Introduction

I published Glanglish, a collection of essays, back in 1990.  And I mean published in the traditional sense: it was a physical book – second-hand copies can still be found on the usual sites.  Those 52 essays were just a selection of the many that I had written at that time, chosen because I presumably thought they were the most suitable.  I wrote even more of them afterwards, and vaguely contemplated a second collection, but was dissuaded from doing so by the complete failure of the first set.

Recently I came across hard copies of all the unpublished essays, each of which is exactly one page long. I do have digital versions, but they are on three-inch floppy discs, as used on the Amstrad PCW 8256, my main computer system for many years.  These non-standard discs are impossible to read nowadays unless you pay exorbitant sums to one of the few data services that can still convert them.  So I have decide to re-type all the essays – great exercise for my piano-playing fingers – and to put them online here as they appear in those hard copies, without any further editing, other correcting obvious mistakes.  I have around 150 to type up, so it will take a while as I work my way through them, in no particular order.

I have chosen to list them chronologically, since I was curious to see what I was writing about when, and how productive I was at various times.  I have included the Glanglish essays in their relevant chronological position to show how the fit into my overall essay production, and what other essays I could have chosen, but didn’t. They are marked with an asterisk, and link to the main Glanglish site, which includes audio versions of all the essays appearing there, for those who might find that an interesting alternative way of approaching them.

Index

Madonna 06/09/85
Like a glove 03/02/86
A smooth operation 03/02/86
The first novel 04/02/86
The longest day 06/02/86
The world is full of marred men 14/03/86
Of Africa 15/03/86
Pravda* 18/03/86
The Quiet Earth 19/03/86
Compact discs and Jimmy Young 22/03/86
PLG British string quartet 22/03/86
The Saxon shore     22/03/86
White nights 23/03/86
Glengarry Glen Ross 25/03/86
Difficult loves 29/03/86
Less than zero 29/03/86
Absolute Beginners - the book 31/03/86
Absolute Beginners - the film      08/04/86
Music of eight decades        08/04/86
Random experiences 21/04/86
Awakenings – Oliver Sacks 23/04/86
Voices – Roger Eno 23/04/86
Vox Boxes 27/04/86
Back to the future 27/04/86
Polish notation 04/05/86
A week in gourmandy 06/05/86
Chorus of disapproval 07/05/86
The engineer of human souls 08/05/86
French comix 21/05/86
Good timing 21/05/86
Le Nozze di Figaro 27/05/86
Taxi 27/05/86
Arvo Pärt – Almeida Festival 10/06/86
Albert Herring - Aldeburgh Festival 19/06/86
Being there again 21/06/86
Madrigalia 21/06/86
A217 22/06/86
Monteverdi 22/06/86
Talking to myself 22/06/86
True amateurs 23/06/86
The discreet charm of Perrier 30/06/86
Proust and journalism 30/06/86
Economising 26/07/86
The school of graffiti 26/07/86
Bucks and berks 26/07/86
Unfinished symphonies 29/07/86
Venetian dawn 29/07/86
The great Wurlitzer 29/07/86
Early music, late musician 09/08/86
Systems music 09/08/86
Boldly going 10/08/86
The arrogance of florists 12/08/86
The Golden Gate 27/08/86
Symphony in white 27/08/86
Dalliance* 27/08/86
The aristos 10/09/86
Friends like these 25/09/86
Vinyl virtues 25/09/86
Hip hop 07/10/86
Jericho 07/10/86
A walk on the Wildenrath side 07/10/86
The carwash 10/10/86
Contingency 10/10/86
The mystery of the 48 10/10/86
The lie 16/10/86
The collector 22/11/86
Invitation to the voyage 22/11/86
Windowlene 22/11/86
Giants’ work 19/12/86
Rossini 19/12/86
Meditation on a Christmas card 20/12/86
Zen and the art of motoring 21/12/86
Deep structures 28/12/86
Mona Lisa 28/12/86
Outer London 28/12/86
Wolfing it 28/12/86
Accounting for professionals 31/12/86
The baby boomers 05/02/87
Back to Bach I 07/02/87
Haydn in the morning 07/02/87
The havs and the hav nots 08/02/87
The significance of theories 08/02/87
The weekly essay* 09/02/87
Counting the cost* 10/02/87
Where there’s a will there’s a won’t 15/02/87
A matter of luck 07/04/87
Random experiences 11/04/87
Invisible royalty* 12/04/87
The treasure house 13/07/87
Love letters 26/07/87
The impossibility of letters 27/07/87
The new heroic age 28/07/87
It’s a small world 30/07/87
Exhibitionists 01/08/87
Lake District knowledge 02/08/87
Gouldberg variations 04/08/87
The universal village 05/08/87
Alpha and omega 06/08/87
Quick, quick, Oslo 13/08/87
The lie 16/10/87
The post-it modern age 17/10/87
The knife's deity* 17/10/87
Windy city* 17/10/87
Old Budapest 18/10/87
Mozart’s problem 18/10/87
Happy eaters 08/11/87
Casting about 28/11/87
Hydeing in the park 29/11/87
Letter bombs 01/12/87
Modern magic 03/12/87
A dream of a murder 26/12/87
Form v content 28/12/87
Character head 16/01/88
First steps with Lorenzetti 05/03/88
The ultimate tie 06/03/88
Miles better 07/03/88
Revelations 19/06/88
Palladio’s puzzle 20/06/88
The bellyache of an architect 02/07/88
Village voices 02/07/88
Making an art of itself 02/07/88
Madonna 02/07/88
Mercury’s messengers 08/07/88
In Guangzhou zoo 17/07/88
Nuts 17/07/88
What masterpiece?* 18/07/88
8.8.88* 08/08/88
Working it out 09/08/88
Where are the new chiliasts? 10/08/88
Repeatability* 15/08/88
Silly farts* 21/08/88
Forever Eden* 07/07/89
Stargazing* 16/10/89
Archaic symphonies 17/10/89
Getting the idea* 19/10/89
Dateline: Bali 20/10/89
Scenes from childhood 21/10/89
Start the day: write 21/10/89
Wallpaper* 21/10/89
Intraviewing* 21/10/89
LP RIP 22/10/89
Rubbish* 23/10/89
The insolence of the inanimate* 24/10/89
Nostalgia for Brezhnev* 25/10/89
Colonising names* 26/10/89
Bookness 27/10/89
Power art 28/10/89
The smell of the new 29/10/89
Weird messages* 29/10/89
Thoughts for your pennies* 29/10/89
The naked truth 30/10/89
Poem of urban choreography 31/10/89
Take and give 17/11/89
In Moody’s boatyard 18/11/89
Nan’s ninth 18/11/89
Chiral asymmetries* 18/11/89
The contingent apple* 18/11/89
The profit of the beard* 18/11/89
Spot the similarity* 18/11/89
Dire diary* 18/11/89
Ecstasy 19/11/89
The plane truth* 19/11/89
Glanglish* 19/11/89
The finite brain* 19/11/89
Antics* 19/11/89
Accidents and substance* 20/11/89
The oscillating universe* 21/11/89
Looking at glass* 22/11/89
Cacography* 24/11/89
Sex and Billy Graham 25/11/89
I think therefore 25/11/89
Systemic dis-ease* 25/11/89
The check-out* 04/12/89
Three sciences* 05/12/89
Socratic wisdom* 06/12/89
Looking down the catenaries 09/12/89
Managerial joys 09/12/89
Our type 09/12/89
Micro politics 09/12/89
Booting up* 09/12/89
The policeman’s bifurcation 10/12/89
Food’s grammar and graces 10/12/89
Ludwig van who?* 10/12/89
Corporeal integrity* 11/12/89
To the power station 12/12/89
Skirmish 13/12/89
Hoardings* 13/12/89
Chopin’s fingering 16/12/89
In security 17/12/89
The new Jesuits* 18/12/89
If were were a has been 20/12/89
Digital reality* 21/12/89
Deep listening 02/01/90
Young hubris 04/01/90
Meta-physicality* 05/01/90
The crown in the jewel* 06/01/90
Scarlatti’s cat* 06/01/90
God in the body* 07/01/90
Truckling on* 07/01/90
Parallel worlds 08/01/90
The slide 23/12/91
Sign of the times 23/12/91
Spot the similarity 24/12/91
Translations 24/12/91
Dust to dust 24/12/91
If I were a gnat 24/12/91
The wipees 24/12/91
When Greek meets Greek 25/12/91
Unshod for water 25/12/91
Normality 25/12/91
Digital disease 25/12/91
The souls of the feet 26/12/91
Techno-babel 26/12/91
The Beethoven syndrome 26/12/91
Thank you, fug 26/12/91
Entitlements 26/12/91
The career of language 26/12/91
Harlem whispers 26/12/91
In security 27/12/91
All what jazz? 27/12/91
The hills of Venice 27/12/91
Exponents 27/12/91
Ferry lands 27/12/91
The great joke 27/12/91
Fricative frisson 28/12/91
Dateline: Bali 28/12/91
Consumption 28/12/91
Unlonely planet 28/12/91
Pushing the envelope 28/12/91
Curried away 18/01/92
Like a virgin queen 18/01/92
One world 25/01/92
Popular fiction 01/02/92
Real virtual reality 08/02/92
Intellectual love 08/02/92
Negotiating life 22/02/92
The domestic time machine 22/02/92
If were were a has been 22/02/92
Going back 22/02/92
The Hour of the Sheep 23/02/92
Radio activity 23/02/92
The class of 39 23/02/92
Così fan tutti 29/02/92
The eyes have it 29/02/92
Walk on by 29/02/92
Just say nay 29/02/92
Banal retention 01/03/92
Chopin’s hands 01/03/92
Capital ideas 01/03/92
The Connection Machine 01/03/92
The itch 01/03/92
Credit cards 13/03/92
Conti 14/03/92
Help 14/03/92
The art of the baroque airline 14/03/92
The analytic L-matrix 15/03/92
Police aware aware 15/03/92
Word stars 15/03/92
The flip of a copper 15/03/92
The game’s the thing 15/03/92
Models of conduction 21/03/92
Switched on Bach II 21/03/92
Deep listening 22/03/92
Cicatrice 22/03/92
Hamlet’s omelette 31/03/92
At your service 26/04/92
Killing Murgatroyd 02/05/92

Ferry lands

Every mode of transport has its benefits and beauties.  The plane collapses distances at the rate of ten miles a minute; the ship abstracts you from life, a kind of floating retreat; the train offers the outside world as a seamless panorama; the car is personal freedom made manifest in metal.  But there is one hybrid form that for me is the most glorious and romantic of all: the ferry.

But not any ferry: to partake of the particular magic I seek it must be an open car ferry.  That is, its design is quite peculiar, consisting of a single deck for the cars and lorries, with perhaps a bridge straddling overhead, and the passengers from the vehicles plus any pedestrian hangers-on stowed up front somewhere.  It is the quintessence of a boat: just a hull and a deck, and so plugs into our most ancient feelings – and doubts – about this type of travel.

A ferry boat is special because it grants to land-bound cars the ability to cross the waters; it allows them and us to transcend the petty limitations imposed by the mundane world.  So almost immediately the experience is strange, your car and the others around it distant from dry land, appearing to float miraculously above the waters.

As well as strangeness, car ferries are also the occasion for melancholy.  Most roads lead somewhere, but in the absence of the boat the path to the ferry seems to drive straight into the waves.  Passing with increasing sadness along such roads, we feel the insidious urge to keep on going, to drive into the deep, consoling embrace of the waters.  But the ferry catches us, saves us from ourselves.

There is another aspect of these roads to the sea or river.  The ferry’s promise is to grant you a matching path on the other side, wherever that might be.  The journey is the nautical equivalent of science’s wormholes – those shortcuts in space and time which allow you to jump through to distant parts and eras of this or other universes.  The car ferry’s road does not show on maps any more than wormholes do; but the road itself exists, and we can take pleasure in this unreasonable gift.

This strangeness, this melancholy, this satisfaction have been constant companions on my journeys with the ferry.  Crossing out to the heather-clad hills on the Isle of Skye I felt the mysterious wind of another land blowing, one of those Celtic worlds of eternal youth.  Passing from the northernmost tip of Euboea back to the Greek mainland, I sat poised in thought, gazing at hazy villages and towns unchanged since Pericles.  And traversing the Nile towards al-Amarnah, crossing from the land of the dead to the land of the living, I felt a sense of achievement in fighting this mighty river’s flow to reach the other side.

So subtle are these journeys that I was barely conscious of leaving my point of departure, and could hardly make out how fast we approached our destination.  But always, when I suddenly found myself abandoned in the middle of the waters, I wanted to dwell there, in these strange, melancholy but deeply satisfying ferry lands, forlorn but happy.

(27.12.91)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels

Index

Hamlet’s omelette

Many consider Hamlet to be Shakespeare’s most personal play, where uncharacteristically he bared many of the deep traumas and unresolved conflicts that drove him to create.  Others regard it as simply the greatest play ever written, where the most fundamental questions of human existence are examined exhaustively and – with a running time of around four hours – exhaustingly.

Certainly, in one respect, it is unique.  For the English-speaker, no other comparable work is so embedded in the consciousness, so integral a part of the culture.  Even those who have never seen it, never read it, and know nothing of its plot, will recognise instantly “To be, or not, to be…” and “Alas, poor Yorick”.

For the actors, this makes the play an obstacle course of famous set-pieces.  As they approach them, they are hemmed in by a thousand ghosts – not of Hamlet’s father, but of the previous interpreters and their famous interpretations, which in turn have been added to the great weight of tradition weighing heavily on every subsequent player.

Watching the play becomes therefore a strangely post-modern experience.  It seems embedded with hundreds of quotations, as if Shakespeare had simply assembled a mass of well-known phrases, and written some connecting dialogue to string them together in the great, sprawling work we know today.  As we listen, the famous lines – “There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy”, “Get thee to a nunnery”, and the rest – jump out in the verbal equivalent of neon.  Hamlet remains for us a supremely discontinuous experience.

As a result, few of us have ever really seen or heard the real Hamlet.  Instead it becomes a mix of ancient comedians’ catchphrases – “Very like a whale”, “A palpable hit” – which we applaud mindlessly like an audience at a game-show; bravura arias and ensembles straight out of opera seria at its most artificial – The Soliloquy above all, but also including the various dialogues of Hamlet with Fortinbras, Polonius and Ophelia; and a kind of inchoate, eternal pattern book, a mysterious and inexplicable precursor of a hundred paintings, symphonic poems, novels, operas, advertisement campaigns, jokes, and, ultimately and most disturbingly, of our own turn of phrases and thoughts.

Against this background, the most revelatory performance of Hamlet I ever saw was that of the national Romanian company.  There before me, in a tongue of which I understood not a word, was clearly the play I thought I knew so well, but which now seemed so alien.  The actions were there, the characters, the speeches; but for once I had to struggle to follow it.  And in doing so, it began to regain its for me long-lost flow.  Of course, the thrilling Romanian actors did have one tragic advantage apart from being isolated from the play’s historical and linguistic burden.  Shakespeare’s tale of a diseased state, of corrupt politicians and of the brutal reality of moral choice was, for those who still lived under Ceaușescu, nothing less than contemporary reality.  Something which we could never experience without a similar catastrophic social breakdown.

(21.3.92)

Index

Dateline: Bali

In the good old days, when you knew where you were, newspapers were real newspapers.  Typesetting was in hot metal, the journalists wore green eye shades and news stories had datelines.  Found at the top of each piece they gave the date and the place the story was filed.  Their role was to remind the reader that communications being problematic from some of the further-flung corners of the world, the stories might have taken a day two to reach the editorial offices, and might therefore refer to the more distant past.  The dateline gave the exact day when the story was written.

Today, of course, with instant, global contact, the date in the dateline is superfluous: all the news is the latest.  So the dateline has shrunk to just a record of the news’s place of origin.

As it happens, this confusion of time and space has been increasingly sanctioned by some of the most advanced theories of science.  For example, one of the central ideas of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is that concepts of time and simultaneity are dependent on where you are: they do not exist universally, but can change.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein went even further, dissolving the neat distinction between time and space altogether by introducing instead the continuum of space-time, curvatures of which give rise to apparent gravitational forces – the idea at the heart of his theory.  This has opened up the possibility of all sorts of madnesses. For example, according to theories concerning black holes – unimaginably dense collapsed stars – in some circumstances it is possible to circle one and not move in space, but in a closed loop of time.

It was thoughts such as these that happened to pass through my mind one cloudless night in the early summer of 1988.  I was on the east coast of Bali, walking up and down the long sandy beach of Sanur.  What made me ponder on these mysteries that evening?  Perhaps it was the soft thrumming of one of the local gamelan bands behind me as it provided its after-dinner entertainment to the sparse guests, with its magical, subtly shifting repetitions which seemed to hover in the air, almost outside time.  Perhaps, as I gazed out across the moon-shimmered sea to the eastern horizon, it was the thought of the International Dateline out there – admittedly another five thousand miles or so.

Certainly the Dateline and its relation to time had obsessed me for years – if only because I had signally failed to grasp its concept.  Of course I knew that it was bound up with the fact that the Earth was a sphere, and so in passing round it there had to be a point at which the local hour fell back by a day – otherwise you would end up with two dates at the same location – clearly ridiculous, even in an Einsteinian world.  But I was unable to put together the different elements of time and space that caused this to happen.  Then suddenly, under that silver moon, serenaded by the distant gamelan, I had it: I understood completely how the Dateline worked, and why it was necessary.  Unfortunately, as this particular point in time I am not able to explain this insight clearly to anyone now.  You probably had to be there.

(28.12.91)

Index

The Hour of the Sheep

It is a pity that Ingmar Bergman’s films are little shown today.  Fifteen years ago, they seemed to be a permanent component of any independent cinema’s programming, providing vast but varied cycles of deep northern angst and spiritual torment.  Perhaps they were played as infrequently as now, but their impact on the first-time viewer was simply so profound and enduring that the cumulative memory was that of one great series.

One Bergman work in particular made a great impression on me.  The film was “The Hour of the Wolf”, and told the story of a typically tortured Bergman protagonist, an artist living on an isolated Nordic island with the inevitable Liv Ullmann – Bergman’s iconic actress – as his long-suffering companion.  This stark, black-and-white film charts his descent into madness through some striking nightmare sequences.  The title relates to the time around 3 o’clock in the morning when most suicides occur, and when supposedly the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.

Happily I have never experienced that particular existential nadir.  But I am only too familiar with the antipodean time, around three in the afternoon, which I have long been convinced is the Hour of the Sheep.

I am not sure when I first became aware of this special hour.  I have no recollections of it from school, but as soon as I started to work I was conscious of the unique position it occupied during the day.  For regardless of what I had done in the morning, or the night before, and irrespective of what I ate for lunch, I found that as the dreaded Hour of the Sheep approached, my entire body craved one thing: sleep.

Working at my desk was bad enough: I would find the visual field in front of me start to swim as my eyes began to lose the ability to focus.  Minutes would pass in this trance-like state until something would snap me out of it.  But worse, far worse, were the after-lunch meetings.  There I would find myself hopelessly trapped, unable even to get up and walk around to stave off this incipient dozing.  Instead I was conscious of my eyes staring wildly at objects several miles or several millimetres away, without reference to my surroundings.  I could feel my head begin to sag; fatally, I would tip it slightly back, only to wake up with a bone-crunching jolt as my head fell away behind me.  As I caught my boss’s outraged look I desperately tried to pretend this was a neck-stretching exercise, and repeated the ridiculous manoeuvre once or twice more .

But my worst experience was when on one occasion I had to interview someone at this particular time of day.  Incredibly boring, he proved unequal to the task of keeping me awake, and to my horror I found myself nodding off in the middle of his reply.  He did not get the job.  By all rights, I should have lost mine.

Clearly even this shocking story does not compare with Bergman’s.  As least I don’t think it does.  Because unfortunately both times that I saw “The Hour of the Wolf” was at The Hour of the Sheep.  Needless to say, I dropped off at various points, and as a result I have never been entirely sure about the film’s plot.

(23.2.92)

Index

Conti

As visitors to Florence know, the nearby town of Fiesole has something of heaven about it.  Tucked away high on one of the surrounding hills, with its wonderful, refreshing air – so cool after the rigours of the crucible of infernal heat below – this little gathering of square, church, villas, gardens and Roman remains has an almost god-like view of the Tuscan plain that seems to cry out for a great painter to do it justice.

I had been here many years ago, and returning was pleased to recognise its layout and principal features.  But I had not reckoned on meeting another memory from that time, one that was rather deeper and more complex than those of the simple touristic visit I had made to the town itself.

It was a guidebook which gave the first indication that something had changed.  There was a relatively new museum here, it said, devoted to the works of an Italian artist who had spent the last years of his life here at Fiesole: Primo Conti.

It had to be the same, I though.  The same painter whom, some fifteen years before, I had been brought to visit here.  I was staying with a charming elderly spinster in Florence, living in a huge cool shuttered apartment near the centre of the city.  Her younger sister was something of an acolyte of the arts.  One of her great catches was Primo Conti – “Maestro” as she called hiim.  Partly to impress and partly to give pleasure she arranged for the three of us to visit his hillside villa.

We made the trip there in the dead heat of summer, the car climbing through the small winding roads out of Florence into the hills.  I soon lost my bearings, and therefore had no idea where this villa was when we finally arrived there.  But I could see at once it was stunningly placed at the edge of a hill with a huge panoramic view of the heat-blurred mountains around us.  The house itself was a simple Renaissance villa with an interesting internal design and remains of some School of Botticelli frescoes which had been uncovered in the house’s restoration.

Signor Conti was a dignified old gentleman with a brilliant white beard and hair as I remember.  He must have been in his late seventies when I met him.  His eyes took on a distant look and his voice became more reflective as he answered reverent questions of his female admirer with stories of long ago.  As we sat out on the terrace drinking iced tea by the pond, I was shown some of his works, and invited to be amazed by his precocious facility.  Ungraciously, I was not particularly impressed.

When I returned there recently, and saw the same villa, now a rather cold and sad museum, the rooms empty except for the paintings, and when I descended to his workshop – eerily left untouched since he last worked there – and looked out at that same scene, I had a chance to reconsider.  I saw now that Conti had indeed achieved something valuable with his life and his art, that the world he had created – this house, those paintings – was of real enduring beauty.  And I realised how wrong I had been those years ago, how incorrect in my youthful judgement, and how I had paid for my arrogant computation that day, and in the years until reckoning.

(14.3.92)

Index

Chopin’s hands

Technology makes us forgetful: each advance, each new wave tends to wash away the memories of its predecessor.  Thus in the world of computers, the 3.5 inch floppy disc is so ubiquitous that to encounter the older 5.25 inch format is like meeting a long-lost ancestor.  Few people know of the existence of an even earlier design, a full 8 inches square, which now looks like the fossil of a dinosaur.

The same is happening with recorded music.  The triumph of the CD over the LP means that we are losing everything it once represented to us.  In particular we are losing its physicality.  In the place of the large, glistening black disc, with its faint, exotic odour, we have the small, convenient, antiseptic piece of plastic which seems devoid of characteristics, devoid of content almost.  The fact that it contains music is reduced to a kind of magic, and the connection between what we have and what we hear is broken.

As a result we find it hard to experience recorded music for what it is: a real moment in time, caught like a beetle in amber.  We forget that the sounds we hear were made by people, perhaps long dead.  It is only when we listen to something completely out of the ordinary – for example the sound of the last Western castrato, caught on an ancient 78 record – that we may be shocked into a sense of the reality of the experience.

Before LPs, before 78s – and how many of us have ever played a 78? - there was an earlier technology which puts us in even closer touch with the music and musicians.  These are the piano rolls, cut by the player on a special instrument, and capturing nearly every nuance of the performance by means of punched holes.  Listening to a roll is therefore a ghostly re-enactment of those moments: the keys go down, the pedals are pressed, the music peals forth with all its phrasing – only the original player is absent.  In this way we have a good idea of how famous composers such as Elgar and Mahler actually played their music.

But there is another, even simpler, technique for capturing the extraordinary sense of music being created.  As we play on the piano a work by composers who were themselves pianists, we can begin to sense underneath our hands, in the chords they put down on paper, and which we now form with our fingers, their own hands as they played.  Just as there is a spectral musician in the player-piano, so that spirit is present too every time we play the piece ourselves.

This effect is more haunting in some music than it is in others.  Composers such as Mozart seemed to produce music of such classical beauty and perfection that it almost transcends the physical.  To play his music is to create music pure and simple.  Beethoven, by contrast, assaults his instrument; in his music we can feel the sense of strain as chords and notes are thrown around the keyboard.  But it is perhaps in Chopin that we find this effect at its height, a composer who wrote nothing without the piano, and whose music is so intimately bound up with the sensuous act of playing that every bar seems to bear not just his fingerprint, but the marks and shape of his very hands too.

(1.3.92)

See also Moody’s Sonnets

Index

The Quiet Earth (16.3.86)

It is probably a universal childhood nightmare to imagine yourself utterly alone in the world.  That is, literally, rather than just metaphorically.  Not only are you afraid because you are friendless and without protectors; the whole fabric of your universe changes.  Life becomes meaningless because there can be no hope of development, no change.  Only death, which will be unnoticed and unmourned.  Better, you might think, to end the farce after the first act than play to an empty, echoing theatre.

The Quiet Earth film is based on just this premise.  One day, a menopausal male staggers out of sleep.  All is quiet around him.  The radio is quiet, the roads are quiet, nobody answers his phone calls.  He drives to the city.  Along the way he encounters crashed cars, devoid of occupants.  The land has the appearance of being abandoned – but by every living thing.

The man, who is a scientist, drives to his laboratory.  Over it broods a huge radio dish.  There is no one inside – except the charred remains of his former director.  His hideously deformed body is still at the console.  We have gathered by now that this is all the result of the Bad Experiment.  We are spared the effort of worrying our poor noodles with any details of this, except that it involved a global energy field, and the Americans.

The first part of the film proceeds to explore the plight of the Last Man Alive.  By definition he has absolute power, though over an empty world.  He begins to be corrupted by it.  In a surreal and improbable sequence he assembles a collection of full-size cardboard cut-outs which he places before the mansion he has requisitioned.  Ranks of loudspeakers provide frenzied applause to his ravings which he delivers to the gathered throng of two-dimensional greats.  Belatedly, he questions the wisdom of scientific meddling, and his role in it.

The shift towards morality play is further enhanced by the appearance of first a young woman, and then a macho red-neck.  She is articulately feminist, and challenges the scientist’s axioms.  He is an Action Man machine, and stands in opposition to the hero’s wan intellectualism.  In the last scenes, where the scientist redeems himself by driving a few tons of TNT into the radio dish, there is a symbolic coupling by the other two.

Interestingly enough, the film does not resolve.  Where we might have expected the explosion and scientist’s death to redeem the vanished mankind, instead we are shifted onto another plane.  One of the film’s shakier premises had been that these three had survived where all others had not because, paradoxically, they had died.  More precisely they had died at the moment the Bad Experiment had taken place.  Thus when the scientist dies once more, he lives on.  We see him on the seashore.  In the distance there is a slow sunrise, picking up the magical opening shots.  Except that this sun has rings.  The final image is of the scientist’s frail and once more lone humanity in an alien world.

The Quiet Earth succeeds through moments like these.  It also scores heavily in sardonic humour.  The action takes place exclusively in New Zealand: a land noted for its quietness at all times.

(19.3.86)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels

Index

A smooth operation (29.1.86)

I have been under the surgeon’s knife three times in my life.  Two of those are lost in the mists of childhood.  I can remember details – waking up after my appendicectomy, unable to move, at the age of seven, the pre-op anaesthetic jab shattering the syringe as it went in when I was 11 or so, but lacking at that age, and for many years after, any sense of self or being, I was unassailed by deep existential angst at the prospect of these voyages.  Just childish fear.

I experienced the childish fear this time, too.  But it went away surprisingly rapidly.  Instead, I became increasingly pre-occupied with the unreality of the whole enterprise.

Consider the facts.  I was preparing myself to be placed in a state of anaesthesia – quite unlike either the waking or sleeping states.  As such I would be helpless.  Moreover, I had even signed a form consenting to anything which might be done to me in that state.  And the nub of what that might consist of was having my body cut open, and bits of it hacked out.  Was this really wise of rational?  Was this really part of everyday reality?

Clearly not; and that was the point.  The act of surgery represents one of the most clearly supra-mundane acts which man is capable of.  It is the old equation of doctors with gods that goes back to shamans and witch-doctors themselves.  The latter are efficacious insofar as they partake of the godhead they serve.

Emerging from unconsciousness is like staggering out of a tunnel into a new world.  It may look like the world you left, but a new light is shining.  You have joined an elect; your mutilation is your rite of passage, and your stitches are your secret badge of honour.  Nothing can be the same again.

What then has this awesome brotherhood of priests achieved?  What have they given you that changes you so?  They have simply shown you that man is master of his body; they have allowed you through them to triumph over the base facts of your physicality.

While you have remained outside the flow of ordinary time – almost outside this world – your flesh has been cut, twisted and stretched; limbs and organs displaced or removed wholesale.  Then you have been put back together, your racked body sewn up, and the neat bundle allowed to surface again.  When you emerge drowsily into the light again, your body has been humiliated, but your spirit – man’s spirit – soars higher.

It is perhaps apt that I chose my consultant by chance after a mistake.  Apt that after a brief and exiguous consultation in an anonymous Harley Street consulting room, I only saw him briefly as a dark figure hovering before my drugged eyes shortly before going down to theatre.  He shook hands, and his hands were as cold as death.  But shortly this man was to prove himself to belong to quite a different camp, and to be one of the ultimate breeds of smooth operators.

(3.2.86)

Index

Monteverdi

According to Pater, all art aspires to music.  It is strange, then, that music is consistently a generation or more behind other media.  For example, where Romanticism raised its tousled head at the beginning of the nineteenth century in poetry, music had to wait a good 30 years before displaying the full panoply of navel-contemplating tendencies.  Where French Classicism and the English Augustans flourished in the first part of the eighteenth century, music only caught up with Mozart and Haydn.  But nowhere is the delay more striking than with Renaissance art.

The art which took man as the measure of all things first sprung up around 1400 in Tuscany.  It was the visual arts that led the way, followed by literature.  Although the music of the time inevitably reflects the shift of emphasis, there is no corresponding breakthrough in method or approach.  That had to wait until what we misleadingly call the Early Baroque.

Just as it was a rediscovery of the body of Greek and Roman knowledge which acted as a spur to the new art, so it was with music around 1600.  Although it grew out of Intermedi and other mixed media entertainments, the rise of opera in the last years of the sixteenth century was a dramatic breakthrough.  The use of monody – a single voice, accompanied by a bare continuo – was no throwback to medieval practices.  The emphasis on words, supported by only the barest of melodic outlines which rose and fell with the text, was quite radical.  Even in the days of poet-composers like Machaut, the music was central rather than subsidiary.

This changed attitude to text and melody brought with it an even more revolutionary approach to harmony.  Where before harmony had arisen as a result of the simultaneity of many horizontal lines, it now emerged naturally as an independent concept in its own right, vertically.  Freed from the exigencies of polyphony and part-writing, it could be used as a key element in the new operatic style.  Above all it allowed drama.

The inflected monody was intended to heighten and emphasise the words.  But the use of strictly verticalised chords meant that they too could be used as building blocks in the musico-dramatic edifice.  By cutting across the flowing linear counterpoint in this way, it was also possible to introduce perhaps the most dramatic music element of all: silence.

These elements are nowhere better seen than in Monteverdi’s progressive exploration in his books of madrigals.  At no time in the history of music have simple chords been so luxuriated in; it is clear that these pieces were as much voyages of discovery for the composer as for the audience.  True to his Renaissance roots, Monteverdi always uses music to support the words, which he shows a keen response to.  Since even the simplest harmonic ploy was new, he was able to invest his music with both a direct simplicity and an affective power which matches anything which came later.  Soon, of course, like all Renaissance art, this pristine delight in the basic elements of the medium passed into mannerism.  But not with Monteverdi.  In the surviving operas, and in the long and rich development of the madrigals, we have a true rebirth of the very essentials of music, one which any art might have aspired to with pride.

(22.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets

Index

Jericho

I am a magpie, and rejoice in the fact.  It means that the world is eternally pregnant with possibility, teeming with strange gifts which it may at any moment throw into my lap.  All I need to reap this harvest is the wit to recognise it, even in the most unlikely places.

Next to the desk in my study there is a shelf where I keep the most prized of these finds.  They stand before me as a constant reminder that life is a surprise, and that an object, or fact, or experience, can make me richer than Croesus.  There is my plastic banana, perfect in its laughable, useless verisimilitude; the ragged half-moon of cartilage extracted from my knee, and now acting as token of my own physicality, and of the ambivalent way the concept of a tidy thinking “I” relates to the untidy matter-of-factness of the body.  There is the pamphlet entitled Sin: what it is, and how it came, no. 7 in the series of Dawn Booklets, and a sad comment on how Man’s brightest jewel – intellect – can reflexively cloud its own achievements.  And there is my Jericho.

Or rather there is the box which contained my Jericho.  Perhaps I should explain that Jericho is only the trade name: underneath it there is the further qualifying phrase “from the Dead Sea”.  The words under that define just what it is that comes from the Dead Sea: “Black Mud” – no more, no less.  The final words on the front panel tell us why we should be interested in the black mud: “from the Promised Land comes the promise of relief.”

Ah.  The back panel is more explicit.  “Since the time of king Solomon and Batsheva, millions of people have journeyed to the Dead Sea to enjoy the rejuvenating mineral-rich waters and mud.  Now, in the comfort of your own home, you can enjoy the same exhilarating experience.”  There then follow rather obvious instructions on how to apply this miraculous substance, plus the cautionary “for external use only” – as if people might be so convinced of relief that they would scoff the whole lot.

Here, then, is a touching example of one of those inextinguishable urges which mark out the human race, the one which we call marketing.  That is, that however unlikely the product, somebody can find a way of selling it.  Its fictional apotheosis occurs with the chocolate-covered cotton which Milo Minderbinder resorts to in Catch-22 to offload the entire Egyptian cotton crop he has carelessly acquired.

There is a certain grandeur in Jericho.  What could be more sonorous than its name?  What could be more touching than the invocation of wise Solomon and Sheba?  Subtly, the product manages to set up the equation Dead Sea = Old Testament = Holy = Miraculous by evoking names which have become part of Western Civilisation and its myths.  An adman’s dream.

As an example of merchandising, Jericho is innocuous enough.  But it goes deeper than that.  I acquired my Jericho box from a photographic studio which had been shooting a series of beauty products.  Jericho was among them.  However, at the end of the session, the agent for the black mud insisted on taking the product away with him, though he was happy to leave the box.  He at least clearly believed in his Jericho black mud.

(7.10.86)

Index

Vox Boxes

During the long summers of the early 70s, my life was punctuated by a series of events which were mysterious and magnificent.  Every month or so there would arrive a huge parcel in the post.  It was heavy, and a profusion of stamps covered its surface.  With trembling hands I would prise open the cardboard to release the often garishly-coloured boxes inside.  They were all the same size, and seemed to be very much part of a huge procession of similarly designed boxes.  On the outside they often had a reproduction of a classical painting, Monet or Boucher, physically stuck on to the covering which was almost cubist in its delight in curious stippling and mock wood effects.

Inside the box which creaked delightfully as I opened it for the first time, attesting to its pristine state, were three, occasionally two records.  For these were Vox Boxes, treasure troves of the obscure.  Over the months and years I bought such gems as Buxtehude organ music, Haydn piano sonatas, Mendelssohn chamber music, all long before they became available again in the late seventies’ explosion of the record catalogue.  

These were relics of a past age of bright-eyed curiosity, when it seemed that nothing was alien to the encompassing human intellect.  Even early Haydn string quartets.  As well as unique recordings of the recondite, they were encapsulations of the era that produced them.

As capsules of aural nostalgia they are helped considerably by their limited sonic range, their boxy acoustics.  The string quartets in particular sound strangely enclosed, as if they had been hermetically sealed in amber like a latter-day scarab.  Somehow they sound like the 60s: recognisable yet distanced.  Each Vox Box became a Tutankhamen's tomb, preserving with miraculous freshness an ancient world.

Not that it was necessary to patronise the music-making itself.  The acoustics may be cramped, but the spirit which informs the performances often soars extraordinarily.  A glance at the labels explains why.  Nearly all of the players are middle European emigres.  Perhaps they were cheaper than established American artists.  But the latter’s loss is our gain.  As marginalised people, they seem to have felt an instinctive empathy with this music from the sidelines of art.  They were able to sing of their displacements and deracination through this ignored music.

And what music.  From the tortured drawing-room refinement of Mendelssohn’s later string quartets, to the perfumed subtleties of Couperin, the angular passion of Handel’s flute sonatas, and the small jewel-like perfection of Mozart’s piano variations – all are caught with a truth which is all the more moving for being fresh and unforced.

Now when I listen to these records, I hear not only those honest performance of twenty years ago, the sadness of the exile, and the power and tragedy of almost-great music.  I experience again what I felt a decade back, when music lay before me like a continent, huge, exotic and unexplored, when each new experience was as magical and full of possibilities as those wonderful Vox Boxes I received long summers ago.

(27.4.86)

Index

In Guangzhou zoo

I went to Guangzhou – what westerners called Canton – on a day trip from Hong Kong.  At six o’clock in the morning we gathered sleepily in our hotel receptions; a coach did the rounds of the hotels, picking us up in ones and twos.  We were then driven up to a public hoverferry moored to one of the piers on the western shore of Kowloon.  Tickets were given out, passports checked, and the entry permit to Hong Kong rather ominously ripped out.  We boarded along with casual passengers; I wondered what were they doing going to China – we at least had the pretext of tourism.  The hovercraft tracked north along the coastline, passing between picturesque green islands that looked like something straight out of an ancient Chinese scroll.  Most of us dozed rather queasily as the craft bounced along, occasionally smashing into the waves with the a force which stirred us from our slumbers.

After an hour or so we arrived at Shekou, one of the Chinese ports of entry, where our passports were checked.  It now became clear which of the hoverferry travellers were of our group.  As we were shepherded by a nervous Chinese from Hong Kong, and passed over to a mainland Chinese woman, I saw and heard Australians, Americans, British, Germans, plus a few from Hong Kong.  On the coach journey through the fertile land, new buildings apparent everywhere as the country strove desperately to keep up with its slowing but enormous population growth, it was obvious that for most of our group that outside was just a backdrop, an Anywhereland.

They were abetted in this by Helen, as our guide had dubbed herself for the purposes of communicating with ignorant Westerners.  She was like an indulgent teacher, read to humour the mischievous boys and girls on the school outing.  More cynically, you might have suspected that she had a rather uncommunistic eye on her final gratuity.  To be fair, much of what she said seemed uncommunistic, impressively so; though that may have been why she said it.

In Shekou – something of a model city – we visited the Museum of Terracotta, where a few token terracotta warriors from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang were exhibited; a lightning tour this: we were behind the dreaded schedule.  Then after a stop for lunch at the Dong Guang hotel, dashing for cover from the thick tropical rain, we arrived in Guangzhou.  A big, bustling place of four million inhabitants and three million bicycles.  A city of garish billboards advertising consumer goods, of street signs in Chinese and English, of young women in flounced and frilly miniskirts, of strange monoptic tractors with their exposed engines and steering tillers.

We visited the Liurong Temple, and then went on to the zoo.  All the while, cameras were clicking for dear life.  As we entered the zoo, the inhabitants of Guangzhou gave us the odd glance, but Westerners were no longer the novelty they were.  Everywhere, people were drinking Coke.  We saw the monkeys picking fleas from each other, and the crazed pacing panthers.  The highlight, though, was the pandas.  Unusually, a pair of them were visible.  They lay on branches sucking bamboo leaves.  They looked like wise and ancient beings, pitying us with their deep, sad eyes through the bars of the great cage in which we humans all wandered.

(17.07.88)

Index