Review: 'Gauguin - Maker Of Myth' at Tate Modern

Tate Modern 30 September 2010  –  16 January 2011

This is what big institutional galleries like the Tate are for: only they have the resources and the clout to bring together a major artist’s work into a single huge show like this. Of course when a curator is given that much economic and cultural capital to play with, they feel that they need to make a statement, whether they have anything to say or not.

As far as I can tell the subtitle ‘Maker Of Myth’ is pretty much spurious: sure, Gauguin was obsessed with mythology, and was a conscious cultivator of his own myth as an artist, but he was as much a victim of myth as a manipulator of it. This more complex picture is not elided in the exhibition, but neither is there any coherent attempt to argue for the view of the artist expressed by ‘maker of myth’. I can buy that term applied to Picasso, say, but not poor old syphilitic, frustrated, misunderstood and finally penniless Paul Gauguin.

This is all by the by: whatever curatorial agenda there may be does not interfere with the work, which speaks for itself, and is hung in nine galleries, grouped according to themes such as self-portraiture, landscape, still-life, female subjects and so on. The themes are pretty sensible, although of course self-portraits are headed ‘Identity and Self-Mythology’, women ‘The Eternal Feminine’ etc. (yawn). There are also two rooms of ephemera which I didn’t linger in, as time was pressing: I saw enough to get an interesting inkling of the extent to which Gauguin was influenced by commercial art, however, and I’d be interested in how much influence he’s felt to have had on the commercial world in his turn

I know Gauguin from books, by and large: his paintings in the flesh are imposing physical objects, mainly by dint of their chromatic intensity. They are mostly smaller than I’d imagined them. There is also, oddly, a lot less paint on the canvases than I thought there would be: there is a good deal of dark underpainting, which gives the often gaudy colours a depth I had supposed came from a physical depth of paint. In fact, the weave of the canvas is visible over much of the painted surfaces, suggestive of a frugality at odds with the works’ visual opulence.

Seeing such an extensive sampling of an artist’s work has its pros and cons. On the one hand it’s a rich meal: there’s really only so much you can take in at one sitting, and at £15 a visit I’m not too likely to go back repeatedly. I stayed for an hour: on my own I might have stayed for two, but I’d have been boss-eyed by then, and really this show would take about ten or twelve hours to see properly.

On the other hand, seeing so many self-portraits together (for instance) gives you an opportunity to see the development of Gauguin’s practice, to see him probing, abandoning blind alleys, gradually gathering the threads of his mature work. His relationship with Van Gogh (which continues in his work long after the termination of their personal association) is a fascinating thread to follow: I’d love to see a show that puts the two together, like the Picasso/ Matisse show here a few years back.

On a technical level some dubious decisions were taken in hanging this show: the contemporary obsession with shoving the labels to the end of the wall often makes it confusing to find the details of the piece you’re looking at, and really, what harm does it do to have a little piece of text next to each work? And while I appreciate the aesthetic drawbacks of either board labels or clear stickers, the direct transfers they like at the Tate tend to have rubbed off a few weeks into the show. It was very hard to make sense of a few labels.

Clearly it’s hard to review a show like this. Gauguin is Gauguin: an opportunity to view his work en masse should be taken if you can. The way he sets blocks of colour singing against each other so that they seem to fizzle and vibrate on the canvas is for me very rarely matched, perhaps only by Rothko. The curator, despite some minor pretensions, has done the sensible thing and gotten out of the way, while these magnificent paintings blare out across the galleries like foghorns.

Review: Diwana

121 Drummond Street, London, NW1 2HL

The occasion was the London branch of my family’s opportunity to celebrate my 40^th, so it was unlikely the place I wanted to go would earn itself anything other than a good review. I’ve been eating here since I was three years old, and I have to say, each time I have a meal at Diwana it conforms precisely to my accumulated memories of what the food there should be like. Thirty-seven years of total consistency is a pretty splendid achievement in my book.

Diwana is a bhel poori house, of which there are a small number in the vicinity of south Camden’s North Gower Street: what this means is that it serves southern Indian cuisine, entirely vegetarian, and that it specialises in a brand of snack food, involving small fried breads, sev (chickpea noodles) and various interesting, aromatic seasonings. The other mainstay of the menu is the dosas, various weird and wonderful riffs on the theme of pancake. I didn’t have any of that.

When I lived in London during the early 90s I explored that side of the menu, but on this visit I returned to my old mainstay, since I very rarely eat there nowadays: I had the thali ‘Annapurna’. This is a stainless steel tray, full of small stainless steel bowls, each containing a different vegetable curry (except the ones containing some fantastically seasoned yoghurt, some pokhara, some rice, and some creamy, sticky dessert). I had some chapatis with mine as well. It was all very yum.

This is not a very hotly spiced cuisine, which means you can really taste the subtleties of the very complex spice combinations they use in all their dishes, and it’s all quite unlike anything else I associate with the term ‘Indian food’. These interesting aromas extend everywhere, including the desserts.

Despite my thali including a dessert, I was compelled (for reasons of nostalgia) to follow it up with a portion of malai kulfi. Kulfi is Indian ice-cream: it is stirred and reduced, rather than being whipped like western ice-cream, which results in a very dense texture. In the past it was served in a tall cone shape: on this occasion the cone had been cut into four segments which lay flat on my plate. This may have something to do with the traditional shape’s tendency to go flying across the restaurant when you try to force a spoon through it. It was also very delicious, very delicately and engagingly seasoned.

They have no license, but you can bring your own alcohol, which in this case we did, although I’m usually happy with a couple of salt lassis (spiced yoghurt drinks) to wash my meal down.

I used to go running into this place for a plaster if I cut my finger while playing in the nearby streets. It’s not just the first Indian food I can remember having: it’s the first food I can remember having out, of any kind. Its flavours and colours and smells and atmosphere (and decor, it still has the same pine tongue-and-groove lined interior) are as much a part of me as anything else is, and so it is clearly completely impossible for me to give an objective assessment. I just love it, the way you love a family member. It’s my ultimate comfort food. I do maintain, however, that it is some damn’ fine cooking, and I have no reservations about recommending that you eat there.

City Story

This is another start to a story, like the one I posted a few weeks ago. Who knows, one day I may even carry on with it...

I have heard that there is an edge to the city, that if one travels far enough one will come to a fortified wall, greater than any known bastion, beyond which lies… what might be called empty space. Land without buildings. Bedrock the same as that through which the lower levels are burrowed, but covered with a layer of the same mold that is cultivated as a medium by olericulturists, which in its turn is populated by a vast crop of self-propagated plants. Such fantasies are surely wish-fulfillment, but who would not wish to see such a paradise, who could bear to deny its possibility once the idea had been presented to them? It is not dissimilar to that better known fantasy of the okeanopolis, inspired by the great marshaling basin of Salar, and perhaps has a similar origin, in a natural response to  great glasshouses like those at at Middlegate. The difference is that many believe that the okeanopolis is real, that there is a place where great wharves stand at the edge of a basin whose extent is too vast to encompass with the eye. I have even seen maps… 

In truth though, the city has an edge: it is where I live. All I must do to cast my eyes beyond it is to step through the window of my garrett onto the library roof, and look upwards. The boundary between roof and sky is too clearly delineated to deny, and one can easily suppose that there is also a lower boundary, although explorers have yet to fathom the deepest extent of the catacombs. It is in the lateral compass of the city that we must face the philosophical necessity of the infinite, and the axiomaticity of the proposition that the city in which we live is the universe, not a thing that is in it. Such a fallacy springs from the presence in our language of two words for essentially the same thing: but all the universe can be said to contain aside from the city, is the sky.

There are days when I could imagine that the library itself is the entirety of the cosmos. Although I am The Librarian, I have no assistants or apprentices. It was a wealthy and powerful family that collected the library, but although they still bear the title of Dynast, it is now little more than an honorific. It is as much as I can do to prevent the most important works from falling into decay, and my days spent conserving bindings, poisoning worm and cataloguing little used stacks are long enough that I often leave the library only during the hours of darkness. It is rare, and therefore welcome, for a visitor to the crumbling palace to require assistance in research: mostly they do not proceed beyond the well appointed reading room, which is kept presentable for the use of the family.

The Dynast Pel Horotin of Metateichan Parast is (or was) a moderately distant cousin of my employers, the Konefkin Dynasty, the owner of a small estate in the district of Parast that lies beyond the Peregrine Wall, separated from the refuse heaps and slums of the Scatapolis only by the River Óis. Like all metateichans he was prone to impetuous action, and ill founded, optimistic beliefs. He was however, a deeply intelligent, perceptive man, and a true scholar, notwithstanding that he was principally a man of action, and a feared duellist. In his company, and through collaboration with him, I have unlocked the meaning of much of the obscurest content of the Konefkin Library.

He first came to the library in a state of great agitation, bearing two ancient texts, small, hand copied codices that he had purchased from an archaeologist excavating deep catacombs to the far south. They were written in an admixture of ancient tongues, and promised to hold a clue to the proper reading of the Paleokiano language, which was known in many texts, but which had never been properly understood. Even its name was a description of its great age, and the fact that it was principally written in blue ink: no scholar had the first idea how it might be pronounced.

Dyn. Horotin, however (who to my great discomfort insisted I address him familiarly, as Pel) was no linguist, and, though interested, was not excited by the possibility of solving this ancient puzzle for its own sake.

The Paleokiano texts were the subject of much speculation by those who hoped to prove the reality of mythological sites: the okeanopolis mentioned above; the Citadel of Mikhtan, filled with its armoury of magical weapons; the great subterranean waterway of Kanna; and many others. His researches had led him to believe that our library’s Paleokiano texts might hold accounts of travels far beyond the regions that constitute the known world today, travels he himself wished to emulate. This was the source of his excitement: he believed he might find directions to ancient sites and treasures that would unlock the earliest history of the city’s peoples, and perhaps enable a scholarly account of the origins of the city itself. In short, he thought he had found a way to discover the identity of the putative First Builder.

This search was to prove the impetus to the transformation of the Konefkin library, to a great leap forward in the scholarship of ancient texts, and sadly, to the almost certain death of that brave, intelligent, foolhardy and misguided man.

A Great Crowd Assembled

A great crowd assembled, at the end of a road.

They gathered around the small, black, glossy, hard pellet of damage

that had extracted sticky filaments from each of them

and tangled them in a web of which it was the centre,

but to which it was not connected.

All of them stared at it,

that black hole spider,

accepting all their gazes, absorbing their attention

and reflecting nothing.

Some of them perhaps had never seen such a thing:

to most, it was unknowably familiar.

To many it was on the periphery of their vision,

just behind one shoulder, stalking them;

to many others it was invisible,

so that when they stared at it directly

they saw what they imagined was behind it:

but not on this day.

On this day it seated itself in dark splendour

unfurling its robes over the steps of its dais like a dowager empress.

On this day it held court

and all the people in that shuffling haggard crowd offered tribute.

I knew a man who went to Africa,

a man who had soul,

a man with two names, one in each of his native tongues.

He was a full man, rotund with humour,

corpulent with intelligence.

He was a music lover.

He is a minister in the court of that shadowed presence.

I knew a man who went to America

disguised as Fidel Castro,

who also had two names:

one for his family, and another for his thoughts,

which were songs about buildings, the coin of our speech.

He has been my shoe size.

He is a henchman of that glossy, matt horizon.

I knew a man who went to India

armed only with a flute.

He had a dog as tall as him,

and I ate powdered milk from beneath his sink,

consumed his bandes dessinées.

He set me in motion.

He sleeps at the feet of that oblivious master.

I knew a man who went to Spain

and dwelt in his father's house.

He stole images

from the quick and the lovely,

and dashed himself on the rocks

of his saline imaginings.

He is a tumbler before the chancellor of that absence.

I knew a woman who went to Norwich,

whence came the man who went to America,

who once lived in part of London

where the man who went to Spain

and the man who went to India came from;

and the man who went to India had a child,

who lived near the woman who went to Norwich.

This is how that jet puppeteer weaves its net.

And that great crowd began to drift away,

returning each to their business, or so they thought.

They are still gathered there,

at the end of that pleasant, wooded lane,

bound.

Bound not by oath or loyalty to that hated compulsion

which drew them together,

but by that tight net of tacky threads which it elicited

but which they alone created.

Bound, an arch of only keystones

at a certain unchanging distance

in orbit of that unreciprocating singularity.

We cannot see it or imagine it

and so we do not fully believe it

but it is all there is.

We are its cadets, and we will be its slaves.

Some of us will serve it as midwives, or couriers:

but every single one of us will be its mute parishioner.

We will be complicit in the sentences and decrees of its court.

We will polish its smooth surface,

and admire our reflections in its light sponging outer boundary.

We will eat its meal of ashes,

and drink its wine of dust,

and hating it, will submit to its excruciation,

until we love it.

Until we welcome our dessert, and sleep.

Suffolk, November 2010

Grey Town Sky

Grey town.
Sad and happy life.
The tragicomedy of:
days pull you forward
like sad happy children grasping your hand;
corks bob
on intersecting swells and currents.
It is not walking, but falling:
that is what we mean by time
(unwrapped gifts can't be re-unseen
however carefully we patch paper.)
Grey town sky happy sad day children's tug:
'bittersweet' is unequal to the task,
because it doesn't say time,
and time is what sad and happy are made of.

Essex, October 2010

Echoes

A light goes out.
I drive: I pass a gorgeous young woman on a bike,
a geeky looking young monk in elaborate robes,
tourists from the far east,
cast iron bollards,
dreaming spires,
autumn, spread across an affluent town
like effluent on the steps of a dining club;
and none of them feels a dimming.
Not one of them feels
the slightest diminution of the light,
and I feel their indifference like a fist.
How can they just keep existing blankly
as though that extinction were irrelevant,
as though it were just
that your daughter should grow motherless?

A light goes out.
I examine all the desert places once illuminated,
moistening and salting them.
A light goes out and it is wrong
so fucking wrong
that shade does not fall across
the whole blasted heath of my sight.
It is wrong that
the babe, the monk, the tourist,
the bollard, the spire, the leaves, the slanting light
fail to see how impoverished they are
by that casual circuit-breaking.

A light goes out
and I want to shout.
This is me shouting your name
wanting echoes to slap back infinitely,
but the future is bottomless,
and swallows all reflection like a greedy child.

Cambridge, October 2010


This one is dedicated to Alex Perry, and was inspired by the appallingly tragic news of her passing.

Big Pictures

Those big pictures make me breathe in,

thinking I could make images like that from words,

excited by all those worlds I will make.

The way they dwarf me

makes me want to buy their cheap and sentimental wares,

paste made bright by rich scaffolds.

After I look at them

(blinded by daylight

in streets I thought benighted)

I'm propelled by their momentum,

walking out their sequence. 

Yes, those big pictures breathe me in

and out again, like a clock or a key.

Suffolk, October 2010

Band reviews from Live Unsigned

This is the writing I've been focussed on lately, short reviews that are meant to describe and promote bands, rather than to assess them from scratch. So no, don't expect any amusing demolition jobs. The links take you to the artist pages at Live Unsigned, a site I can't recommend highly enough as a place to promote your band, or find something to do in the evening.

Ellen and the Escapades

http://bit.ly/bTuBqZ

Rich, warm harmony, and melodies that have comfy sofas rather than hooks make Ellen and the Escapades’ accomplished alt-country rock often easier on the ear than their influences, like Neil Young or Bob Dylan. Their chord sequences have moments of epic bigness, but mostly take us down familiar roads, showing us stuff we know from new angles. Vocals that sit midway between ethereal and earthy are full of character but never distract from the songs.

Flaming June

http://bit.ly/cxrRQx

Tremulous yet powerful vocals sometimes reminiscent of Dolores O’Riordan are married to an urgent folk rock strumming with the angry intensity of The Levellers, garnished with fiddle obbligatos from a player that sounds as though they could stand more of the limelight. This is drinking music, dancing music and listening music.

Healthy Minds Collapse

http://bit.ly/c5spx1

Rock solid melodicism supported by textural but hard grooving guitarscapes showcase some serious performance chops, from a band whose range extends from the considered and lyrical to the intensely energetic. Effectively combining the virtues of grunge and pop-punk, Healthy Minds Collapse have the attitude, and the skills to back it up.

Erland and The Carnival

http://bit.ly/cCr9Vc

There’s a distinctly 60s vibe to this mostly electric, mostly guitar folk rock band, although Simon Tong’s history of involvement with well known acts such as The Verve, The Good, the Bad & the Queen, and Gorillaz is sometimes audible. At times there are flashes of vintage Steeleye Span or Pentangle, but for the most part Erland and The Carnival sound very much like themselves, which is nearly but not quite like anything you’ve heard before…

The Voodoo Trombone Quartet

http://bit.ly/cn3xXI

Wide and fat big-beat grooves anchor this outfit’s excursions into reggae, bossa and the grooviest 60s grooves, sometimes ornamented with light hearted vocals that make the whole thing reminiscent of Jeb Loy Nichols’ Fellow Travellers. Imagine Norman Cook was commissioned to write the theme music for The Saint, and the Stan Kenton Band was hired to perform it, and you are getting close to forming an idea that can be utterly blown away when you actually hear The Voodoo Trombone Quartet.

The Amorettes

http://bit.ly/dvdDFc

The title of the top tune in their MySpace player gives you a clue: Hot and Heavy. These three girls are both: guitarist Gill gives Angus Young a run for his money, and she don’t need no schoolboy outfit! There is nothing fancy, there are no frills, there is just pedal-to-the-metal flat out rock in a style that hasn’t needed to evolve since the 70s, performed loud, tight and in your face.

The Good News

http://bit.ly/cJXSdp

Wistfully quirky vocals extoll the joys of the ordinary, while the expertly played rhythm section parts groove hard in an irrepressibly happy manner, that puts me in mind of Talking Heads’ 77 and Little Creatures eras. The Good News strike just enough irony in their attitude to make their sincerely happy music highly digestible. I challenge you to leave their gig without a smile on your face!

Sniffin Flowers

http://bit.ly/9r4tiD

With a nod in their name to the iconic zine of the punk era, and to the nature loving dippyness of the 60s, Sniffin Flowers do exactly what it says on the tin. High energy, attitude filled guitar pop-rock with lo-fi vocals, and plaintively overdriven upper register Jazzmaster twang that all sits somewhere between 1967 and 1977. Think The Kingsmen, The Small Faces, The Troggs, but harsher and edgier.

Pinknruby

http://bit.ly/bJi1oK

Impeccably performed floaty vocal folk, with a traditional feel but modern guitar harmonies. Their website includes ‘a guide to picking and preparing wild herbs, including making teas, tinctures and flower essences’: I think you can hear the ‘flower essences’ in Pinknruby’s ethereal songs, which mine a rich vein exposed by acts like Capercaillie, Pentangle and Clannad. Don’t expect fiery reels: do expect to be taken somewhere otherworldly.

The Black & Reds

http://bit.ly/939bnw

This is soulful classic rock with a deep, right on the money rhythm section feel, which puts me in mind of Ocean Colour Scene, but digs deeper into the past to find the swagger and dirt of the golden age of British Heavy Metal, with all the bluesy electrified devil worship of early Sabbath or Deep Purple. This is a band that come across like they could f*** up a hotel room pretty good, given half a chance, and still deliver a faultless show every night of the week.

Fuzzy Lights

http://bit.ly/dehl3v

Folky strings, warbling analogue sounding synths, haunting melodies in atmospheric soundscapes, occasional moments of metal-esque drama, all blended into a seamless psychedelic fusion that wears its influences on its sleeve without being a slave to them. Neither folk nor rock, and not what I’d call folk-rock, but something very distinctive and very accomplished.

Action Beat

http://bit.ly/dlGNM0

Instrumental music needs a feature as human as a voice to engage our sympathies, and something as content rich as lyrics to keep our attention: it’s a brave group of musicians that would attempt it in a style as anti-noodly as punk, but Action Beat succeed while eschewing the virtuoso guitar melodics you might expect. They name check Black Flag as an influence, and their very musical use of texture comes across like BF without Henry Rollins, always keeping the energy level high, and taking enough side turnings to keep the journey interesting.

Mar Shy Sun

http://bit.ly/aIyu1I

Avante-garde industrial rock with grinding electronic and bass/ guitar/ drums grooves that sound something like early Revolting Cocks, or Skinny Puppy, and anti vocals staggering drunkenly across the whole shebang like Elvis channeling John Lydon’s work on Flowers Of Romance. There is a very old school 80s industrial feel to this stuff so don’t expect industrial floor fillers à la Faderhead or Suicide Commando: expect restless experimentation and an uncompromising artistic vision.

Savon Tranchand

http://bit.ly/dqY42l

Quirkily rhythmic electronica with spoken word or chanted vocals (in French so I can’t say much about the lyrical content), and sparingly used guitar textures. Their beats are designed more for the art gallery than for clubland, and imaginatively sprinkled with punctuating noises: I find the whole process of not quite understanding Savon Tranchand very enjoyable!

Proud Proud People

http://bit.ly/aH6LIG

Gentle music with an uplifting shuffle and contemplative moments supports a vulnerable and self-effacing vocal delivery: this unpretentious folk-pop is not going to make your ears bleed, but it will hopefully charm you as it did this reviewer.

Lina Paul

http://bit.ly/9OElu7

Desolate, lonely scenarios, like aural Edward Hopper paintings, are described in songs and poems that float above minimal washes of pale, haunted guitar chords. This reflective, introspective music occasionally brings to mind Portishead, and Björk’s vocal delivery, but it would be doing Lina Paul a disservice to say it was like anything much else.

JukeSome

http://bit.ly/cI0N5m

Shapely melodies sung in appealing close harmony characterise this German accoustic duo’s well crafted songs. To my ear these are pop rock songs, but performed simply (and very well) on acoustic guitar and fiddle. I have no clue what they’re singing about, but I would happily sit and listen to them for an hour or two.

The Telescopes

http://bit.ly/bP7RK6

Sometimes playing recognisable song structures that at their best are reminiscent of The Jesus And Mary Chain or The Velvet Underground’s psychedelic droning, and sometimes performing noise sculptures with the fire-and-forget self-generative qualities of minimalist music, this post-shoegaze outfit is in full command of the sonic potential of the electric guitar. If you let them, they will take you to interesting places.

The Fauns

http://bit.ly/aIalFU

Sounding not unlike their stated influence Slowdive, but with the vocals even more awash with reverb, and even further back in the mix, these latter day shoegazers show us once again how a brutally distorted guitar can be a thing of warm comforting mellowness. If this is self-celebration, it’s a very welcoming, inviting kind.

Totally Stressed

http://bit.ly/caKXjM

Self-identifying as Art Rock, these six women from Berlin perform music with a core of moderately heavy post-punk inflected rock, which they layer with folk and classical instruments and themes to create a powerful, complex and well integrated fusion. I find it very hard to imagine walking away from a Totally Stressed gig without a spring in my step... 

The Skellies

http://bit.ly/dmkN9n

Angry, attitude filled lyrics declaimed in the manner of Mark E. Smith and energetic, insistent punk riffing, sometimes sounding like The Clash or The Buzzcocks, sometimes more like The Dead Kennedys, always fraying at the edges just like punk should. The Skellies have their moments of experimental weirdness too, but mostly this is straightahead sweaty mosh fodder, which is always pleasing.

De Shamonix

http://bit.ly/dtmtgL

This is red blooded rock ’n’ roll, with un-finessed graunch that makes you take a step back and brace yourself. The bass and drums could be straight out of Steppenwolf, while the guitars have a drug infused Detroit garage feel, and the rapid fire vocals are a masterclass in classic rock singing. De Shamonix pull no punches, and believe me, you don’t want them to!

Mary And The Baby Cheeses

http://bit.ly/dnFLnw

Touching bases as diverse as Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, Freezepop, and The Velvet Underground, this is an experimental band that is unlikely to ever leave you feeling you know what’s coming next. With an idiosyncratic but varied approach to vocal delivery, there’s clearly some serious artistic intention here, but also a good deal of humour, and an end result that is highly entertaining.

Ange Da Costa

http://bit.ly/aABVkG

Reggae bubbling with funky clavinet recalls The Wailers, and guitar led afrobeat has more than a hint of Fela Kuti to it, but much of Ange Da Costa’s output is jazzy, funky soul, reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield or Brazilian artists such as Max De Castro and Jair Oliveira. Impeccable rhythm section work and great polyglot singing, make this slick, groove filled music eminently listenable.

Sun's Poodle (second draft)

I need to work this shit out:
I want the winter to be my friend.
But in the winter entreaty's lexicon evades me
and I carry summer's kiss blandly tattooed across my fabric.
The sun's poodle wavers, sidles gingerly
into an imagined crack between hibernation and denial,
only to find that fantasy is reified in times and places of its own choosing.
And it's so fucked up, it does my head in.

I am mis-classified.
Sun's poodle puts his testosterone back in his handbag,
and returns to his basking,
a lizard in a crack in a sun baked stone wall.
I am the wall.
I am the fly the lizard hunts; I am drunk;
I am mulling things over;
I am soaking up light
as though it could be stored
to sustain me on narrow days
when I must be a creature of visible breath,
and sleet, and filigreed rime on morning windows;
and piercing sheets of anaemic yellow
animating haze above white gilt fields of once was and will be.

My words betray me: I love those things,

love winter, as it kills me, love how it kills me;
loving it kills me.

I am hoping to convince myself, but…

…fuck it, I am the sun's poodle.



Limousin and Suffolk, August to September 2010

Algebra

And the solution to the equation
is a negative.
Our x and y are mash up
in a mill of functions and operators,
and the solution to the equation is
the sum total of all the beauty in the universe;
and the solution to the equation is
fire;
and the solution to the equation is
outgrowing and burgeoning,
and exceeding all my hopes
and stilling my heart with her complexity.

This equation must be quartic, or quintic,
because there is more than space and time
in the geometry of these decaying orbits.
There is more than shape to these forms;
there is more than fractal chaos
to these disordered patterns;
and there is more than heat loss to this
entropic blue shifting expansion
of the spaces between.
The solution to the equation is
the sum total of all the beauty in the universe;
and the solution to the equation
is a negative.

Colchester, September 2010

Solar System Story

This is a random vignette, the apparent beginning of a science-fiction story that I will probably never write: I'm very good at the beginnings of stories, so maybe I should write a book made of them, like If On A Winter's Night a Traveller. This conversation just popped into my head, along with its setting, while i was walking the dog. If I write any further instalments, I'll publish them here.

I stood near the edge of Yasu Dome, looking out across Triton towards a new, as yet unnamed volcano, spewing water and methane into the thermosphere, where it variously froze and dispersed, making its minor contribution to the thin veil of gases, that could occasionally be glimpsed as a haze against the sun. I was waiting for my friend, the Anglican Archbishop of Neptune to return to his office, where we had arranged to discuss a business venture over coffee and drugs.

Of the Neptune system's roughly ten million inhabitants, around ten percent subscribed to some kind of religion, leaving aside whatever notions individuals may profess regarding the nature of spiritual existence or human consciousness. Of that million souls perhaps two hundred thousand were Christian, and of those, precisely twenty-seven were confirmed Anglicans. Justin Woo was in fact the only Anglican priest in the Neptune system, although his status as an Archbishop was equal in the Anglican Communion to the Archbishops of Canterbury, or Mars. As I understand it the majority of Justin's church merged with an older, larger sect to become the Afro-Orthodox Church, to which most Neptunian Christians belonged, in some kind of wrangling over sexual preference.

For this reason his stipend did not provide a whole living, and his 'palace' was a one bedroom apartment: it was still officially a palace however, and had been purchased for the Church of Neptune by the very wealthy Bishop of Io (from his personal fortune) on a drunken binge, along with the locked office I stood outside, and the identical one next to it, which was the Cathedral of St. Desmond.

I am not a Christian, or any other kind of religious, although I am very much in tune with the idea that there are more important things than us in the universe. My close association with the First Returners when their huge asteroid vessel made its tour of the solar system, inculcated in me a strong sense of the vastness of everything: even with the anti-aging treatments they all used, and even accounting for the relativistic benefits of the significant fraction of the speed of light at which they travelled, everyone aboard would have spent most of their lives in transit by the time they got back to Alpha Centauri. And once they did get home, they would be living a domed existence with ready access to less than a million other people, in an entire binary system. The bigness of all the stuff among which we find ourselves, is according to Justin, a very good place to start: his account of his faith is very much more attractive than most other religious creeds I have encountered (not that I've ever been particularly proactive in seeking them out).

‘It’s completely pointless,’ he once told me, ‘to talk about knowing religious truths. Or at least, if you’re going to say you know about God, you should make it clear it’s not the same kind of knowing that it is every other time you use the word.’

This is a good kind of talk to hear from a religious leader, even a politically irrelevant one like Justin. (I only wish the Hindu fundamentalists that exposed a hundred thousand to vacuum at Pavonis Mons had felt a similar lack of certainty.) But of course, when you hear such a view from a minister of religion, you challenge it.

‘So wait… what? Are you saying you’re not sure about God? And Jesus, and all the other things?’

‘Oh please, come on! I’m a fucking Archbishop! Of course I’m sure, it’s just that…’

‘Go on.’

He took a deep breath. ‘I know, with great certainty that God is real, that God loves me, in the same very personal way we love the people we have close relationships with. And more than that, I know that Jesus Christ is real, and that it is through Jesus that I can approach God; and I know that it is through the sacraments of the Church that I can approach Jesus.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘Aha! Precisely! That’s a rhetorical gift: we should form a double act. How do I know?’

Justin leaned forward, speaking as intensely as I’ve ever seen him speak (which was something more than slightly, but still less than moderately).

‘I know these things to be truths because I’ve experienced them for myself. I’ve gone through the motions of being a Christian, and I’ve felt God’s love. You can’t argue with God’s love.’

‘People do.’

‘Yes, but that’s my point. It’s irrelevant: to argue for or against a religious truth is to be utterly mistaken about what sort of truth it is. It’s personal experience. Personal experience that anyone can share, but only if they are willing to take, well… a leap of faith.’

He sat back and toyed with a bottle of his latest venture, a somewhat less than successful effort to invent an indigenous Neptunian liquor, which he was optimistically calling gin, and I was calling the holy spirit.

‘Okay. So obviously, we’re actually talking about faith or belief, not knowledge.’

‘I know I said it was pointless to think about it in those terms, but yes, it is knowledge. You have to understand that knowledge is something that happens inside you. The thing you know, the fact, is out there, but the knowledge is an experience you have. And in the case of religious knowledge, the ‘thing’ is also an experience you have.’

I made a dismissive gesture. ‘Yeah right. You know you’re not convincing me: I mean, that’s not, ever, what I mean when I say I know something. How do you know you’re not deluding yourself?’

Justin grinned. ‘If I am, it’s a delusion that works for me. And yes, other people have spiritual or religious experiences, and place other interpretations on them, Buddhist, or Islamic, or Hindu, or Judaic, or Zoroastrian, or psychological or atheist ones. I’m not saying that they are wrong. We religious types do not have a monopoly on the spiritual; even someone whose slant on it says that only their creed is right, and that all others are false, is just as right as I am. I’m not very evangelical, as you may have noticed…’

‘Oh come on, this is no kind of knowledge, or even belief! Everybody’s right? Fundamentalists, murderous fanatics? Are they right too?’

‘They’re entitled to their beliefs. A belief is a route towards the spiritual knowledge we’ve been discussing. I would suspect that someone who wants to wage holy war is not actually in a very healthy state, mentally or spiritually, but the part of their creed that says they should kill the infidel, or not use contraception, or always have salt on the table at mealtimes, or wear special hats on certain days, is extraneous to the task of coming to know God. I mean, Jesus is fundamental to me; the Anglican liturgy is extraneous. It just happens, like all these things, to provide a good context, to help create a sense of identification with the faith. It gives you something to do while you’re waiting for religious knowledge to come along.’

‘I have plenty to do,’ I laughed. ‘What’s wrong with drugs, or sex, or music, or… yadda yadda, whatever?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, taking another slug of his almost undrinkable gin.

Sadly, Justin’s contingent, nuanced sense of belief is not widely shared by religious people in general, whose favoured ideologies have tended more towards the fanatical as their numbers have dwindled. The religious ten percent of Neptune’s population are a somewhat larger proportion than can now be found anywhere else in the solar system, although Justin’s own faith is much better represented further down the well, particularly in the Jupiter system, where it is the largest Christian sect.

Neptune is the last place, the utter edge, the extreme limit of human habitation (other than the small weird groups of scientists and isolationists that have made their homes on trans-Neptunian objects such as Pluto and Makemake). As such it has been a popular destination for those who want to make an escape from the main stream of human society: religious fanatics, political extremists, anarchist libertarians, fugitives from justice, hedonists and perverts. Every habitat is independent, coming together only to share resources, and latterly to co-ordinate their naval forces, the Piracy Crisis having forced the issue. It has a reputation as the wide open, lawless system where anything goes, where anything can be had. To a large extent this is true, but daily life is tamer there than the rest of the solar system generally believes, especially in Yasu, which operates a legal code directly borrowed from Free Mars.

Yasu Dome is the de-facto system capital, as it is the city where most of the co-operative ventures are headquartered, and the site of Triton’s largest spaceport and transport hub. Which is why Justin is based there. He arrived, apologising that his rare pastoral visit had overrun, and we went inside.