Overlooking Faxaflói Bay

Overlooking Faxafloi Bay

Reykjavik, May 2015

Thank goodness that I have found a pen. I cannot see this and not write, the beauty is almost beyond belief. I have just been reading Nan Hudson’s talk of Scottish ‘glamourie’ and ‘witcherie’ – yet here it is before me now. The view beyond the bar – a view of the beyond. I am perched on cold gneiss rock boulders on the edge of the North Sea. They are larger than cannonballs and  punctured with cavities and air holes. The sea begins two metres from where my feet dangle and extends as far as the eye can see – past the open gateways of the Reykjavik city old harbour and into the sky. The sea is as ‘bland’ as silk as Hudson would have it, like a shift of sheer blue that occasionally crimps and undulates. The mountains beyond are blueberries and rich and mauve as lapis. Their colours bleed into the silvered shimmering of the sea which becomes incandescent with the light of the sunset. A great life seems to lie beneath the sea, something as somnolent and purposeful as the families of deep-sea leviathans which wind mysteriously beneath its surface. The sail of a small yacht can be seen faintly in the far distance. The flat puddle-like contours of Viđey glow like discs of pure gold. The sun is returning to its core, which like the whales, are buried in darkness. I watch tussocks of seaweed waving and stirring beneath me. Bobtails and spears of cloud unspool above my head. The sea has become a mirror for the clouds. I am left with black-blue rock and a black-blue sea.

It reminds me of an aphorism from an old Icelandic folk verse:

By fate’s swirling stream

each man is swept as he may; 

we proceed in a mysterious dream 

on life’s dark moments’ way.

Iceland: A Fragmentary Approach

 Again a driver

Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

Upon his deadly journey: again some writer

Runs howling to his art.

– The final lines of W.H. Auden’s “Letter to Christopher Isherwood” in Letters from Iceland

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In 1936 W.H. Auden embarked on a three month journey to Iceland and was later joined by fellow poet and friend Louis MacNeice. What remains of their trip together is a frivolous travel and verse account that they pieced together through whimsy, some effort, and most of all fun. It pays tribute to what great writers both men were – showing them in their less premeditated and polished verse selves, but nevertheless the persona of the book is still one loaded with both men’s sense of humour, personality and infectious desire to be as studious and capricious as possible. As Auden concluded in his opening letter to Isherwood in a characteristically friendly and self-deprecating aside: “The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.”

Icelandic coastal landscape

Despite all the travelogue’s quirks it does also reflect Auden’s ever-present ability to see to the heart of a matter. His powers of perception as a traveller, writer and student of human nature are always preeminent. In fact one of the things that really struck me when I started reading his book, with several weeks experience of living in Iceland now behind me, was how relevant and faithful to its subject matter, it still appeared to be. All of Auden’s facetious remarks about not being able to find a decent brandy in Reykjavik or the local ‘artificial lake’ that it boasted in its historical heart, even his more slanted and critical remarks, were things I felt a twenty-first century reader could relate to. This could be in part due to two things: firstly the timelessness of a really good piece of travel writing – after all perhaps our cultures and societies do not change as much as we would hope they do – or Iceland’s immunity to the constant laws of change that affect life elsewhere in Europe. I would perhaps be hesitant about making such a sweeping generalisation, were this idea not itself constantly impressed upon me by many of the Icelanders I spoke to personally. One historian I met claimed: “It is widely acknowledged that Iceland did not modernise till after the war.” World War II that is. If he is right, given the small population size and the special atmosphere of containment that almost all visitors feel when they arrive in Iceland, perhaps it is possible that I could still relate personally to a travel book written in the 1930s. Of course there are parts of Auden’s book that are hideous and he is guilty at times of sounding like a total snob. But Auden was not afraid of making his opinions on taste and art freely available, he was a man and part of that generation. Thank goodness, his wisdom and intelligence generally protect him from any serious gaffs, however there are still moments when you read the book that you feel hang about, what gives you the right to speak about the whole country like that?! 

Of course everyone was at it. I can still imagine Lawrence pattering out huge chunks of prose in Sardinia with only a passing knowledge of the place. I don’t really think these writers were elitists or cultural supremacists, their writing is just implicated in the old thumbscrew that the author sounds like the authority. But both of these men had a horror of authority and would not have seem themselves as experts of countries they had simply passed through. The problem is with us, then, the readers, and how we perceive the writings of talented white English male travellers. It’s a question of trying not to be anachronistic and juding them by the standards we hold today. Anyway, Auden’s saving grace is his sense of humour and tendency towards satire, which frequently acknowledges his own folly and pretension. Auden was not one to hold back his criticism, sometimes his scepticism stings even if it is true.

Take this mischeavious passage on Reykjavik in answer to Isherwood’s Question: “What does R. look like?”

There is no good building stone. The new suburban houses are built of concrete in sombre colours. The three chief buildings are the Roman Catholic church, the (unfinished) theatre and the students’ hostel, which looks like waiting-rooms of an airport. There is a sports ground, with a running track and tennis courts, where the young men play most f the night. In the middle of the town there is a shallow artificial lake full of terns and wild duck. The town peters out into flat rusty-brown lava-fields, scattered shacks surrounded by wire fencing, stockfish drying in washing-lines and a few white hens. Further down the coast, the lava is dotted with what look like huge laundry-baskets; these are really compact heaps of drying fish covered with tarpaulin. The weather changes with extraordinary rapidity: one moment the rain blots out everything, the next, the sun is shining behind clouds, filling the air with an intense luminous light in which you can see for miles, so that every detail of the cone-shaped mountains stands out needle-sharp against an orange sky. There is one peak which is always bright pink.

Despite Auden’s reserve and economy of language, you get the sense throughout the book that he was actually very fond of Iceland. This is recapitaulated in the foreward to the 1967 edition: Iceland was were he spent “three of the happiest months” of an “up till that moment very happy life.”

However, this meditation on Auden leads us back to a question I gestured at before: how can we prevent travel writing from sounding like judgement? Because of course all good works of criticism are also works of judgement. But making judgements about places and people seems far more complicated and loaded with problems than about a work of art which threatens to hurt only the feelings of the creator. In any case how can we place a value judgement on a culture, an environment, on local manners and habits? The only answer I can see is that the modern work of travel writing is not a work of criticism, it is an observation of a place that freely admits the subjective laws of experience and cogitation that guide it. It is reportage not critique.

Why do I begin my own humble letters from Iceland by harking back to Auden and Macneice’s? Not, I assure, because I see my work on any level approaching theirs, just to contextualise my own obviously unmethodical approach to writing about Iceland. In fact, though I wrote a fair amount of material about Iceland when I was there, there was no logic to how it was recorded or stored. I wrote on napkins, on exhibition tickets, backs of books, anything made of paper. I had very little money at the time. Collating this material together has raised a few eyebrows in the British Library. However, I think the action-based real-world experiences I had in Iceland provide a healthy counterpart to my more dream-like experiences in Ghent. I hope you enjoy reading my letters and that you also find the time, one day, to visit Iceland yourself.

Wales: Making a Decision

The Train from Aberystwyth to Wolverhampton, 19.30

I think that I have been travelling today almost non-stop for seven hours. Now I face another seven hours back. I have been curling and snaking along rail tracks – a passage eased by drizzling rain and a sky smeared with green mist. I have bypassed a border into Wales, leaving a landscape crisscrossed by electricity pylons and half-empty canals behind me; it was the post-industrial landscape of the English Midlands. Now I have entered another kind of geography, what the property agent I met in Aberystwyth described as an accredited Unesco ‘Biosphere’ region.  I do not know exactly what Unesco means by ‘biosphere’ in this context – but I understand the urge to protect this area; to delimit it as somehow special, and to attempt to give it a label. That’s because there is a quality about the stretch of coastline scrolling along the edge of the Irish Sea with its backdrop of low mountain summits that is very unique indeed. It is special: a ‘sphere’ or aura of beauty clings to it. Do you know how to say ‘beauty’ in Welsh? I read the word on the right hand side of a bilingual Boots pharmacy. It’s Hardffych.

There is something ‘hard’ about beauty. It is difficult to resist. And so, in a word, has it all been. It is difficult to resist the prospect of living in this area, difficult to resist the prospect of that cosy two-bedroom apartment high in the loft of a former Victorian holiday guesthouse with bay windows overlooking the sea. As I stood on the Aberystwyth town pier I watched a vast congress of migratory birds swirling about in the twilit sky. There were like a swarm of black bees: contracting, expanding and bending into the most incredible shapes imaginable. At one point the cluster of house martins split off into two scintillating black blobs that flattened into hemispheres and turned about each other in perfect disc-shaped formations like two rings spinning about on an invisible axis that only they could see.  Behind them the lights of the Aberystywth  pier arcade winked at me. The horizon line stained pastel blue into pink. It was sundown.

It is also the existence of the nearby Barmouth sea estuary that has turned this area into a famous beauty spot. The estuary – a mighty sea-limb creeping inland – is so glorious a natural landmark that it has inspired the imagination of great writers like Sebald, who normally tread in far different climes. Since that momentous spring cycling trip last year I felt an urge, almost incomparable to what I felt anywhere else, to rest here. It was more than tranquillity that drew me to the environs of Barmouth Bay or the North Sea Estuary, so wild and troublesome to locals. It could have been the lure of distant mountains or the words of that kind English camper we met by Snowdon, speaking of the nearby Mt Cader Idris as one of the last real wildernesses left in the UK, but I think it was the beauty of the estuary itself – so savage and undefinable, yet so serene and peaceful. There were moments cycling beside it that I felt I wanted to spend all the years of my life  living beside it. Never in my life before – except perhaps in one part of the Annapurnas, have I seen nature express itself so harmoniously, formally, so well in each part. It was the vastness and profundity of nature I experienced there that struck me – that took my breath away.

Now it is dark and the apparitions of that late afternoon are shielded from my sight – rebuffed by the strange reflection of train windows.

I can only see myself.

A number of huge decisions rest on me now – their implications are so numerous and impossible to guess at that I feel that I am looking out to sea. I am a bubble, light as air, exhilarated, scared.

Underlying it all, I realise, underlying all the logistical and formal cause and effect relationships – the dilemma is a humorously human one. Love. It is strange to think, but also somehow inevitable, that the tallest mountain I must cross before I can decide the shape of the next three years is a romantic one. It is a mountain that has grown – for mountains grow – almost without me seeing it or meaning it to. Our defences erode like coastline – it is part of the universal human condition. The broken, tattered membrane of my heart, so damaged by the despoliation of last year was healed. Now things are once more unravelling, and I have to ask myself whether I arrived in Ghent with a broken heart and will also leave with one.

Love is also a responsibility. I realise that now. The one who is immune to the repsonisbility that life bears, must also be immune to love. To love is to bequeath, to ‘troth’, and that is an exchange. The responsibility of someone else’s heart is actually one of the most profound responsibilities human nature can know.

I know a very difficult and sad conversation must come – but funnily enough, my lack of battery charger is preventing this. Are the gods laughing at me? I must ask him. If the answer is no then I will go to Iceland, and disappear once more across another sea.

Love has taken away my eyes

Love has taken away my eyes. Now all I’ve got is ears.

It all feels familiar and strange: the centre of this small city that I know so well. Each cobbled street, each walkway, each bridge. I know the way that the light falls on different spots of the Grasslei cafés at different times of the day – and where you can sit to enjoy the last full sunshine in Ghent. By now, even the voices of the boat tour guides are familiar to me. Their white pleasure craft slip through Prinsenhof diurnally for matins and vesper services. I feel that I live in a city that has become pure metaphor ; a rich landscape of abstract qualities: textures, sounds, interplays of light. It reminds me of how Freud used the city as a metaphor for the mind. Its intricacies are neural, its landmarks are mental signposts – areas of accumulated power and resistance. I see space here now, more abstractly. Familiarity has given way to understanding, understanding to imagination.

It changes every time I do. The whole city is a mood ring: I feel, it sighs; I love, it loves. Now everything is bright and recrudescent. Spring has come. The light is mellow and muffled. The glassy Leie rustles her silvered skirts, ever-winking, ever-moving. The white-beaked moorhen rocks back and forth and bustles about in the water searching for fragments of food. The walkers strolling across St Michael’s bridge appear and disappear behind the wood-timbered meat market.

Love can change everything. Who said it was like walking on air? I know what they mean. There is a lightness. Your whole body is affected; your understanding of weight and time is affected.  Your awareness of place is affected. Even the bricks and cobblestones feels saturated with him. I feel like I’ve jumped in a rocket and got off in a strange and unknown planet where things are pale and soft. It’s like those sketches that Botticelli made of Paradise. Zero-gravity. Fleecy and soft as cotton buds. A kind of harmony and restfulness pervades everything. A transformation has taken place. The world feels different. A concertina lines every footstep, and a kiss is the natural point of contact: a mooring.

Notes on Psychology

Detail from the central tympanum of Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady.

It’s spring now. Did you notice? I did – March showers: sudden, elastic, tragic; volleying and pounding little plastic balls of hail onto my woollen hat. I was like that today as I rain-danced and jogged through the tired streets of Robot, adulating with Turkish ‘bakerijs’, posters of pitta bread brimful of shis kebab. If you go far enough you get to the Gent-Brugge canal – if you go even further you get to Bergoyen: my garden, my retreat, my lake.

I came that way two days ago with Davilo – the Argentine that I met at the pub, that night a thousand years ago. I found out that he played music – I asked him if he knew La Compasita. It was originally an Argentine folk melody and the magpie’s next project. He said he played it since he was a little boy. I immediately invited him to my kitchen where I imagined him sitting happily beside the magpie, strumming together in unison like an old time Spanish guitar duo or like the Prodigal son returned.

It was never to be. Did he lie to me? I don’t know – but he couldn’t play La Compasita. The magpie slouched, the request died on my lips. But he could do something much, much better than play this tune. He could talk about the mind. He could talk about the mind coherently and with complete confidence. I don’t think, actually, that I have ever met such an eloquent foreign English speaker – his capacity to shape ideas, mould them and refine them as he spoke, in a language not his own astonished me. It was far more impressive that a virtuoso guitar solo. It was a brain, a brain virtually pumping with a sense of its own brilliance.

I would love to plagiarise. I would love to – right now – tell you all the brilliant things that he told me. But even as I do so the efforts fail before I even begin. How could I hope to convey those sparkling, jagged, fragments of conversational mirror that I could barely understand at that time – and if I did so, only fleetingly and lovingly, like a child grasping at snowflakes in the air? Davilo’s mind is voracious, greedy, self-devouring. It never stopped. As soon as he had formulated one idea, his was busy composing his next. It reminded me of something a friend once said to me: she said that while others wrote or painted or acted, she considered her life’s great works to be her conversations. That was where she had stamped her finest intellectual achievements. Her masterpieces was relational, performative; they were perlocutionary.

I remember the first afternoon that Davilo came to see me alone. He was barely through the door when his strange form of monologuing began. We had both been away for a few days. It is strange, he said, since I came back I feel that everyone in my life has taken some big steps forward in the past two weeks. They have made discoveries or decisions that have changed their lives, and not in small ways. It is very queer.” No hello, no kiss on the cheek – right to the heart of the matter. Then of course I asked him what life-changing events had taken place in his internal world since I saw him last. He was vaguer in this regard – threw some hints my way – Czechoslovakia, hugging a stranger in the dark. They had so much in common that it was uncanny: like a glitch or knot in fabric of things.

We weren’t talking, we were metatalking, we were talking about talking. Words spun around like fireworks or a gambler’s die. We were sculpting something together, something precarious and liable to fall – but only if he let it. He never did. So we started talking about talking again: I mentioned our exchange as an example. Ah no, but it’s different between you and I, he said. We are not playing by the normal rules. We have made a contract – an agreement – not to follow the usual rules. His certainty made me doubt. What contract had I signed with him? What kind of language did we use with each other that transcended the usual – presumably moribund – delimitations of human speech? I had the sense that it didn’t matter where we were (as it happens at my kitchen table). We could have been anywhere or nowhere. At that moment in time everything was telescoped down to just one discernible point: his moving mouth. The ventriloquist. The tea got cold in the pot. I didn’t even pour it.

We cycled to Bergoyen by the water in the late afternoon. By the time that we got there the sky was resplendent: the setting sun had cast a rose-red light across the whole meadow. Again the words poured from the cataract of his moving mouth: we all carry round a burden of guilt and shame: it is part of our inheritance. Why carry it? Let it go. What is talking? What is friendship? I asked him. Communication is nothing but a rough translation. Friendship is assessing the extent to which your language maps onto mine, my Orpheus replied. We live in a culture where stress and intoxication are predominant. Why is that so? I asked him. I don’t believe that people forget the things that they do when they are drunk, it is precisely to do those things that people drink in the first place. Intoxication is a permission-slip, it allows us to do the things we desire but fear to do ordinarily. What is your view of London? I asked him. I liked London he replied. When I went there I felt oddly at home, people were very receptive to me. But the people who live there – they are some of the most over-worked people in the world. We had zapped into a different dimension where everything ceased to matter except for our minds and the slippery quick-silver snakes of his psyche. Why try so hard? He said. It all amounts to the same thing. That’s what I learnt. Anxiety, shame, greed. We don’t need to live with shame in our lives. Other people? They are an illusion. I have been reading recently Jung’s theory of the shadow. He predicts that our evaluations and anxieties concerning other people are almost certainly projections. They are our shadows, what we project onto them are our own shortcomings.

I had taken him to Bergoyen for a reason. I wanted to impress him – to show him something secret and magical, something I treasured. It seemed to barely register: the low white sun, the grey, glossy meadow-lake, the flocks of birds nesting in the long grass. Yet this time it began to chaff. As brilliant as he was I wanted to tug this intellectual troglodyte from out of his mental cave. See the world around you! Something inside me cried, though I was too afraid to say so out loud.

The more I analysed the auto-didact Davilo and his persuasive way of talking, the more I realised that he was a product of therapy, therapy conducive, perhaps not to one’s mental health but to one’s ability to articulate and atomise oneself and the world around you. It is a great skill. Now that I come to think of it some of my closest friends have undergone extensive therapy and thus had an opportunity to fine-tune that highly undervalued skill: the art of conversation from a psychological point of view.

But Davilo is not alone, he is only one of many common-place geniuses that I have met in Ghent. It is a city which, I began to realise, attracted extreme and eccentric types, like the local postman who was able to play every middle-eastern instrument I could name, and could speak with more ease and clarity about the abstract qualities of music than most people use to speak about their grocery shopping.

We cycled back, it was time for work. Somehow something in me was unsatisfied. I tried to reach out to him, to talk about him, my frustration with his inertia, his depression, his inability to realise his dreams. You are not talking about him. He are talking about yourself. Remember the shadow? Penumbra. He is your mirror. It was not cold, just objective.

I was stunned – appalled. The truth of this judgement fell on me like a weight of bricks. Had I become him? After all these months of writing and vegetating in the spell-binding voluptuous setting of Prinsenhof, like the little figurine in the centre of the music-box? He was right. I was the magpie. Nothing more; nothing less. A mirror somewhere shattered. I was illuminated; exhausted and totally unhappy.

The Guitarist

What stops people on the street? What arrests them more than the cold or the creaky plastic slip of their gloves? What stops the shoppers on their forward march or the families rushing to get home?

Not much. Not love, nor money, nor charity workers. But Lukas can.

I’ve seen him perform magic. Groups gathering around in silent clusters like church worshippers; old men in smart suits and flat-caps pausing for a silent ovation; elegant ladies throwing a condescending coin into his propitious guitar-case. He does not collect money – he collects letters and gold – tokens of love. What did Max say? Great art is the transparency of self.* It is about communication: the communication of the inner world; the projection of it and the willing absorption of it by another. So great art has the same structure as love.

And he is not even technically a guitarist – he is a guitarist with piano-playing hands. So what is it about it his playing that is so undeniably beautiful? It is him. It is the transparency of self. It is not the music that is beautiful, but Lukas.

These are the compliments that a lover bestows. I realise that; yet through Lukas I am learning and discovering something about art more truthful than anything I discovered in years of reading in libraries. Art should be affective. Affect and effect; they are connected. Beauty. The long phrase. Making people happy. Because Lukas’s musical achievement is one of communication: the spiralling coin signifies contact. Playing on the streets completes him because it is a way of talking to the people around him. His playing is an act of love, an act of social grace, as Auden might say, ‘a mouth’.

*For an opposing view please see my discussion in “The Swing Guitarist”

Timing: On Writing & Madness

Portrait of Thomas de Quincey by George Hamlin Fitch; Project Gutenberg

I first started compiling and archiving entries under my blog Time Signatures two years ago. As the title of this blog suggests – temporality – and trying to understand its relationship with writing, was of central concern to the project. I was deeply influenced by my reading of Benjamin at Edinburgh University in 2012, especially his account of the individual’s relationship with the historical process. This obsession with time and temporality had a bearing upon a central – or as I then saw it – paradox, that affects all forms of writing, but especially the blogging form; i.e. that disjunct between the moment of experience and the moment of expressing or recording it. My interest in temporality and writing – the run-away moment – was also a subconscious extension of the manner in which that particular blog came into being. The critic and writer Richard Mabey talks about “secondary nature”; well the material on Time Signatures was largely, “secondary travel writing”: a repurposing of slightly less polished accounts that I had sent out to friends via email the year before. Hence, at the point at which I was constructing Time Signatures – laying together the disparate bricks of a travelogue from two years preceding – I had the uncanny sensation of feeling that the experiences that were written in the ever-unfolding present, were actually displaced by several degrees – through processes of reception and reformation, over a distance of several years, even geographically distant from their original places of conception. What meaning did they contain and what sense could I make of being their ‘author’; I who was now displaced, relocated, constantly adjusted by new environments and experiences?

The question of temporality’s relation with literature seemed highly pertinent to me then: it seemed to beg wider questions about how humans can relate to their pasts, their ‘histories’ and how we relate to the texts that we produce. I felt a great sense of sympathy for authors who had been vilified for the opinions that they had expressed in their youth. It seemed asinine that in human life we expect people’s opinions to grow and develop, but in the world of texts the opposite is true: authors are locked down to the statementing myths that the public want to remember them for. But on the other hand, it’s important that there is some accountability, right?

As a way of trying to break down the temporal wall that built up between the moment and its record, I experimented with a Dadaist technique that I read about in an art textbook called Ecriture Automatique. ‘Automatic Writing’ was reflexive, instantaneous – it was language ripped from the present moment. So I tried to write as much as I could from within the experience itself – and the difference between this sort of text, and the texts written in hindsight or in diarist style are immediately obvious.

More recently in Ghent, I had fresh cause to think about the relationship between time and literature. In the past my écriture automatique had always, of necessity, been bucolic. As long as my subject didn’t talk to me or require any interaction with it: I was able to write it, to paint it, automatically, with language. Thus I was able to record scenes or the fluctuating sensations of my own subjectivity and inner sensibility, I was able the checkerboard of colours that I saw in the Gobi desert from out of my Jeep window – or the ‘panorama’ of Siberia flashing past my train window.  The subject was always passive, not active.

But one morning, in Ghent, while sitting round my kitchen table, I was actually able to paint a social interaction between myself and a young man who was open to the experiment (and possibly a little high), so that I was able to write it – the conversation – while only ‘umming’ and ‘ahhing’ occasionally.

At the time it felt like I was breaking through something. I had grafted  the moment itself onto the record. I had eroded the membrane that stands between art and reality to its narrowest possible point. The art was inextricable from its context, the context of the passing moment. It was ‘action writing’.

But that breakfast conversation also gave me another reason to pause for thought. Drugs. They are everywhere: ubiquitous and forbidden, a part of our simulacrum and the escapist-hedonism drenched postmodern world. It made me wonder, what was the difference between the young day-tripper sitting opposite me – his mind permanently awash with displaced fantasies – and myself? Isn’t the writer, like the day-tripper, also an escapist, a dreamer, a professional fantasist? Suddenly it seemed that all of this temporal displacement and self-dissolution was eerily similar to some kind of socially acceptable trip.

Society had developed different ways of thinking about people who hallucinate or fantasize regularly. More often than not we pity them for their powerlessness – we consider them winsome misfits, perhaps mad or unhappy. So if the writer is a professional fantasist, she is also a madwoman or a depressive – both figures that have been marginalised in European societies: institutionalised, stigmatised and removed from view. Why are dreamers so dangerous for society? According to Aristotle the poet is politically dangerous and threatens the very fabric of the Republic.  Dreamers are dangerous because they are still. Perhaps stillness is in itself is a kind of disobedience. It is not very easy to day-dream in London. There’s too much interference – too much going on, too much money everywhere. But on a boat or among the larch trees of Ghent, it is very easy to dream…

The more I write and think about it, the more obvious the oft-discussed correlation between madness and artists appears to me. Displacement, self-effacement are part of the job description! And artists who have openly depended on drugs for success? They are too numerous to count. There are obviously hundreds of musicians, and writers… well the Romantics are the obvious examples. Thomas de Quincey made opium a theme in his writing – and what writing it was! His essays are some of the most beautiful and elegant prose works I have ever read and his writing on the mind as palimpsest, one of the earliest anthologized attempts to grope towards a modern understanding of the human brain. I also remember reading a contemporaries’ account of how the opium ‘dribbled’ from the mouth of William Hazlitt – probably by someone like Dorothy Wordsworth.

Of course this is not a defence of recreational drug-use for the purposes of artistic expression. I have come round to the view that mental well-being is one of the most important assets that we have – we need to protect our minds. In fact, the more I think about drunk, coke-snorting city workers, the more I think that the proliferation of drugs in modern society is capitalism’s ultimate triumph. We are all self-medicating on opium.

So, I have considered different models for thinking about the writer: as time-traveller, as fantasist or madman. But these are unsatisfying; they seem too cynical, too irrational. After all, writing doesn’t have to be retardant – it can liberate itself into infinite possible futures.

So perhaps we should think of writers instead as astronauts – alien way-farers – jumping between lunar islands of present and possible futures. It’s all good of course, could even be terrific, so long as the spaceships land back down on earth.

The Magpie

Lonely and wild, the magpie flies —

Scudding past clouds

And under boughs of trees.

He settles on a branch or fence post

Then dives —

And the taffeta ties

Of his silken body glide

And pull down the curtain of the sky.

Whither do you fly little magpie?

Where do you go and why?

A glancing feather;

The wink of an eye

Then his flight become incendiary:

and fire-lit, explodes into the sky.

March 2015

The Swing Guitarist: The Man & The Artist

I started off the night by wanting to know his name so badly that it felt like every moment before the point I could ask him I was treading on hot coals. I finished by having no desire at all to know his name. What explains this evolution?

The Hot Club de Gand is another fantastic little night-life spot located, as it happens conveniently on my way home, by the fifteenth century faux-Palestinian castle, known in Dutch as the Gravesteen. Since last year it has had scaffolding blocking up the entrance to the narrow side mews like chunky braces overlying teeth, so its discrete entrance is even more difficult to find for those outside of the know. As its half ironical name suggests (images of sequined dresses and men doing ‘the chicken’ spring to mind), The Hot Club de Gand is a jazz club – and there are two evenings to go there: on Thursday night and Sunday night, for the jazz improv session.

Though I generally work on Sunday evenings, if I finish by eleven-thirty I have more than enough time to cycle across the two ribbons of water that separate the small jazz tavern from my own humble pub facing the courts of justice. That’s what I did last night. Outside it was cold – bitterly so, the chill wind transformed my mittened fingers into swollen claws clutching handlebars; the tip of my nose became icy pink. I chained up my bike opposite Paul’s geneva bar and scuttled quickly into the Hot Club, skipping through the small courtyard outside filled with beautiful poseurs and smokers and pushed against a door misted with condensation and human backs.

How do you make sure a party always feels full? You hire a small venue! But the Hot Club is not small for this reason. I mean it is small, the wooden-panelled room with the small stage and bar on the right-hand side is tiny – but the Hot Club would probably be at full capacity under any condition. And for the music lovers and the musicians – its compactness is part of its appeal. The tiny dimensions of the room erode any difference between the space of the audience and that of the performers. It creates a kind of pact, a kind of conspiracy. Silence during performances is mandatory and the America rhythm guitarist who always seems to be there, makes sure that this is the case. There is not enough space to support human conversation and music, so the conversation wafts upstairs into a ramshackle room lit with horse stable lighting or drifts outdoors.

When I arrived, the small club – and indeed it does feel like that in the old-fashioned sense of the word – was packed. Every space by the bar counter was crammed with seated customers, leaving only one gap through which to order drinks. I got my beetje – small beer – and sat down. As soon as I entered my attention had only one clearly defined target – not the bearded double-bassist, swarthy and talented though he was; nor the jumpy, jackdaw-like rhythm guitarist who liked to tap and strum upon the outside of his washed-out-looking guitar as much as he liked to pull and push upon its strings, but by a second guitarist – the soloist. The soloist was playing in the unmistakeable mode of French-derived gypsy jazz – the music of the manouche – touched here and there with flamenco elements. From the moment that I entered I was deeply impressed by the quality of what I heard. I was not alone in this. The double bassist and rhythm guitarist exchanged looks of awe and surprise at each other continually throughout the set; and from these two stalwarts of the Ghent Jazz scene, this was tribute enough.

The solo guitarist was probably in his fifties. I deduced from the language that he spoke to the ring of his family and close friends sitting near the stage during the pause or intermission that he was Flemish. His face was impassive, inexpressive, fleshy. He wore a plain black cotton shirt with some design details picked out in faded white swirls. He was clean-shaven and his shoes were sensible, his hair was cut closely to his scalp. His appearance bespoke professionalism and conformity, like a player in a hotel bar, yet the unmistakeable finesse of his playing professed a far higher level, which his haughty stance upon the stage stool reinforced. All expression, all colour was confined to his hands which moved with a spider-like rapidity across the neck of his guitar. The impossible, gymnastic requirements of barred diminished chords were moulded perfectly and without apparent effort by his old, ringless fingers. He appeared to strike notes and sounds with such consecutive swiftness – his hands moving on invisible journeys – that they defied constraints of time and space. I always felt like I was always two notes behind the ones that he played.

But what of the sound? Bending notes here and there, performing odd little wobbles with his fingers, pursuing a track across an instrument ribbed with structure and pattern – his playing was both highly methodical and yet formless; governed by rules and yet completely unpredictable. It was also always at ease, warm and sunny. It suggested the elegance of the old world, with leaps and bounds at once playful, childish and stylish. It was the playing of a master, one that understood the intricacies of every effect on his instrument and had no doubt in his ability to pull it off. What did I hear? A magical Nuage – a number of Django’s tunes, some Gitane. And all of it, ringing sweetly and insistently on and on.

There was total silence in the Hot Club that night – the whole audience was hooked, hanging on each nanosound. But the more he played the more I felt a kind of resistance build up within me. It had something to do with that smile or perhaps even snarl, curling the edges of his mouth – something also to do with the fact that he played like a complete individual, even though he was in a band. It’s not that he was a selfish player, other members of the band did solo, but the manner in which he picked up the musical thread after them and the assumption of complete confidence that underlay it, was rather a turn-off.

My disillusionment reached its strongest point about half an hour after he started playing, following the intermission. Then, a young disciple that I had seen watching him ardently from a seat in the audience, jumped up to play second guitar. He was of course la pompe – no one would dare oust the maestro from his seat, but also a very talented musician. As I watched the pair strumming together I wondered what their relationship was. The older man could have been his teacher, uncle or father. But again, there was an almost disturbing similarity between the young and old man – they were even wearing the same shoes! The young man seemed completely in awe of his teacher and also completely subordinate to his musical authority and direction. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this: the effect of this great musician, I suddenly realised, was to musically subordinate everyone else about him. I wondered whether this was just a natural consequence of genius – that it is bound to eclipse, to irradiate and to some extent diminish. But then I realised that it was not – sometimes real geniuses can be empowering too. Perhaps it can all be summed up in the old distinction between Picasso and Matisse. They were both geniuses but they could not both teach. Matisse was a great teacher; Picasso a fierce individualist.

I also wondered if this was really a problem. I mean there, in the context of live performance with the man sitting before me, his personality became an obstacle to my enjoyment of his music, but if I listened to one of his CDs, I would only care about the quality of the work he produced. It also made me reflect on what Max had said to me about great artists in Brussels (I will post on this topic in a moment): art is the transparency of self, he said. Yet, when I listened to the beautiful music being played before me, the only thing I realised that wasn’t being transmitted towards me was his ‘self’ – and thankfully too! That was all being displayed by other actions: his body language, his smile, his way of sitting. It was then that I realised that it is a mistake to identify the art with the artist – the straightforward mimesis that Max discussed was too naïve. Great art is not who we are but who we want to be – it is an idealisation. If anything great people and great art seem diametrically opposed. History has shown us that sometimes the most tormented, morally questionable and broken individuals have produced the most sublime artwork. Perhaps the more terrible and disturbed the life, the more pressing the need to create something coherent and meaningful on the page. In this case art is not about transparency but about displacement. The more desperate the life; the more perfect the art. If we accept this hypothesis then art is not about expression or transmission, it is self-medication. It is when desperate longing is interfused with talent for expression then occasionally art can become – incendiary.

A Note on Tronies

I discovered a new word last week – it’s an art-historical term, but one which is actually very applicable to modern-day life: it is the phenomenon of the tronie. A tronie is a recording of a silly facial expression. These days, of course,  many people record these on their iphones as ‘selfies’ , post them on Instagram or even message-dissolve them to each other on snap-chat. But three-hundred years ago Rembrandt recorded them on velum, oak panels and copper plates.

What made Rembrandt the king of the tronie? And why did he do them? In The Power of Art Schama writes that Rembrandt was one of the most honest artist auto-biographers of all time and that he recorded observations of himself with more penetration of insight and honesty than any other Protestant painter of the period. We see this detached and curious observation of his own external morphology and the changes that took place over time, in the astonishingly long catalogue raisonée of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. From a swarthy young man, through a precious middle period and on to brow-beaten middle age, Rembrandt appears to us in all the forms he took in his life. Perhaps this meticulous self-documentary explains why Rembrandt has always appealed with such force and strength to art historians and biographers: he gives us such a clear sense of himself.

Of course he didn’t draw the line with self-portraiture. The same morbid curiosity for realism that would find him eventually painting a dissection scene, applied to all those to whom he was close to – especially his young wife Saskia. His impressionistic, beautifully-articulated love affair with the human face finds its highest expressions in some of his graphic nocturnes – portraits he sketched of his wife while she slept. There she is: Saskia, asleep in her bed-box with her face nestled against a plump goose-down cushion. In these drawings, she appears to us with such vivacity and realism – with her upturned, pinched nose and fat cheeks, that for me, this album is a universal expression of the tenderness we exercise towards those whom we love while they sleep.

Anyway, enough Saskia, enough Rembrandt – that is all stuff for the next story. Now I speak of tronies because the mercurial, silly, importunate expressions that Rembrandt records drolly, whimsically, perhaps in a bored or flippant mood, remind me strongly of Lukas – that is, of the Magpie. The Alexandrine-blue eyes, fair hair, wobbly nose – there something about Lukas

which is highly reminiscent of the famous Dutch Golden Era artist.