. For what? Why predestine this design to end? Why, if we reject the impellent promise of a day of Judgement do we still live awaiting a future ending?

But you will say to me that it is natural. You will tell me that as our lives are finite. That as we will all die, it is prudent to build a world design with the premise of it ending. All things come to an end, you will say to me, this is our one certainty.

I am not going to disagree with you. Our current worldview is based upon such temporal assumptions. We have constructed many fixed narratives on the basis that our birth stretches far behind us at one unique point and our death awaits us at the horizon. We are ever linear, ever constant. This is our lifetime.

In Donne’s sermon, he refers to ‘now’ and ‘then’ as ‘secular terms’, by which he does not mean they are non-religious terms, but rather the word’s other meaning, that they are terms bound up with time, that they are epochal. Of course there is that other meaning too, that they are terms ‘of the world’ outside of the everlastingness promised by the church, and this is perhaps revealing; it points to that basic truth, that the world we have designed – and mark that the world exists without our designs upon it – is innated to be secular.
A series of blackouts – power shortages, I do not know what they are – have hampered the production of this text. Each time I come to restore what has been lost, I find that I write something different. Not terrifically so, the theme is the same, but the wording and focus differs. If I was of constant thought, if my mind was not but a series of particles in permanent flux, I would be able to produce the same text again. But I am continually changing, rearranging my patterns, reforming; to such a degree that I may even (as the incorporealists set forward) begin to doubt that this twitching bundle of neurons even amounts to that which might be termed ‘I’. It is no more than that; we trust in Kant that the phenomenal world is the creation of our own minds. But what minds? There is comfort in George Bernard Shaw’s introduction to The Irrational Knot which he wrote some twenty-five years after the novel’s publication:

At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot. Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since joined the majority. Fourth of this line, I cannot be expected to take any lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather. Even my personal recollections of him are becoming vague and overlaid with those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on the lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself to himself. [2]

We have developed an urgency to tell life stories to make sense of the chaos we find in our perceived Being; we use memory as a proof that we even exist. The ‘lies a man tells’ become more than tradition, they become what we are; linear narratives placed as verification of our pumping hearts and quivering sinew. They are pieced together, wired with coils of streaming copper through flesh – in sequence – our whole bodies constructed, designed out of these lies to give an account of how we came to be—yet all of this, all that we know and mention about ourselves—all of this is lies; and our compunction to lie? What causes our compunction to lie?

It is our design; our notion that we must make linear temporal sense. We must stand accountable, all of us on show, and existing; our minutes visible for scrutiny. We must construct some order of words with which to explain this conglomeratic ball of stuff that we term I, signalling off this particular bundle of atoms as important, distinct from those around it, and constant; extraordinarily constant. All of this is a fiction. Are we so grand to believe that if we cease to name our parts then they will cease to be?

The tide is retreating from Pope’s isthmus between birth and death:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man. [3]

We are placed there on this passage in a state which Pope terms ‘doubt’, and by viewing our state as being between two points we are trapped:

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much: [4]

This ‘Chaos of Thought’ that we find ourselves in is of our own design. We attempt to force our beings into rational narratives to make sense of them, even though this rationality is of our own construction. The proper study of mankind is only man if we maintain man’s dominance upon the universe, if we accept that man – man the singular – even exists beyond his atomic structure.

None of what I am saying here is new. We have known since the middle of the seventeenth century that the earth is a mere speck within a Copernican system. The universe is not constructed around this planet, and as such man’s role in the entire make-up can make only a flimsy claim on importance. Yet we have steadfastly refused to accept this fact. We have either ignored it, like Milton refusing modern science and clinging to Ptolemaic cosmology; or we have attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge to our own elevated sense of self, as in Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681). Yet with this knowledge our application of linear narratives to our own existence falls apart. As Perry Miller asked in the middle of the last century, ‘was an end of the world any longer thinkable, or artistically satisfactory’ once the earth’s position in the universe was known? Does the linear narrative of time even make sense if we are no longer waiting for a judgement day?

Yet it is a view we cling to even now. There is something of that promise of destruction that we feel comforted by. For what was offered by religion in the concept of the afterlife, in the judgement day was not in fact an ending, but indeed endinglessness. The church was structured around the promise of existence outside of time – temporal, secular – both these terms applied to the laity, but meaning ‘timely’, existing ‘of time’. What Donne describes of the Last Judgement is the point when now and then “are now met in one day”.

It must have seemed obvious to you that when I invoked Donne, that Eliot his rescuer, would not be far behind him; but as we all remember, it is here, throbbing in our collective memory of The Waste Land.

So much of our modern thought, our modern physics, is based upon this premise; that Einstein’s relativity led us to re-examine time with the notions of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ as simply that ‘persistent illusion.’ [6] Yet as a concept it was always there within Western theology, that to free ourselves from the chaos of living thought, the dissolution of time was always offered as salvation. Increasingly I am achieving this, shaping my hold upon the world as being without time. There is much that must be shed; the terminology I use: ‘increasingly’, ‘must’, ‘shaping’, ‘being’; all of these are secular terms, they are either constrained by tense, or betray a focus on progression, that there is a trust in a future state where all of this will be different. Yet it is possible, I am certain of that; as E. S. Pilkington described of his nightly meditations in South America:

I lay in this state listening to the deafening clamour of voices. We are told that our baring on the world exists only in the present, but there is this eternal noise that keeps me rigid. It is as though all voices from always are speaking at once, a dread clairaudience that cannot be shut out. Not just from the past, I hear words that are not spoken yet. We are told that the apocalypse will see the dead rise from their graves, but in the street I am aware of them, in the library they brush against my sleeve. I cannot but feel that the end of all time has already happened. [7]

What Pilkington achieved, albeit briefly so far as we can tell, was a breaking free from the present; time just another phenomenon like his atomic structure. I intend to shed this sense of self also, as E. T. Whittaker writes of copepods in his series of lectures The Beginning and End of the World:

we are struck by the fact that with them the individual counts for nothing, the race is everything [8]

It is my aim to live merely as matter. Matter indistinguishable from the matter that surrounds it and ungovern by time. Pilkington’s crude experiments in the 1930s – the blinding of his left eye with ink to restrict his perception of depth in the hope that objects might appear as one – these can be built upon. I am stuck that in these blackouts, thrown etiolated into the void, I am unable to distinguish my way around the phenomenal landscape. Syzygies collide with one another; all is equal all is same. “These two words that design such ages are now met in one day”.

[1] John Donne, sermon preached at St. Paul’s, Easter Sunday, 1628
[2] George Bernard Shaw, preface, The Irrational Knot
[3] Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle II
[4] Ibid.
[5] Perry Miller, ‘The End of the World’ in The William and Mary Quarterly, (Apr., 1951) pp. 172-191
[6] Albert Einstein, letter to the Besso family, (March 1955)
[7] E. S. Pilkington, ‘Observations on time and the past-prospect of death’ in Studies in Living Thought, (Mar., 1931) pp. 212-221
[8] E. T. Whittaker, The Beginning and End of the World, p.42

Davies On Conservation

Hello. I am not the most computer literate of people so I can hope this works out for the best but that is about the extent of my capacity, so please bear with me. I have been asked to write a short introduction for your publication to a series of articles that I will be writing about my activities in the countryside, which will be educational. My name is Mike Davies and it is a privilege to be speaking to you today. Thank you for reading.

I am thirty-seven years old, but I can remember with startling clarity the first time I found myself in the wilds of England. It was an aching August morning, at a weekend, and I was walking in the foothills of the Chiltern hills, not far outside Abingdon. The trees rang and buzzed with the swarming songs of insects, drowning out the birds far above in the canopy. I had not prepared very well for the conditions: my shirt was clinging to my shoulders and my back, sweat soaking through into my fleece. I was listless and depleted. I was thinking of deserts. I was thinking of the Sahara at night. I was dreaming, I think, of cool sands, how they turn blue by twilight. I had seen snowdrifts like that in these same hills once, what seemed like a lifetime ago. I was dreaming of how my body would settle into the sand, how it would shift about me. The same swifts that span and shrieked, the birds that were hidden from my sight by the variegated blaze of greens that formed the roof of this furnace, those same birds would call those deserts home come winter, when I would be rising and falling in the darkness again.

Each footfall struck rich fermentation from the soil. Hops and fern roots, the sharp smell of browning beech leaves. Dry and whirling, this nightingale floor, arching up in lazy curves of clay clinging to chalk. I remember thinking, I feel like I'm walking through a tinderbox. I remember hearing myself say it. My mouth water had thickened, and when I spat it was heavy with gelatin and smeared across my front. I batted at it and shook it from my arm, but it had caught there.

The ground banked steeply to my left as I kept on through the tall trees. The floor was full of space, great stretches of unturned earth bare but for minute, light-starved copses of scrub and the curling dust-drifts of fallen leaves. What sunlight reached us down here was pale and touched lightly, but my scalp and skin were swimming in sweat just the same. There was tawn in the air, is the best way I can put it, and it was heavy stuff to breathe. It was a dune, I imagined. The way the topsoil gave and slid a little beneath every labouring trudge. If I fell here, I thought there might be an avalanche, and before I choked on cindered leaves and rushing ground I would be quite alone, and quite silent. It would be over, of course, the whole silly business, in a matter of minutes. There was not enough, I realised thinking this, there was simply not enough of the stuff loose on the bank to rush down as my morbid thoughts had demanded, not enough to do this to me, but I forgave it. I forgave it that poverty.

Occupied with thoughts of my forgiveness, a handful of steps found me startled, standing as I was on old cracked concrete in the pitiless glare of what they call direct sunlight. I feel like a sausage, I thought, looking about with wide eyes, I will burst.

I had come to one of the old roads, a Forestry Commission lane that wound through the hills, gated and locked at either end, barely metalled by any contemporary sense of the word. In front of me a tall, trapezoidal tunnel had been bulldozed through the bank and out the other side. The shadows were deep darkening quickly to black, and they drew me forward. Cooler air came forward to meet me as it will over running water. I obeyed my instincts. I had nothing left.

I sat down slowly, peeling away my fleece from tired back and drenched arms, shirt sticking to me here and there as I moved, and I laid my back against the wall of the tunnel. The air was still, here, and I unbuttoned my shirt. I knew, short legs spread well out in front of me, that I could sit here for as long as I needed for days if I needed it and not be disturbed or unsettled. The sun would set and the night would pass over and perhaps I would see the woods lit up by moonlight, or perhaps I would not. I had forgotten what time of the month it was, what the date was.

The tunnel was humming, I realised, in a low unvarying voice. Here the insectile chatter was softened, blurred, the stone channel doing to the buzzes and shrieks what the walls of a church do to the voices of a choir.

I lay out slowly, as my tired muscles tightened and began to pull, and I dragged the wet bundle of my fleece under my head, and I lay there for a while, gazing across the pale, shadowed floor. It was strewn with tiny pebbles and stones and dust and twigs and things, and some of them were sticking into me, but I didn't mind, I couldn't. After a while, I think I slept. I remember dreaming, certainly. Strange dreams, they were, with the blaze of life shot through.

Julianne Moore

We've all had an instant Julianne Moore at one point or other. For many of us it reminds us of a childhood misspent collecting crash debris or tarantulas. Findus Julianne Moores were the height of sophistication in 1973 when they were first contrived, available in three flavours: battered trifle, honey spam and gosling. The craze for Julianne Moores led to ever moore (!!) bold experimental derivations from chemical food laboratories up and down the M1 corridor. Bird's Eye Julianne Moore Drummers, later joined by Mini Moore Kievs and the premium Julianne Moore Lattice were just a few of the products banned by the Common Market in 1978.

Yet how many of us have made a Julianne Moore at home? It could be easier and more economical than you think. To make a Julianne Moore to feed five good-sized land registry clerks you will need:

150g self raising stewing mutton or chops
6 large eggs (cubed)
Garden rice
Not runny honey. That other honey. About a handful.
Chips, to taste
3000lbs courgettes (optional)
A squeeze of nutmeg
A pinch of cider vinegar
Three tablespoons of red
Mixed peel (mixed)
Squirty clams (4)
3lbs salt
Gravy blacking
Hopscotch

Take your live mice and chase them through a bed of celeriac. Upset the eggs. Run at the nutmeg with the mixed peel, but don't let it congeal. Baste the honey with the stewing mutton or chops, and leave over day over night over day. When happy, mix through with gravy blacking, hopscotch and red. Begin the rice. Approach the chips with caution. Apply the courgettes throughout with alacrity (optional). End the rice. Pierce film lid and microwave for three minutes. Peel back the film and stir, and leave to stand.

Present in a tower on upside-down measuring jugs. Ideal with orange squash and paper hats.

And there you have it. Eat slowly and savour those memories of the winter of discontent and the rise of the National Front.

Notes of an unwritten article, erroneously published

BY TED DRINKLE

Some time in or before 1956, John Betjeman noted and recorded the existence of five privately owned lampposts in London, all of them along the Strand. The private ownership of light is an intriguing concept; it evokes a sense of unnecessary greed, perhaps recalling Delos David Harriman’s bold ruse in Heinlein’s 1949 novel The Man Who Sold the Moon, and yet historically it is perhaps not so remarkable. The fact that Betjeman comments on it at all, is as a subtle jibe at the LCC for their installation of new public lighting around the city. These five remained as oddities – survivors – “all of them” he writes, “are well designed and none of them in concrete.”
It is that side of Betjeman that seems somewhat curmudgeonly. Though concrete posts did not survive well, the implication that privately owned lighting was by its nature better, underplays the invaluable importance that public lighting schemes in the 1950s had on this country.
Private lighting is by its nature, largely piecemeal in its approach, with few noteworthy exceptions. In 1824, Paris was fitted with 11,205 street lamps, their lighting franchised out to enterprising individuals who would be made responsible for the illumination of twenty-five lamps during a forty minute period. Such extensive programmes were never seen in this country, however. Here, privately owned posts were the responsibility of individual shopkeepers or homeowners, and so their operation was rarely consistent.
Of those posts that Betjeman records, it would be interesting to know how many are surviving. Certainly the first, which stood by St. Clement Danes, seems to have gone. From his description of the post, I take it to have been at the end of Milford Lane, where The Graphic had originally positioned its premises in 1860. The Sun Engraving Company acquired this building some time around 1932, during a time of massive expansion. The company itself is of interest; aside from producing such popular publications as the Picture Post, Radio Times and Woman’s Own, it was at the forefront of developing colour photogravure in this country, building upon the work of that the Rembrandt Intaglio Company (which they bought in 1932) had pioneered at Lancaster, by running three single-fed colour machines in tandem.Milford House where the company had its city premises, was severely damaged by bombing in 1944, though astoundingly work continued there for the rest of the war years, printing government propaganda thanks to a repair grant which allowed the upper stories to be rebuilt. Such flimsy construction that it was, and the company having built a large print works out in Watford in 1952, they must have abandoned the site sometime around Betjeman’s observations and it has since been replaced by a large 1970s office block.

Procuring a Wife

taken from The Gentlemen's Service, April 1959

Hartsgrove Remembered

That summer at Hartsgrove; you brought us tumbling through the brooding rhododendron down the flanks of the ravine, to show us the ice house mossy and dun, said to be by Adam though there’s no record of that, where in 1941 while London awoke to find the Duveen galleries the least of its casualties, James Lees-Milne took tea here with your grandparents seated on milk stools but never wrote it down, and the finances of the family was moved into children’s confectionary; a site acquired on the edge of a northern council estate that had swelled like a dormer-windowed tumour on the neck of a sleepy village by a stream, fed by Lord Reith and the 1946 New Towns Act, there on an inauspicious piece of scrub and concrete, next to a cattle market that had been there since the sixteenth century, your grandfather, realising that the world was on the cusp of change, yet trusting always in sugar as his grandfather had done – though, he would point out to you, his breath a fog of whisky and pipe shag, this was not the same sugar, this was not the same – he invested in a man named Ostler who had been a pharmacist before the war and together they set about employing the people of the council estate making bright pink sherbets and packing them into jars, and the sickly scent of the baking sugar hung with sickly scent of the drying pig shit in the market opposite, and all worked together and all was a happy world, and you said it was a shame that we did not commemorate our nation’s confectioners the way that we do our generals and politicians, and you pointed out to us the spot where Constant Lambert lost his wristwatch tickling for trout, though there were none, and the place where Nash is said to have set his easel though the accounts of it are vague, and you brought us to the end of the ravine where a Victorian gardener had envisaged a grotto should be built, but never was, furnished with sea-shells and lit at night by candled lanterns, and here we met that dog with the orange glass eyes who told us that the ravine had originally been scoured by unemployed Welsh miners, an act of family philanthropy that had resulted in unusual Welsh influences in the local crafts and vernacular furniture around Hartsgrove, and the dog, which was balding and not altogether there and mounted on a plinth that wrongly attributed it to be a Field Vole, invited us back to meet his family, but you politely declined and later told me you were tired of conversing with the taxidermy of the estate, as indeed you had done for most of your childhood, your nanny it seems having been stuffed with shredded music manuscript, which was widely supposed to be a lost plate-engraving of something by Mendelssohn, though when she was cremated, a controversial act amid the largely catholic staff, it seemed she would not burn and upon removal from the oven was found to be mostly of clockwork, and you showed us her grave which was uncommonly positioned in the centre of the drawing room, and your mother had taken to using her cruciform, marble stone as a whatnot for the display of miniature porcelain windmills, which you allowed me to play with and I justly did spinning the moulded sails about on their tiny brass nails, and you told me she had never been to Holland, and I said they had windmills in Norfolk too, but you wouldn’t believe me, and you went off to ask her, and you never came back. I let myself out.

The Funerary Role of the Corvid in English Culture

Few of you will remember (youngsters that you are) the invaluable sacrifice made by corvids in the two centuries or so preceding the last. Few will have considered the thick satisfaction of their yolkless harming; absolving yourselves with that bready smear of indifference we have won, and boast, and cling to proudly like a shielding pelt. Few of you observe the common crow and think of what it, or rather what it’s forefathers, did for us – gave up for us – humbly and without flinching.

Much is made, and accepted, of the view that the death of Prince Albert marked the conception of modern mourning. We are ready to believe that the deceptive theatre of internment, the blackish gloss of jet, wore on to our common funeral rites only through the Queen’s depressive bereavement. Yet no real account is given for the many such funerals that precede that; of quite how ritual black mourning garbs were in the century before. The black-bordered letter, though prominently espoused throughout the 1860s in the practical rulebooks of epistolary correspondence, may be traced back as early as the 1720s, if not before. The black-plumed dray; kept locks of hair; Millais’ digging nuns in The Vale of Rest – all find prominent antecedents in the generation before them.

And central to this is the role of the crow. Often we will have marvelled at the chattering of young magpies in our flues; or looked upon the wan, pale eye of the jackdaw as it lays asphyxiated in the hearth. This daily event, sooty and sad, reminds us no doubt of seeing drowned Nordic fishermen in our childhood; brought ashore in their glossy, dark oilskins and lain out for identification beneath the harbour master’s clock – as if anyone could – and remembering how pale, how very nearly white their irises were. How innocent, in their oxygen-empty plum-bruised faces, those glassy marbles stood. We share this common heritage of grief. When MacNeice asks “is this why people have children? / To try and catch up with the ghosts of their own discoveries [?]” we might wonder upon the jackdaw, dead in the grate, whether we seek in it’s pale eyes some solace from those men we try to blot out – black out – upon the quayside.

Whether this is the origin of the association or not, it is hard to ignore the sacrifice. Crows have long since donated feathers to funereal wreaths; tattered drays with mourning; exposed our loss in dour millinery and feathered bunting – and if there is indeed an explosion in the burial industry in the nineteenth century, then the spark came not from the Queen, but from Coalbrookdale, and the inescapable union between the bird and chimney-pot. The chessboard rook is less a castle than a terracotta vent.

The middle-class nineteenth century townhouse, had both places for nesting, and first-floor balconies bedecked with drooling wrought iron – the practice for which was to dress such ornament in sable plumage to mark the passing of a family member in the house. The essayist Charles Caleb Colton records in the Gentleman’s Review of 1811 the sight of seeing “the whole of Fitzrovia festooned with the sable wings of birds” strung from the houses’ balconies; winding carrion lineaments of grief from windowed sill to weeping railing – all to mark the passing of the third Duke of Grafton, the former prime minister. It is said that Edith Fricker, the wife of the poet Robert Southey, was interred upon a mattress of drowsy choughs – chloroformed for the duration of the service – but which began to awaken, and flutter desperately, and peck for escape as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

It is by this simple, innocent sacrifice that we learn the crow’s humility. We may learn from it how it readily gave its life for our decadent weeping; how from busty raven to ample rook, we might follow its example and give of ourselves, unquestioningly, to the self-indulgence of others. No cry for attention is to be ignored; no feather, valued above the attentiveness to others. By corvids we are to flatter, and accept.

Robert Burns Crow

For the last two years I have been in close correspondence with the good people at HCUP about the viability of bringing about an edition of Robert Burns Crow’s Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System (1780) as part of their Historical Reprint Series. As with all of such publications, the aim would be to issue a new facsimile volume of the text, and therefore the task is dependent on obtaining a clear extant edition for electronic reformatting.

Burns Crow’s book however has suffered an unfortunate fate. Its original publication by John Orme of Piccadilly was halted by the outbreak of the Gordon Riots. Though Orme himself was not a papist, the publisher had recently handled the printing of Lord Mansfield’s collection of letters on the press, and as a consequence when violence erupted, Orme’s premises were subject to much disruption; windows were broken, machinery over-turned. Burns Crow’s book underwent a short and hurried run as a result.


Though Burns Crow was at that time the Regius Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, and the book had received not insubstantial promotion in the newspapers and journals of its day, the interference with Orme’s presses during the riots led to few complete editions of the much-awaited book ever reaching its subscribers. I have located letters that reveal up to 400 signatories having paid to receive copies. It is thought that no more than 67 of these payments were ever honoured.

Further problems arose. In Orme’s hurried attempts to resume business, it appears that many copies of the text were hastily stitched together with folds from other publications – no doubt arising from papers being scattered about the floor of the workshop during the unrest. Several copies appeared with large sections of blank paper, many with the text interwoven with an unidentified edition of pastoral verse.

Of those editions known to have survived, none is complete. The task as I presented it to HCUP would be to assemble for the first time a full edition of the Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System, presenting it not as a facsimile (as many of the pages are damaged) but as a freshly constructed electronic text.

The press were initially very interested, hoping no doubt that such a project would bring publicity to their enterprise. It’s the kind of thing the Today programme might just pick up – book finally published after 230 years – and I was instructed to set about work assembling the whole manuscript.

It has been a lengthy task, which I have had to fit around other research. I have struggled to find many surviving copies of Burns Crow’s text. In total there are four, and each suffers from a unique peculiarity in its printing. I have sat up late many nights, finding which pages relate to corresponding pages in the other editions.

As time has gone on, and HCUP have received completed sections from me, their interest seems to have waned. Last week I was told that they would not be publishing the Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System but they wished me luck in finding an alternative outlet for the work I have undertaken for the last two years.

I present below a section from the book, and invite anyone interested in bringing about the publication of this invaluable scientific text, to contact me here.

A comet, containing the requisite quantity of matter, whose perihelium distance from the sun coincides with that of Mercury, and moving from which in a direction contrary to the order of the signs, will, by striking the planet convert the elliptical orbit of the planet into a perfect circle whose radius should be equal to the distance of Mercury from the sun at the perihelium. The collision of two such bodies is supposed to be oblique and matter will be rendered still more evident, by taking this case of direct collision. An equivalent case might be effected by a collision at the aphelium, provided the velocity of the burnished heart and glowing eye, she dropped her pail and felt a sigh, espoused within; to scan the sky. God’s firmament beheld her then, the alder on the dreary fen, beshook with breezes held her stare, and kept the nymph a statue there, her face like marble and her hair, would preserve the motion of the jaculatory atoms in vigour, within the substance of such gross bodies and lead to the detection of one general property required in the figures of the quiescent atoms, namely a reticulated structure.


from Robert Burns Crow, Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System (1780)

Error Correction

In this lower spoke of the Northern Line it is not often time to buy one of those green desk lamps which TV lawyers have; there isn't enough fusty grandeur flung out by the colonnades (if there are any colonnades) to suggest the purchase in the first place. But the thought suddenly struck me and wouldn't be shaken away. I don't recall it crossing my mind that I'd have nowhere to put it. It's true, partially true, at least, in that while I did in theory have the space, I didn't have the right kind of desk (I still don't have a desk at all), or the right kind of room; and those things are a good degree more crucial. We play to these eddies, anyway, little local short-lived narrative whorls which are worthwhile, worthwhile because even a transitory spring in your step is a spring in your step, and is good and vital. And, despite being by now on the escalator and so doing no actual stepping, I had one of these, having made my mind up. It would have a brassy base, and a green shade. The switch preferably black.

Buying it, even trying to buy it, in the end, was something I fell before leaving the station into deciding against. Not for reasons of space (which as I mentioned before were really not reasons at all), nor either for the vague aesthetic problem of how to situate it somewhere suitable in my room (I didn't at the time even have a room); it wasn't even that it occurred to me (which it ought to have done) that I hadn't the first idea where to search for this lamp. It would have been around the time I pulled my travelcard out of the barrier. I strode, bashed through the plastic saloon-bar gates, enthusiastically, purposefully now, accompanied in my head by conical-bore brass instruments, timpani, that kind of thing, as well as for some reason the sensation of wearing brogues (I wasn't), and a brief desire to buy a newspaper and hold it under my arm the way a businessman would, and walk down the high street in that angular way, full of compact intent and pinstriped vigour. Thinking about it now, with the benefit of so much hindsight (and a red anglepoise), it's probably that I realised, in this case, that not even trying might, for once, in the end, be less hurtful than actually succeeding, and needing thereafter to confront something like consequences, and, most likely, their having been misjudged.

A fortnight later I was overcome with a similar momentary pang involving a leather-bound appointments diary like the one my piano teacher used to have. I gathered myself to deliberate, somewhere airy and crisp in West London, and bought one, and sat down with a coffee to write my name and address in the front with an equally new pen, a real treat of a moment, but haven't used it since, almost certainly because I never have anything to be on time for. I'll not throw it away, perhaps because it was relatively expensive, but I've let it slip to the bottom of a pile somewhere and will let it stay there. Having been right about the lamp is on the back-burner as something to admit later (if it turns out to be the case).

Fields (1993)

That night there was an open quality to the sky above my house, as if the upper parts of it had been cut away to lay the dusk open to the vacuum beyond. The lights shone farther, the colours were richer, and the darkness came faster. And so it was possible to stand outside in the pool of lamplight by the screen door, looking up toward the zenith where the darkness was greatest, and think that I was witnessing the first pinholes forced through the cooling cerements of the day, as I could every night. This is what you see when you look up at the sky at night from a sufficiently remote place: you see the indifference of the universe. Although it may be that what finally meets your eyes when you turn them upward is so old that 'sight' is no longer the right word for what happens there.

It is kindly in its collapse, though. We see a face in the moon or a crustacean in the stars, and suddenly the distance is lesser because the terrain more familiar. Just the stark fact of the gaze itself, spanning light years. That much is our work—my work: I was doing it, just then, listening to the moths hitting white-painted slats, lighting and re-lighting my cigarette, looking up and clicking the tendons in my ankles and naming things. On the big codex for the taking. The shrew. The vagabond. The ribcage. The sleeping nun. The spirit level. The loaf. Something scurried past on the decking; I looked down, didn’t see it, and winced at the sudden brightness. It seemed crucial not to look back up before going back in. So I didn’t. I gathered my things, a little too much to carry, and, in three attempts, pushed the door open with my shoulder.

But this is how you get on with it, afterwards. It doesn’t matter how heavy things get, the foot goes on lifting up and sinking back down and pushing you along, one footfall at a time. To keep moving, that’s the important thing, the best thing. It might be the only thing. I was at the kitchen table now, slipping the two brimming canvas bags onboard. Voices from the radio spoke to one another at the sink where the light shone. I eased the three packing tubes onto the top of the bags delicately and then handed them down to the table. I shut the door. I walked to the sink and took a glass from the drainer. Nothing quite seemed to make it to the cupboard these days. Things just crossed from one end of the counter to the other. I wiped the rim of the glass where my lips would go and filled it almost to the top with cool, clear water. I sat myself down to drink it before I put my hands out flat and started to cry.

Dinner at the petrol station

For around two weeks, I had been stopping there on the way home from work. I was doing a lot of overtime and having a pretty rough time as a result. Actually, that isn't quite accurate. I was having a pretty rough time at home, and as a result I was doing a lot of overtime.

I was living in this flat with a nurse and her boyfriend. He had a tattoo of the Alien emerging from his shoulder and was interested in home cinema and high-performance motorcycles. We got on alright, but I was absorbed in my own anxieties most of the time and so I avoided having anything to do with them on general principle.

This was the routine: I would leave my office somewhere between five and six o'clock, with the code I was writing locked away for the night, and I'd nurse some well-worn tapes on the train ride home. I would step out under the low arch of the train station with my ears firmly plugged, and walk home past the allotments and training fields in the dark. Every night a different tape. I didn't have a stereo, so whenever I visited my parents I made more. By the time I left the job, I had over a hundred. Many were scratchy tapes of my parents' record collection, which I found very comforting to listen to.

At first I'd been stopping in for a yoghurt or a very occasional chocolate bar, but after a while I began to buy most of my food from the convenience store attached to the petrol station. Cornflakes, packed sandwiches, cartons of milk, microwave curry.

I don't recall exactly when I became scared of using the kitchen. I had a couple of cupboards there where I had been storing food, and of course some space in the refrigerator. One time I almost blocked the sink, which I can believe would have been the root of it – but I don't remember.

It was a high and blazing summer that year. They began sending us home from the office after the air-conditioning broke down, as the architect had put in windows that couldn't be opened and we had all begun to cook in our cubes. Everywhere I went, my shirt stuck to my back. Appetite dripped out of me steadily. One evening, I began to successfully picture myself as a lobster. I was having a lot of strange dreams.

It was hot without mercy or interruption and now I had lost interest in cooking for myself. I had already lost interest in ironing my laundry, reading books, listening to the radio, drawing, and staying in touch with my friends. I would have retreated into my own private realm, but it seemed like too much effort. Most of the time I sat staring at a computer on a wooden chair that I'd borrowed from someone.

Food I bought from the petrol station was generally dismal and expensive, but I didn't care. I had long since given up on all but the most petty satisfactions. Besides, it meant that I didn't have to deal with the kitchen. The kitchen was too full of other people's things. My own room, which was also too full of things, somehow offered nicer views.

All the same, it bothered me somehow. After a few months, I realised one morning that it had the same wallpaper as the room where I had recuperated from measles five years previously, and all became clear.

I had been eighteen, and for most of two weeks I had laid up with my body transformed into something I didn't recognise. I clearly remembered watching from the depths of delirium as the geometric pattern of the wallpaper slipped and whirled. I had seen bombed-out buildings, fleets of swarming black helicopters, deserted streets and clouds of wasps appear within the floating, shifting shapes.

I began to wish I'd never taken the flat, but somehow it never occurred to me to look for another one. That would have been impolite. Nonetheless, my dreams were beginning to bother me. Once I was in a lighthouse off the coast of the Azores, jerry-rigging a sound-weapon to be aimed at the United States, where a lizard the size of Canada had torn itself from the earth - what had once been Toronto was what it had for a brow - and was devouring entire states at a time. Its fangs drooled oil and its hide was starred with seams of coal. I know these things because I looked at it through a telescope.

I took out the 100W light-bulb and installed a weaker one. Eventually, I reached something of a crisis point. I developed a justification for leaving my computer unplugged and switched off, and with a little stockpiled cash, I bought a stack of paperbacks and a few records, and for about a month I did nothing but read them.

For those long evenings I sat comfortably in my room, reading silently and voraciously by the light of the sunset outside. The windows opened on the little courtyard, and since the tenants of the downstairs flat had apparently just discovered Belle & Sebastian, their music drifted easily up into my room all night.

In time, life began to draw back some of its colour and salt. A friend of mine had invited me to visit, and for five days I was amongst his friends. I was invited to lessons in martial arts where I learned for the first time how to throw a punch. We relaxed in the glorious green parks of Oxford and patiently endured each other's favourite records at night.

What is it in the nature of the things we remember, that each memory contains worlds within worlds? I am trying to draw out the character of these separate places into this writing, and as I look through them each surviving memory is its own little nourishment. The petrol station was there, and the diseased patch of concrete by the garages was there, and the square of lino cut away where the cat had destroyed a bird was there...

There's just no end to it.

Things That Come and Go

Things That Come and Go was a Ladybird series of educational children's books published between 1968 and 1971.

Each book explores a different topic through the eyes of two children, Klaus and Ingrid. All of the books are small, thin hardback volumes with 56 pages, measuring 112×170 mm. They consist of text on a left page and an illustration on the facing right page, drawn by artists Harry Wingfield, Martin Aitchison, Frank Hampson, Patrick Caulfield and Francis Bacon. The illustrations vary in style from books to book, depending on artist, but Klaus and Ingrid are recognisable throughout: he for his sweeping side parting and scar, she for her severe bob and thick bottle-glass spectacles.

There were nine published in all:

Klaus and Ingrid Miss a Vital Train Connection (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Wrestle with Grief (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Push Marcia Under a Truck (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Experience Ennui (1969)
Klaus and Ingrid are Left Behind with Strangers (1969)
Klaus and Ingrid are Wheat Intolerant (1970)
Klaus and Ingrid Learn About Mummy's Swinging Parties (1970)
Klaus and Ingrid Get Into Jazz (1971)
Klaus and Ingrid Love Smoking (1971)

The series was discontinued when they could no longer compete with Peter and Jane, who by this point were incestuous hippy teenagers appearing in a number of explicit Ladybirdsploitation books of the early '70s.

from "Fungi of London, 3rd ed." (1979), by E. C. Harle

[...]

Also thought extinct but recently identified in a few isolated pockets is the Hallarmorn Fungus, or Hallarmorn's Horn (this latter appellation, along with variations -- Hallarm, Hallam, Hunnam, even Hellmann -- is, it is worth noting, both a widespread error and a tautology: firstly, the works of its supposed namesake, Dr. A. A. Hallarman, make no mention whatsoever of the fungus; and, secondly, the word itself is much older, and a corruption of alarum horn).

The mycelium is extremely similar to that of the stinkhorn families, and for most purposes the descriptions of those (see Ch. 3) will suffice. The fruiting body is of much more interest and is shown below:

[diagram]

Notable particularly, and not sufficiently conveyed here, is the composition of the stem, which always extends out sideways, widening to a maximum diameter of three inches, and curves slightly upward. Unlike the stinkhorns, it is not spongiform, but extremely 'woody' and made of long, thin fibres, in which can be found cellular material cannibalized from the host organism with uncommon veracity. This is why the base of the horn is often the same colour as the flesh of the host organism -- usually beech or birch -- as it is almost entirely formed from it. The body from there outward is usually a fierce red, while the leathery carapace at the end (the spore-producing surface) is mottled grey and yellow. This surface is slightly convex and extremely tough.

[...]

The spores it releases are unique not in that they are hallucinogenic when inhaled, but in the speed (effective in thirty seconds, often less), duration (active for up to 36 hours), and the sheer specificity of the visions produced. Accounts dating back as far as The Harley Lyrics (c. 1340) can be found, every single one of which may differ in detail but strongly features three aspects:

1. Vivid visual hallucinations of the fruiting body of the fungus erupting from an eye-shaped bloody aperture in the top of the left calf, just below the crook of the knee, of the person hallucinating;
2. An overwhelming sense of absolute threat, of which the imagined fruiting body is functioning as an unignorable warning;
3. The conversion of all real-world sensory data into an experience which might best be summed up as a circumscription (usually circular), followed by an eruption within those parameters; and acute panic that while this is definitely what is being warned against, it is not known why.

The most famous experimenter was perhaps Aldous Huxley, whose own account has been lost, but reproducing the responses of two of his friends, notated by Huxley on the same occasion, might help to clarify the above points:

What I remember most is the puddle of petrol, which I suppose now was just the gramophone, and the silt which dredged slowly to its edges until it formed a solid white ring. That in itself was perturbing but there was then a conflagration when I tried to approach. And, yes, that would be where I recognized just how dangerous this puddle was, not for its being on fire, but for some other, unfathomable reason. And I looked at the back of my leg and the Hallaman [sic.] was there, just as dangerous, but furious like you wouldn't believe, bright red. I felt sick that this thing visibly had fibrous bone and muscle and skin -- my bone and muscle and skin -- for its first two inches. Christ, I think I heard it creak, as well, though of course it didn't move and I don't recall seeing it grow. Sick but also I had to feel grateful, otherwise I wouldn't have known how damned perilous was this burning puddle, or the rubber bands with bubbles stretched across them (these burst in a flurry of cacti spines), or the fact that every one of my fingernails turned without my noticing into a coin, with a thick brass rim; the centres froze then and cracked, along with my fingers, the pain in my fingers was excruciating. I suppose the hallucinogens are still slightly active, my fingertips still feel like they might indeed be made of ice. [...]

-- "P. M."

And also:

... Pretty bizarre, yes. Not at all like the others. The fury was immense, unbelievable, not sure whether it was mine or -- and this will sound absurd -- the mushroom's. Not that it particularly resembled a mushroom but I was forced to think it into being one, the fact of it was far too off-kilter otherwise, it shook me entirely, that much, well, that much anger. And the anger, oh, it was deathly, not like loss... but like something impending, heaven knows what, but it turned the smallest things bitter and acid and fenced (if that makes sense), before puffing them away, usually in down or feathers but sometimes in flames, or leaves, or anything like that. The ashtray at one point was suddenly covered in salt, along its sides, and I couldn't remove it, there seemed always to be more, covering the rim, and I fussed over this for a while until I heard, or felt, or something, this thing on my leg, saying, this is bad, it is definitely bad. The ashtray then came up in a huge burst of wind full of photography film, or ticker tape, I wasn't sure, and the salt blew away. There was plenty more of this; a ring then an explosion at every turn. Funny business, certainly! Not one I'd leap to take again.

-- "A. J. E."

[...]

Eating of the fruiting body is not recommended -- the taste is mediocre -- but is thought only to be harmful within 48 hours of consuming alcohol.

[...]