Seeing the light

I have spent the last couple of weeks in and out of the Hayward Gallery, in anticipation of the Poets After Dark event in April. I am one of the ‘dark poets’ – ten of us in total – commissioned to write a new poem inspired by the Hayward’s current exhibition, Light Show. The exhibition brings together artists who work with light in various ways: there are minimalist works from Dan Flavin, an immersive piece by James Turrell that plunges you into darkness and then confuses your concept of space, a wild strobe-lit ‘night garden’ by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, Katie Patterson’s single bulb which simulates moon glow, Leo Villareal’s waterfall cascade of LEDs. The overall effect is to remind us how light (and sometimes the absence of it) effects our moods and minds, and of course, how technology (sometimes very simple or antiquated) creates the ability to make work that moves and changes before our eyes like a magic trick. The whole show is about magic, and illusion, and disorientation.  

But even before I went round, I had an idea of which piece I would choose. I have been a fan of Cerith Wyn Evans’ work for some years now, and when I discovered that the piece for the Hayward took as its starting point a line from a poem by James Merrill, it seemed the natural choice. Merrill’s line, ‘Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill’, is from the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover, a 500-plus page formal exploration of his experiences with his partner, David Jackson, summoning spirits through the Ouija board. In their years of occult searchings, they managed to contact Auden, Yeats, Maya Deren and a Roman sage named Ephraim, to name a few. These voices appear throughout the poem as dramatis personae, and serve to guide, and sometimes chide, their mortal hosts. The overall effect is impressive, if not bonkers. One might dismiss Sandover as eccentric (if not formally accomplished) ramblings, and quite a bit of it is. But it also serves as a vehicle to record Merrill’s thoughts about mortality and afterlife, and the here-and-now life he led with Jackson. In ‘The Book of Ephraim’, Merrill talks about ‘one floating realm’, the other world, as opposed to ‘one we feel is ours, and call the real.’ And within the real, momentous events occur, which the poet attempts to process:  

We take long walks among the flying leaves
And ponder turnings taken by our lives 

 

Wyn Evans’ piece is not about this realm – the real, so much as the other – the floating. The work comprises three standing columns made out of obsolete incandescent strip lights, the harsh lightscape of classrooms and public-sector offices. Wyn Evans says of these columns: ‘They are in suspension, between heaven and earth. They have a life of their own.’ Indeed, they do – I have spent several hours sitting in their presence, watching then flare to light, and to heat (suggesting the presence of the physical body) then fade, with a bluish quivering after light, into cold darkness. The effect is haunting, moving. I can sit for some time, not writing, just watching their hypnotic movement (and watching other gallery visitors approach them, holding out their hands to catch their warmth, as if they might embrace them). I’ve jotted down a few lines in my notebook in an effort to try and work out what I think they are: columns, circles, towers, amusement arcades and how they work: elements, visible wires, like a magic trick exposed.  

My poem is forming itself slowly. It started with a line from Merrill, which I’ve now removed, as he felt too strong a presence (perhaps like his Oujia board party guests), although Merrill seems to be hovering over it, a benign ghost. It feels like a slow unravelling, which is perhaps appropriate for the vastness of the subject. One line of Merrill’s stays with me:

A whole small globe – our life, our life, our life.

Information and tickets for Poets After Dark here:
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/poets-after-dark-70624

 

Rip it up and start again

 

The German artist Kurt Schwitters arrived in Britain in 1940, after fleeing Germany, where he was labelled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and then Norway, after the German invasion of that country. Schwitters’s practice was to make new things from the fragments of what had come before: refuse, found materials, abandoned scraps. To describe this work, he coined the term ‘Merz’:  

I call[ed] my new manner of working from the principle of using any material MERZ. That is the second syllable of Kommerz [commerce]. It originated from the Merzbild [Merzpicture], a picture in which the Word MERZ, cut out and glued-on from an advertisement for the KOMMERZ-UND PRIVATBANK [Commercial and Private Bank] could be read between abstract forms …  

Schwitters was always interested in words, but not necessarily in their meaning. Like all of his Merz works, he liked to cut up words, reconstruct them, present them in fragments, so a glimpse of a phrase might catch your eye, divorced from the rest of the text around it. He liked the shapes of letters, and typography, so he could find pleasure in the simple grid of a bus ticket or the bright graphic of a candy wrapper. What strikes me about his collages is that they construct a narrative of his movement through Europe – some of them contain texts in German, Norwegian and English – so that they become emblematic of the urban experience, not just in their frantic energy, but in their mix of words: a kind of artistic melting pot.    

 

There are also his ‘sound poems’, which when viewed on the page look like Finnish on acid but are actually not a recognisable language (which made me wonder if the Icelandic band Sigur Rós had come across them when inventing the language of their lyrics). The greatest of these is the Ursonate, or sonate in urlauten ( which translates as ‘primordial sonata’ or ‘sonata in primordial sounds’). Schwitters left instructions for reciters of the 30-page work, mainly advising on the correct pronunciation of the letters. Perhaps the most important of these interpreters is the Dutch poet Jaap Blonk. But we also have recordings of Schwitters himself reciting the poem, sounding like a deranged exotic bird:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7E2i0KMqM 

 

How to process the world he had known, the destruction of Europe through two catastrophic wars, the experience of being made homeless and turning up in a foreign country, grappling with an unfamiliar language, always being alien (for even in Germany, he was different)? Perhaps the Ursonate is the only acceptable response – the world is nonsense, impossible to fathom. We just have to make sense of it as we can. And, to paraphrase Eliot, we must shore our gathered fragments against ruin.

Schwitters ended up in rural Cumbria, creating a Merzbarn (he would have liked the fact that after his death, part of it was lifted away and transported to Newcastle – a very Schwitters-like intervention). But he also painted conventional landscapes and portraits to earn a living – these are completely ordinary, boring even, without a hint of the concerns of the more radical artist and thinker. In that respect, perhaps he did understand what he had to do to settle in and become one with the English. A collage work created in this period is interesting in that it is one of the few in which the text is meant to be read and understood: these are the things we are fighting for. 

  

The Ursonate in full here: http://www.costis.org/x/schwitters/ursonate.htm

Schwitters in Britain is at the Tate until 12^th May: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/schwitters-britain?gclid=CJrd7tzRu7UCFabLtAodEFoAuA

Home is so sad

Various discussions over the past week have triggered a preoccupation with the concept of home. As readers of Invective already know, I have made my home in London for the past 26 years, having spent the previous 21 years in New Jersey and New York. When I first moved here – with no particular plans, and probably no clear intention to stay – I found I was writing poems about my childhood in America, as it seemed I had gained the necessary distant to do so, not just physical distance, but also mental distance. At a certain point, when I started to establish a life for myself here, those American poems stopped. If it can be said that the majority of my poems are situated anywhere, it is London, or at least an urban location resembling or based on London. In my favourite poem by Cavafy, he talks about the possibility of ‘finding another city better than this one’ but the reality is that:

This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city.

Cavafy’s poem is relentlessly negative, concluding ‘As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.’ So the city becomes a metaphor for his failure, which he is fated to carry with him forever. Although I would contest his conclusion, I agree with Cavafy that a place you have spent much of your life becomes engrained in you, and any other place you visit is held against that dominant place, the place you call ‘home’. You do carry your city with you everywhere you go, like a garment you wear against your skin. But for me, that is a comfort rather than a burden.

‘Home’ is necessarily complicated for me, in that I consider London home, but I also recognise that I am not a Londoner. This is my adopted city, and perhaps for that reason, it is always precious, and I have never taken it for granted. If you think of writers like Conrad or Kundera or Nabokov, it is their otherness, the fact that they were from one place, and made a decision to reside permanently in another (and give up their mother tongue to write in the language of the place they made home) that charges their prose with a quality of surprise and energy. I have just switched from one kind of English to another (sometimes mixing my poems with both American English and British English, as I do in my speech). I think of myself as Anglo-American, and, like Plath or Eliot (if I could even begin to compare myself to them) my poems reflect the dual nature of who I am.

At the recent Place: Roots – Journeying Home weekend at Snape Maltings, the discussions began with Benjamin Britten and his commitment to place (in his case, Suffolk) in his music. The beginning of Peter Grimes just sounds like the beach at Aldeburgh; it makes sense of the place entirely, so that no other music can represent it so well. This idea of being firmly rooted was carried through to a discussion by Patrick Wright of the German writer Uwe Johnson, who, like Sebald and Hamburger, ended up in eastern England (Johnson rolled up in Sheerness, which even he thought was a dump, but somehow that awful place added a quality of stark alienation in his writing).

 

Wright made the point that ‘roots are also routes’, which makes me think of writers such as Bishop who was always searching for a home, and laid down roots in many places, only to uproot herself and start again. I always think of her line (in Questions of Travel) ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ every time I embark on a journey elsewhere, impossible as it is to take away with you the ‘folded sunset’. It seems that lately I have returned to America, not physically (I have only been back once in the last six years), but psychically. When doing readings from The City with Horns in 2011, I found myself telling audiences that the New York I depict in my Jackson Pollock poems isn’t the New York I remember, but the New York of my parents’ generation, a New York that filled my early years with stories of glamorous book launches and classic cocktails. And now I am trying to recreate the New Jersey suburbs of the 70s in my novel – thinking of Cheever, and Rick Moody, and Tony Soprano, and my own childhood.

I’ll finish on this poem by Larkin, which Anne Berkeley and I were discussing during the Snape weekend – the definitive statement on home:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

 

Securing Shadows

When the photographer Tessa Traeger was a child she knew two brothers, Thomas and Godfrey Batting, first cousins of her grandmother, who ran a chemist shop in Tunbridge Wells. They remained bachelors (although both proposed at various times to Traeger’s widowed mother, who refused them). They were keen astronomers and avid collectors (and, by all accounts, great hoarders). Tom bought paintings at the local auctions, but Godfrey, an amateur photographer, collected cameras and early photographs (including the works of Dr Francis Smart and Thomas Sims). Their shop supplied all the photographers of the town with cameras, tripods, glass plates and darkroom materials.

When Traeger made the decision to train as a photographer, Godfrey was appalled, and wrote to Traeger’s mother to say that it was ‘no profession for a woman’ and that she should keep it as a ‘pretty hobby’. Despite that, Godfrey left his entire collection of photographs and equipment to her, as he knew no one else in the family would want them.

That was in 1971, and although Traeger used many of the items in the collection in her work (mainly still life photography for magazines such as Vogue) she knew that the vast collection of glass negatives would need to wait until she had the time to work out what to do with them. Now in her seventies, she has begun the massive project of sorting through the negatives, creating new work. Traeger writes:

What interested me was that some of the negatives are in excellent condition and yet others were crumbling away in the most colourful chemical and fungal displays … The fungus is usually more pronounced in the dense parts of the emulsion and almost non-existent where the negative is thin, thus convincing me that it is flourishing on the silver gelatine emulsion. I started to photograph these decaying emulsions digitally … by using lighting and mirrors I was able to enter the mysterious world of the very beginnings of photography with the strangest narratives playing out before me never fully understood …

The results are the most haunting images I have seen. I’m reminded of spirit photos, which were popular in the 1860s, and which claimed to capture ghosts or spirits of the dead. People believed in them; they wanted proof that their loved ones still existed, even in ephemeral form.

But these spirit photos were created through double exposures, one of the first experiments in photographic manipulation. Traeger’s photos are not frauds, or studio inventions – they come to us through the process of decay and corruption, their subjects sometimes just visible through a haze of chemical erosion. The erosion is a rainbow of blues and greens and golds, spreading like a lovely disease; a ship sails into a cloud of evil poison, a face crazes like a broken porcelain bowl. Accident and damage, yes, but beautiful and frightening and moving in equal measure.

An early advertisement for photography admonished its new customers to Secure the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade, Let Nature imitate what Nature made. Traeger’s project is not so much about securing the shadow before the substance fades, as showing that fading itself. Her new photos from the old negatives remind us of our own mortality, how even science is fallible, how nothing is permanent. Traeger says of her images:

They are a hymn to the layered mystery of time and light in photography, and to the miraculous work of its pioneers. I have picked my way through the lost garden of old prints and negatives, discovering new ways of seeing the forgotten walk on the beach, the boat leaving the harbour, the church door swinging wide on a vanished afternoon.

Traeger has only skimmed the surface of Godfrey’s legacy. Her project is to continue capturing what is left of these images before they fade away completely.

Tessa Traeger: Chemistry of Light is on at Purdy Hicks Gallery until 21st February:
http://www.purdyhicks.com/

Liz Jobey’s article about Traeger’s work in the FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a417beb8-5f75-11e2-be51-00144feab49a.html#axzz2JN5WHa00

A mind of winter

Although it has been an increasingly regular occurrence over the last four winters, Londoners of my generation still consider snow a novelty. Suddenly, the population of the city turns child again, breaking into impromptu snow ball fights, erecting elaborate snowmen in local parks (although the prize for best urban snowman goes to one last winter, constructed atop a toilet discarded on the pavement near my house). To commemorate this common miracle, I decided to take a stroll along the river, starting at the southern side of Tower Bridge, and finishing at Vauxhall Bridge, a walk of approximately 2.5 miles. In all the years I have been exploring London, this walk may have been the most memorable. I chose not to bring a camera, or my iPod; I wanted to concentrate on looking and listening, without imposing extra demands on my attention.

The experience of looking was greatly altered by the haze of snow, steadily falling as my walk began, and continuing for the rest of the day. London is impossibly beautiful in the snow, perhaps because snow seems to cleanse and purify; it softens blemishes (cloaking some of the more horrendous examples of misguided architecture) and renders what is already imposing, such as St Paul’s and the Houses of Parliament and Southwark Cathedral, with an even greater majesty. Somehow, London looks more ancient in snow, and I had a vision of the Elizabethan frost fairs that sprang up on the surface of the Thames (during what was known as the ‘Little Ice Age’) as soon as the river froze. This reminded me of a beautiful poem, ‘The Other Side of Winter’, by my fellow Salt poet John McCullough, where he writes of this ‘crystal weather’:

Overnight the Thames begins to move again.
The ice beneath the frost fair cracks. Tents,
merry-go-rounds and bookstalls glide about

on islands given up for lost. They race,
switch places, touch – the printing press nuzzling
the swings – then part, slip quietly under.

Perhaps what is surreal in John’s poem – the vision of an alternative city balanced on the fragile ice – can still be imagined, as snow erases landmarks, renders ordinary routes unfamiliar, simply by covering our accepted routes of travel: roads and pavements are hidden, margins and boundaries are less pronounced. The snow showed me vistas I hadn’t noticed before, simply by masking others.

It was striking was how quiet the city became. Normally that stretch of the river would be heavily populated on a Sunday by tourists, dogs, families. Apart from the odd jogger and determined Japanese sightseer, the city was emptied, as if the snow had blotted out its citizens as well. Only around the London Eye was there a crowd; a long queue to ride the wheel, which puzzled me, as the visibility was terrible, but I realised it was the miracle of the snow which drew them, as if they needed to reach its source to understand its movement. Snow muffles sound, draws everything closer, so that the peel of City church bells was incredibly clear even from the southern banks.

I have been reading Nick Papadimitriou’s extraordinary book, Scarp, the result of a lifetime’s work of chronicling his corner of outer London, around Hendon, Edgware, Pinner. Not a part of the city I know well, but his book does not necessary require knowledge of the region (although it has inspired me to perhaps take a tour); what he is espousing is the idea of ‘deep topography’ – a complete immersion into a landscape, so that you know not only the names and landmarks, but the native plants, the cast of characters who have populated the area (in the present, and in the past), a full picture of the region in all seasons and aspects. Papadimitriou talks about laying aside knowledge and concentrating on ‘sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through’, and maybe this was why I (sub)consciously decided against equipment which would aid me in recording my walk (or distracting me from it).

It reminded me why I love London so much (as if I need to be reminded), my adopted city of these last twenty-five years. Johnson was right, of course, it is never boring, in its constant flux and flow, and each time I think I know an area well, it surprises me with some new revelation. I look out the window now and see the snow has begun to fall again; the kid in me wants to get out and be in it, to see what its veiling might uncover.

Here’s John’s poem in its entirety on Declan Ryan’s Days of Roses site: http://daysofroses.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/the-frost-fairs-john-mccullough/

Images are Whistler’s Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Snow in Chelsea
A 1684 etching of a frost fair by Granger
Snow-White by Gerhard Richter