The Connection Machine

For a few million dollars you can buy a rather special supercomputer.  Called the Connection Machine, it is by no means the biggest in terms of raw power; that honour belongs to the famous Cray machines, though they are being increasingly challenged by other manufacturers' models, notably the Japanese. What the Connection Machine has is processors, lots of them. Sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-six to be precise.

A processor is, as its name suggests, where a computer does all the work, processing the information that is fed in, and producing the output.  Micros have one of them, and a few of the bigger systems have several. None of them has anything like the number of the Connection Machine.

As you might expect, each of these processors is quite weak in itself, and certainly cannot compare with the single processors found even in ordinary office and home computers.  But these processors have been specially designed so that they can work alongside thousands of copies of themselves, joined up to them by hundreds of thousands of connections, something that would be near-impossible with conventional processors. 

This approach has been adopted on the Connection Machine because certain computational problems prove to be far more tractable when dealt with by many processors rather than just one.  Where there are lots of separate but linked events occurring it is far easier to model what is going on in this way. Typical examples are predicting things like the weather where everything affects everything else in a highly complex manner.  Using a single processor machine, however powerful, requires some awkward calculational contortions.

In fact there is a good precedent for taking this multi-processor approach.  The human brain consists of just such a connection machine, with billions of neurons joined together by trillions of axons to produce a computer which makes the device described above look like an abacus.  Indeed, these similarities between the two have been fruitfully exploited to investigate models of the brain.

But there is another intriguing use for the Connection Machine.  It is possible to set the computer up as a cube of 496 processors along each of three dimensions.  By entering the laws of physics as equations at each of these 65,536 points, it is possible to model an entire three-dimensional universe, albeit a very small one.  In principle you could introduce the computer equivalent of atoms into this universe and watch their interactions.  It would even be possible to simulate a Big Bang in this artificial cosmology, and to sit back and watch the universe form.

Imagine now a similar computer, but with trillions, quadrillions or even more processors.  The model it could run would now be even more accurate, the universe it predicted even bigger.  As the number of processors grew so would the accuracy of the model, until finally there would be no perceptible difference between the observed universe and the output we saw from an unimaginably huge computer which modelled it.  The brain, the universe: it is not called a Connection Machine for nothing. 

(1.3.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Thus Spake AI

Index

The Hills of Venice

Try this simple experiment.  First, find a comfortable chair. Sit in it. Really feel the sensation of being seated - the pressure of the chair on your back, on your haunches, the weight of your hands in your lap.  Relax, feel the shoulders drop under their own weight, feel yourself flow into the chair.  Now wait: thirty seconds, perhaps a minute; think about anything.  Then begin to think - don't do it - about getting up.  Think about the action required, how it will feel. Now try to observe yourself thinking, and start thinking about the sensation of thinking about getting up.  You should find yourself sinking into a pleasant loop: thinking 'I could get up any time - this very instant...but instead I'll wait a little longer and just think about it.'  And you wait a little longer, and think the same thought, and you realise that you could stay like this forever, trapped in the loop, unable to get up. And then, suddenly, you get up.
 
Why? Why at that particular moment, and no other, did you get up, when you had been sitting thinking about getting up just a little while before?  The more you try this exercise, the less it becomes obvious what triggers the final breaking out of the loop.  At various moments you are aware that you could get up, but don't; then, perhaps because you have noticed something around you, because you remembered something, for whatever reason, at that moment and no other, you got up.

Sometimes, when you are climbing a hill, you become very conscious of your feet and their placement, one after another.  You watch yourself just as you did in the chair, but this time the body is active, and part of you is making decisions every second.  Why did you put your foot exactly there next to that stone rather than on it?  Partly because of where you put your previous step - it limited the range of options to perhaps two or three positions.  Then you somehow made a quick judgement about which was best, which one you ‘wanted’.  And so it goes on, each foot determined by its past along with some internal values about where a 'good' foothold is.

A similar but less constrained experience can be had walking round Venice.  The unusual labyrinthine construction of the city means that your path becomes one of simplified choices: shall I turn down this alley, shall I take the left or right path at this junction?  What exactly it means to walk without direction in Venice, trying to walk 'at random', simply choosing the paths you 'feel' like taking, can be tested by noting your route on one day and then returning on another to repeat the experiment.  If you have observed yourself carefully as you made your previous choices it is instructive to watch how often the same basic thought processes seem to occur as if by themselves: I'll turn left here because there is an attractive gateway over there; now I'll go right no, left again, there's a puddle to the right, and so on.

In effect you are still on that hill, your choice this time limited by the streets and junctions you encounter, themselves outcomes of your past selections, with that choice narrowed down by applying a few judgements about which way is 'better'.  Whatever you do, whether you are sitting in a comfortable chair or poised on the brink of a life or death decision, you are always climbing those hills of Venice.

(27.12.93)

See also Moody Sonnets - Invisible Citizen

Index

The Analytic L-Matrix

In the 1970s, one of the most popular approaches for seeking an understanding of fundamental sub-atomic particles was to use something called the Analytic S-Matrix. Noting that earlier efforts to provide an explicit description of how things like protons, neutrons and mesons interacted had failed signally, some researchers proposed treating the whole system like a black box with a certain hidden but consistent structure.  By noting what came out when various other particles were thrown into that box it was hoped that certain fundamental and fixed properties of the system could be deduced, and a kind of table, or matrix, could be drawn up expressing that knowledge.

Much research data was gathered and processed, but in the end it proved impossible to synthesise it into any schema or grand statements, rather like the tale of the three blind men feeling an elephant: one touched the ear and described a heavy carpet, another the leg which he said was like a tree trunk, while the third felt the tail and pronounced it a rope. All the views were in their limited way correct, but they gave no idea of the true nature of an elephant. And so it proved with the Analytic S-Matrix, which was soon superseded by other fashions in theoretical physics like quantum chromodynamics, strings and instantons.

The idea of treating a complex entity like a black box is an attractive one, if only as a short-term approach until something better comes along. For example, given our extremely poor understanding of how the brain works at a cognitive rather than physical level, perhaps something similar could be applied there. The basic particles that we would throw in and measure as they came out - words - are cheap and plentiful, so experimental difficulties are slight, even if interpreting the data is difficult. 

In one area, the search for patterns in this way is already well-established. Chomsky's theory of 'deep structures' in the brain which lie behind all language systems have been sought assiduously, though with little agreed success. Perhaps the project was too narrow in its aims. Instead, we could look more generally at how the mind processes words and concepts not with the aim of completely explaining language, but rather to see if there are any underlying patterns or trends to thought itself.

For example, it would be interesting to compare those black holes that occur in every language - things that seem oddly difficult to say. In English, it might be the brain-twisting 'Didn't you use to not use it?' where the evolved structure of the phrase is obviously not expressing the thought clearly. There are examples in other languages; the question is, are there any in common? And what about the actual concepts we choose to describe our world; just how culturally specific are they? 

What is needed is a coordinated global project to compare and contrast linguistic usages in every sphere of human activity. This investigation of the Analytic L-Matrix may prove as bootless as that of its sibling S-Matrix.  But at the very least the world will start talking together, and will find the commonalities which bind us together as part of a family and the subtle differences that mark us out as individuals within it.

(15.3.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Mind Your Language

Index

Nan's ninth

When I was a child our family made an annual pilgrimage on Boxing Day to our maternal grandparents.  It was the big event of the year, the tribal gathering together of all the sons, daughters, spouses and grandchildren.  We met in a small terraced house which lay halfway down an unmetalled road.

As we drove through the descending darkness, it was a challenge to avoid the potholes filled with bright sand-colour water, and to find somewhere to park in a road laid down before cars were even invented.

The house itself had a very particular smell, as do all often-visited locations for children, who retain a feral appreciation of odours, lost in the socialising process of adolescence.  It was the smell of the past, of a time before I was born, of where my mother had been a girl, an unimaginable era comprehensible only through that smell which was direct and visceral in its effect. The furniture and decorations were of a piece with this smell: chairs with stretched and baggy covers, worn and scuffed tables, massive dressers with faded photographs in mottled silver holders, heavy glass and - even more redolent of distant times and places – a yellowing elephant's tusk.

Events revolved around two main areas; the front rooms and the kitchen.  The latter seemed to embody warmth and the fundamental civilisation of the hearth.  Here the women gathered as they helped prepare the enormous meal for the twenty or so people present. Between the kitchen and the front rooms was a dark passageway, the main repository of the house's characteristic smells of wood and polish and fabrics and people.  Here small, shrieking children would run with clattering feet, savouring the cool air and the darkness and their unexpected contrast with the two islands of light they joined.  Here too were the stairs leading up to the almost forbidden region of the bedrooms.  When, daringly, we ventured there it was like entering a frozen world; everything was very still, and somehow hard to connect with the vitality below.

The front rooms had been transformed for the Christmas celebrations, chairs were packed in everywhere, and in the second part a long table stood ready to receive the turkey - carefully separated into white and brown meat - the ham, the celery sticks and the all the other ritual elements of our feast. Whether it was because it was near the food, or simply a result of our love or adventurous nooks and crannies, it was under this table that we children preferred to remain for much of the evening. 

At least, we remained there until it was time for the presents. It was the children's task to hand these out.  Often I knew in advance what my grandparents were giving me; one year it was a Hawkes Pocket Score of Beethoven's Ninth, original price 33/6d.  Despite this, I was enraptured by the score's solidity, its crystal clear printing of music I had only recently discovered and been amazed by.  As I reverently turned its pages, I was oblivious to the by-now familiar scene of the over-excited children, the flushed and happy adults; sadly oblivious too of my maternal grandmother, presiding over it all, the great and proud matriarch at the centre of her annual, and more than ninth, familial masterpiece.

(18.11.89)

Index

In Moody's boatyard

At first I saw only beauty.

Entering the boatyard I perceived a forest of masts, thousands of lines like nearly-parallel cross-hatchings on an etching.  It was impossible to distinguish individual masts; instead they became a huge bristling three-dimensional entity.  But it was more than just an etching: it shifted subtly as the wind and the currents swayed the boats in their moorings.  It became real, kinetic art, an image that moved in indescribably and unrepeatably complicated ways. The effect was hypnotic.

I looked at the boats. Their hulls gleamed in the bright, grey light; colours emerged from the clustered shapes.  Gradually an Impressionist scene formed itself before my eyes, a day on the Seine, but extended, like a theme and variations, or an idea taken up and writ large.  The bobbing of the boats became soft, slow blurs of pigment, pointillist theories made manifest.

Then I saw only money.

I realised that these were not just masts on the coloured hulls of gently swaying boats; each unit was an object of desire, a luxury item.  At the least - even for the meanest vessel - each of those masts and hulls would cost £30,000; some cost more than a million pounds.  I tried to see each agglomeration of wood and steel and rope and plastic as all this money.

I cast a glance at the entire boatyard.  There were too many vessels to count - an indication in itself of the number, I guessed - how? - that there were 1,000 boats in all.  One thousand of these items, each worth - say - £50,000 on average.  In all, the boatyard held £50 million.

I could barely grasp the thousandness of the boats; the fifty millionness of their worth was literally incomprehensible.  And yet, today, £50 million is poor fortune for the really rich; at the very least you need hundreds, thousands of millions. Tens times, a hundred times, these boats - belonging to one person?

But if I was numbed by these numbers, what of the bigger figures? The U.K.'s trade deficit?  The National Debt?  The total TNT equivalent of all the nuclear warheads in the world?  If the rich inhabited numerical realms beyond this boatyard, and governments beyond them, and the arms race beyond even that, what chance had mere mortals like me?

Then I saw neither beauty nor money.

Walking along the quay's wooden fingers which poked out into the dark water between the boats, I read the names of the boats, and of their makers, and of their harbours.  Everywhere I went it was Moody's: the boats were built by Moody's, they were berthed by Moody's.  Moody's boatyard was more powerful than I had realised; all that beauty, even all that power, was subordinated to one, overriding principle.  And that principle was Moody's.
 
(18.11.89)

Index

A217

A great mystery in my life has finally been solved.  Often, as I have driven through Cheam or Sutton I have passed a broad road, the A217.  Somehow, it has never seemed to fit.  By that I mean that neither was the road - a dual carriageway which always appeared empty - congruent with its suburban surroundings, nor did it have any obvious direction.  I simply could not see where this road could lead to, or why it was needed.  For me, it came to be one of those mysterious strips of no man's land, belonging nowhere, always in-between.

But no more.  I have driven that road and lived to tell the tale.  Inevitably gaining that knowledge has proved disillusioning.  Instead of a secret path leading who knows where, the A217 now turns out to join A to B in an ordinary functional manner.  As it happens, my decipherment of this route plugs a long-standing gap in my familiarity with this area.  Now Cheam, Merton, and Sutton hold few terrors for me. It is as if that final stretch of the A217 bridged two headlands of knowledge; as if two long tunnels under a mountain have been joined in the middle by the last push.

And of course I feel immeasurably the poorer for having wiped out that grey area, that absence on my own personal atlas.  What was before a region replete with possibilities because unknown and therefore uncircumscribed turns out to be just another extension of suburbia.  Worse, that suburbia turns out to be extensive and complete, admitting no fantastical exceptions.

Gaining knowledge was always like this, a fundamentally ambivalent operation.  For every fact gained, there is a kingdom lost.  This was nowhere more true than in the exploration of Africa.  Not for nothing was it called the Dark Continent.  Dark because utterly unknown.  From the earliest times other nations had speculated on its hidden riches and fabulous realms.  From Prester John to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, images of the extraordinary have been common.  It is equally symptomatic that it was the Victorians who succeeded in mapping out most of Africa.  This was not just the colonial itch.  More importantly for them, it represented the conquering of ignorance – theirs.

Once the full extent of that ignorance had been mapped, they were driven to negate it. And yet as they chipped away at the dark areas on their maps, so in some sense they diminished their quest.  It was almost as if their energy and zeal fed off the unknown.  As with Balzac's wild ass's skin, the smaller Dark Africa grew, the more enfeebled the race became.

This is certainly true today.  Everyone, if only unconsciously, feels the lack of the mysterious, the sense that we are pushing against our physical limitations.  Simply, there is nowhere left on earth to discover, nowhere for monsters and wonders to reside.  True, there is still outer space, but there we have only taken our first very faltering steps.  Instead people are thrust upon themselves, to explore the dark inner spaces.  This is partly why drugs are so attractive; they promise danger and the possibility of things beyond knowledge.  Perhaps we should never have driven down that last A217.

(22.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets – On Stupidity

Index

French comix

Off the Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris there is a small side-street called Rue Gaillon.  Down this street there are two restaurants and little else.  Both of them are Japanese.  Further along on the Avenue itself, there is a shop with flowerings of Kanji in its window, and few Latin characters.

Perhaps there is a significant lacuna in my knowledge of French and Japanese history; I certainly feel at a loss in trying to offer an explanation for this tie-up between the two nations.  However there is one tiny but intriguing clue: both peoples have a curious appetite for comic strips.

These are none of the American Marvel hero types, though inevitably those provide a powerful influence.  What has developed in both countries is a totally idiosyncratic and to the outsider totally inexplicable art-form.  There is a basic rule in aesthetics that it is in the truly banal that a nation reveals itself most intimately; great works speak more of the maker than the background.  And so it proves with these comic strips.

The French versions are mostly fantastical and off-beat.  Often they are perverse and morbid.  If they are realistically drawn, they may represent weird counterfactual worlds, parallel to our own yet sharply divergent in some essential facet.  If the drawing style itself is surreal, this slight grip on reality may be lost altogether.  Instead we are sucked into nightmarish worlds of twisted creatures, supramundane visions of terror, strange disjunctive sequences of images and ideas.

In the leading journals like (A Suivre) and Metal Hurlant, the cartoons are drawn with a technical brilliance which is unmatched by anything on this side of the Channel.  It would appear that these miniatures provide a completely personal and liberated form of expression for otherwise frustrated artists. The resulting productions are therefore more true, more intimate, and more disturbing than conventional public art.

The Japanese case is slightly different.  Here the emphasis seems to be on quantity not quality. Vast numbers of these comic books are consumed daily.  Their appearance is crude, with individual cartoons reduced almost to woodcut simplicity.  The content is similarly coarsened.  Mostly it is an unsophisticated adventure story; often there is a sexual element with a strong sado-masochistic bias.

Both of these comic book traditions seem to offer their aficionados escape and unrestricted fantasy. Both eschew the quotidian.  In many ways they perform the same function as soap operas in anglophone society.  Perhaps the English-speaking world, through the dominating influence of America, is now fluently televisual, and as such has passed beyond the less technological pleasures of the comic. Perhaps France and Japan just lack good soaps, and are unable to warm to English-language classics of the genre. Whatever the reason, these bizarre and gaudy comics offer an interesting insight into the mentality of the French and Japanese nations.  Whether they explain the restaurants is another matter.

(21.5.86)

Index

Boldly going

Trekkies - fans of the Star Trek series - are an odd lot.   I should know, since recently I attended what was described as The First Annual Bellenden Star Trek Convention, a day-long extravaganza involving video replays of about seven episodes.  It proved a curiously moving experience.

Along with the shows themselves, there was a screening of Leonard Nimoy's "Star Trek Reminiscences".  This hour-long programme featured the man behind Mr Spock with some insights - though rather biased ones - into the making of the series.  One of the most interesting facts revealed was that the 78 episodes of the series were produced in just three years; it was only later, with the three Star Trek films, that the old cast was re-assembled.

And yet our memories are of Star Trek as a kind of recurrent, timeless event, part of being young itself.  The first shows were broadcast in the U.S. 20 years ago, and a little later in the U.K.  Such is their very special production values that they do not seem rooted in this epoch by any external signs.  With each re-run they asserted their timelessness.

Partly this is a reflection of the almost unique endeavour the programmes represented.  A full-scale science fiction series of this type was without precedent at the time.  The costs of the pilots were the largest-ever; perhaps to compensate, the episodes themselves are often dangerously close to being threadbare.  This explains the extraordinary fudges in scenery and models; it was simply a case of not being able to afford better.

The films show that this was no tragedy.  Placed against convincing backdrops, the actors begin to look dangerously exposed.  The fact is, Shatner, Nimoy, and above all the splendid DeForest Kelly were not great actors.  Often they were distinctly ham.  But it is precisely this stilted, almost ritualised acting which lends such coherence to the whole series.  That and the fact that they were produced at a pell-mell rush.  Like Haydn in his isolation at Esterházy, the writers and producers of Star Trek were almost forced to become original.

This is particularly noticeable with the plots.  There is a lot of dross; and yet there are also some striking storylines  - as if they had run out of bad and hackneyed ideas, and so were forced to make up some good ones.  Pressure of time meant that again and again, the actors fall back on the same stock phrases and expressions; everything becomes formulaic, like some Noh play on speed.
 
The second-rate nature of the actors, aided by their obliviousness of the fact, enabled them to take these near-unpronounceable lines, and make something very special and personal out of them.  In a touching way, they really believed in what they were doing.  In the Nimoy reminiscences it is clear that the role of Spock provided an abiding sense of fulfilment.

Never mind the huge improbabilities of half the galaxy speaking English; never mind that a crew of 400 is generally represented by 4; never mind the crass American nationalism and unsubtle racism.   Star Trek boldly went where no series had gone before; today it still boldly goes. 

(10.8.86)

Index

Systems music

Everyone who has ever learnt a musical instrument will know the experience.  You come across a tune or chord sequence of such aching beauty, of such compositional inevitability, that your heart misses a beat.  You play it again, looking for the following phrase which will turn it into a composition, and you into a composer.  To help things on their way, you play it again; and again.  Until finally, with frustration then resignation, you recognise that you are trapped in à prison of your own making which is perfect but minuscule.

Systems composers love that prison. They do not long for endless vistas, for the organic development which characterises most other forms of music.  They are content to dwell on a phrase, to linger and to extract from the simplest material the last drop of music.  Theirs is a music of eternal adolescence.  Which explains its origins, growth and current success.
 
In its spurning of traditional goal-directed processes, its delight in the moment, and in its love of the small-scale and simple, it shows its roots in the Sixties.  It is no accident that the extreme minimalism and aleatoricism of John Cage were originally close in spirit, if not technique, to the later systems composers.  Some, like Terry Riley, straddle both worlds.  Steve Reich may have proceeded from different principles - those of phasing, and a study of rhythm - but he shows a similarly non-Western approach to the whole business of music-making.

As systems music - rather than music of the minimalist or experimentalist school - found itself, so the characteristics which are familiar today emerged.  Since it was mainly concerned with the most basic building blocks like chords and scales, the idiom became almost exclusively tonal.  Within that idiom, some composers turned their systems music into an investigation of just one element - for example, Philip Glass, most of whose earlier music consists of constantly repeated arpeggios and nothing else.  The momentum is derived from the constant repetition, and the swirling figurations which articulate the underlying arpeggios.

Perhaps the most talented practitioner of the younger generation is John Adams.  His music moves beyond the common-ground of tonality into subtle classical cross-referencing.  He draws not only on the strength of the basic musical system, but of the masterpieces which have been written in it.  For example, his Grand Pianola Music constantly evokes the magisterial presence of Beethoven, particularly in the piano writing of the Emperor Concerto.  The arpeggios are no longer neutral powerhouses as with Glass, but are themselves charged by potent cultural memories.

As music which is largely adolescent in impulse, it is no surprise that the world of systems has proved highly popular with non-classical audiences.  Its use of basic elements makes it immediately accessible; the constant repetition is in any case very similar to the riff-based structures of pop music.  But above all its goal is the same: it tries and often succeeds in reproducing that unforgettable first experience of music's force and magic in all its freshness.  And despite the name, to do that requires more than a mere system.
 
(9.8.86)

Index

Proust and Journalism

In his strange polemic-cum-second novel attempt Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust writes as follows: "It is the imagined approving silences of this or the other reader that the journalist has in mind when he weighs his words and tries out their equivalence to his thoughts; and thus his work, composed with the unwitting collaboration of other people, is less personal."

Any journalist worth his or her salt would agree with the first part at least. One of the earliest lessons you learn in the trade is to keep a clear image of the reader in front of you at all times.  Words and phrases are indeed chosen with a view to evoking or provoking in the reader a certain response; this leads to the kind of creative shadow-boxing Proust describes. The latter part of his judgement is more questionable.

Of course, in making this charge, Proust was not out to be fair: he had Sainte-Beuve in his sights and was out to get him.  Since Sainte-Beuve's literary prolixity involved mostly journalism, this might mean that the latter got winged in the process.  Yet Proust himself was not averse to producing a few column' inches himself. Indeed, the same book Contre Sainte-Beuve describes well the thrill of first seeing your work in print, the strange fragmented sensation of savouring its multiplicitous appearance up and down the land.  But he makes clear that he is only a dilettante; he would not want to be thought one of the poor hacks of the ephemeral feuilletons.

Mostly this has to do with his high conception of literary endeavour.  Although it begins rather differently, Contre Sainte-Beuve turns into a disquisition on just what the primary characteristics of fine writing are.  Initially the work was intended as simply a rebuttal of Sainte-Beuve's belief that knowledge of the writer brought knowledge of his work, and that the latter was somehow encompassed by the former.  For Proust, with his belief in the transmuting and transcendental powers of art, this was anathema.  What is interesting in what could have been pure rant, is that not only does Proust move on to explain how he appreciates literature, he begins to hint at what his own variety will be.
 
The first few chapters of Contre Sainte-Beuve take the form of poetic impressions - which later turn up revamped and much expanded in A la recherche.  But what is even more significant is that the last chapter of this section, and the one which immediately precedes the criticism itself, is called simply "Talking to Mama". The critique itself turns out to be addressed to the dominating image of his mother.  In fact all of his writing, just as all of his life, revolved around this central figure.

A la recherche begins with the agony of Mama's denied kiss; it closes with a final evocation of the bell which signalled the departure of the guests and the approaching kiss.  As the last pages make clear, the whole mammoth opus is dedicated to salvaging the lost time and lost paradise of his childhood.  Proust, just like all good journalists, also wrote imagining the approving silences of his reader, but in his case there was only one: his mother. The result could hardly be more personal.

(30.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pensione Calcina

Index

Arvo Pärt - Almeida Festival (10.6.86)

Imagine the scene.  A boy grows up in the small town of Rakvere in Estonia.  Although he has taken piano lessons, he has never heard an orchestra.  Until one day, when he discovers that recordings of classical music are sometimes played over the public address system in the town square.  Hungry for music, he cycles round and round the square mesmerised by the new sounds which emerge, however imperfectly.  That square becomes his childhood and his life.

It is the story of Arvo Pärt.  If it sounds like a scene from some obscure and small-scale film, this is probably appropriate.  First, because like most professional composers in the Soviet Union, Pärt has survived by writing film music - some 50 scores in all.  But more revealingly, because a particular practitioner of Soviet cinema is constantly evoked in this noble and melancholy music: Tarkovsky.

It is easy to imagine all of Pärt's pieces as soundtracks for specific films. Thus the powerful evocation of the millennial Orthodox Church in the Te Deum could serve as a fitting counterpoint to any of the mystical scenes of Andrei Rublev - Pärt himself looks like some meeker, more saintly version of Rublev; and the music of the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, which constantly slips away like so many small tears, seems at one with much of Tarkovsky's extended and central scenes of rain and flowing water.

But the key film has to be Nostalghia.  In fact just as an unsayable longing for the evanescent past permeates Tarkovsky's whole output, so Pärt's music seems a constant meditation on something infinitely sad and unassuageable; something located far back in the memory; and as such something deeply treasured.

Partly this has to do with the idiom employed. Throughout, it is tonal, often modal, but with layer upon layer of added notes, and poignant minor seconds.  It seems to draw on standard elements like the Orthodox liturgy and Estonian folk inflections, along with other half-remembered musical memories, but everything is covered in a thick varnish of Pärt's own musical presence which subsumes it, like an old master's bright colours dimmed with time and even out to a rich glow.  But it goes deeper than this.  Like Tarkovsky, it is almost as if Pärt needed self-imposed exile; he needed to be cast out of paradise the better to mourn it, and more crucially, to validate that mourning.

Perhaps the fullest coming-together of all these elements is Tabula Rasa. This extended meditation on baroque concerto techniques turns into a deeply moving refraction of tiny motifs, each insignificant in itself, but layered as here with subtle pointing from the string orchestra, it becomes as obsessive as a tune recalled from childhood.  And perhaps that is what we have here. With the constant circling of melodies, the use of the prepared piano's broken and liquid tones emphasising the overall effect of distance, we seem to be back in Rakvere, hearing with Pärt's ears the haunting, strange music as it swooped around him time and time again.
 
(10.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Nostalghia For Bagno Vignoni

Index

Early music, late musician

Almost single-handedly, David Munrow established the modern tradition of performing early music. He founded and directed The Early Music Consort, and was its most brilliant performer on every imaginable wind instrument. He was a natural broadcaster and a gifted writer.  As well as records, books and a television series, he created a music radio programme for children which remains a model of its kind and without a successor to this day.  Ten years ago he took his own life at the age of 34.

To mark this sad event, the Crafts Council has taken the opportunity of displaying some of his collection of musical instruments alongside its current exhibition of contemporary musical instrument manufacturers.  In one small case, there is a group of obscure South American pipes collected by Munrow before he went up to Cambridge. But as well as these melancholy because mute testaments to his enormous facility, there is an even more moving record of the man upstairs.

In the corner of the long room housing the Craft Council's studiedly elegant café, there is a video cassette recorder and TV. During the current exhibition an episode from Munrow's TV series on medieval instruments is being shown.

In his short action-packed life, Munrow dispensed and radiated huge amounts of energy.  Aside from the sheer quantity of work which he achieved, the video shows that he lived every minute with the same febrile intensity.  This impression is reinforced by his cherubic, boyish appearance. His rosy, chubby cheeks and mop of rich-brown tousled hair make him look like some precocious schoolboy; which he was.  A schoolboy almost oblivious of his powers, simply exulting in the excitement and pleasure of what he was doing. 

This is clear in his introductions to the instruments, and in his performances on them. He clearly loves them all, loves them for their idiosyncratic shapes, their impossible names; and he has a schoolboy's rude delight in their raucous, almost flatulent noises.  When he plays them, he plays with the air of a delirious jazz saxophonist, inventing anew the frenzied notes, making music of and for today.

It was this sense of discovery, this lack of dry academicism which endeared him to his huge following. That and the almost palpable throb of his energy. The same was true of his Pied Piper programmes for children.  Again, his sheer unforced love of the music was immediately apparent.  And there was no question of patronising, no Uncle David humouring the kiddies. As an eternal child himself, he felt with the same directness as they did; one of his greatest gifts was that he could communicate that.

Watching the videotape of his programme there is one small, almost insignificant detail which is the most poignant.  It is not the smiling little leprechaun, not even the eternal twinkle in his eye; it his hands, and their effortless mastery of instrument after instrument.  It is this which brings home the tragic squandering of talent which had so much to offer and was so rich. Perhaps almost too rich; whom the gods love…

(9.8.86)

Index

Wolfing It

This is not an essay - except in the sense that all my writings are attempts. It is a holiday appropriate to the Sabbath, on which it is being written.  It is an indulgence.

Yesterday, I reached half-way point in my Partial India, 13 letters down of my abecedary voyage through the memory of a voyage.  At this midway point, I feel poised, as if the rest were downhill.  (I know it is not.)  For one of the first times in my own writing - as opposed to my journalism, though the only real gulf is that I get paid for one and not the other - I have a sense of getting somewhere, because there is somewhere to get. The problem with these short pieces is that they are intentionally self-contained. As such, they define their own minute universe, and refer only to ideas in it, never my other writings, except possibly by implication.

In fact, I need these constraints.  Just as Mozart, Beethoven and many lesser luminaries turned increasingly to fugal procedures in their later works, feeling the need for some musical roughage, some resistance to compose against, I too need the sense of compression, of words being strictly and inexorably limited. The other side of the same coin is that I could not face writing a 300-page novel.  I am a child, and need immediate rewards; I would certainly lose heart shortly after embarking on a full-length fiction.

Writing these one-pagers may be necessary for me, but the form does have its advantages.  Apart from the convenience of time - I can knock one off more or less whenever I feel like it - there is the sense of achievement once the filled page has been honed.  And in enterprises likes my Partial India, there is a kind of avalanche or magnifying effect. As the elements pile, the sum steadily becomes greater than the parts. It is like building a house instead of making bricks.  And so my 13 bricks, or half a house, feel more substantial than their bare quantity might suggest. 

I have always wondered what it felt like to compose in the manner of Hugo Wolf.  When he was working on the Mörike Lieder, he would frequently produce several songs a day.  Listening to them, they sound like uniquely individual creations, as if each masterpiece took months to craft.  Now, over the last week, I have found myself doing something slightly similar.  Thus a week ago I wrote my A and B; on Monday D; Tuesday H; C, Q and S on Wednesday, F on Thursday; K, L, M and Y on Friday, and yesterday I wrote Z.
 
The experience is strange but rather wonderful. While I am writing, I am totally immersed in the matter to hand.  However small and trivial, it expands until it fills my mental horizon.  What I have written before, or will write, does not exist.  Once I have finished - or rather stopped – I can then begin again, with the same pristine sense of being pastless and futureless.  In this way it is possible to construct four worlds a day which are quite separate.  Or at least should be: inevitably there is spillage from one to another.  But at least I have achieved some glimmering of an understanding into the exultation which Wolf experienced.  I only hope it does not have the same effect.

(28.12.86)

See also A Partial India

Index

Invitation to the voyage

Travelling offers a multitude of pleasures. Those of seeing new lands, new peoples; of covering physical distances; of leaving home behind, and with it quotidian cares; of sun, sea, sand or whatever.  But for the connoisseur there is a pleasure which is keener than all these which are achieved once the journey has begun.  It is a pleasure which can be extended indefinitely; a pleasure which is ultimately independent of the act of travel itself.  It is that fine thrill engendered by the preparations for travel.

The idea for travel may come from a thousand sources; books, friends, crossword puzzles, fortune cookies.  But once it is implanted in the mind, it has a habit of taking root, and burgeoning.  Its ramifications and possibilities spread out endlessly; almost involuntarily you find yourself forming images, painting scenes from that journey-to-be.

You begin to read around the subject.  Guidebooks, maps, travellers tales. The destination begins to shape itself; you can hear the street cries, smell the incense, feel the cold tundra wind on your cheek.  As you plan your itinerary, those place-names which were once ciphers stand before you like familiar faces.  Where the map was once a puzzle, an intricate rebus, it becomes now a necklace, where each city and forest is a pearl on the string of your voyage.

At a certain stage, your preconceptions attain the fixity of stars; it is hard to imagine how you could ever have thought otherwise. Yet this knowledge has been flowering inside you from day to day, and started from nothing. Moreover, the growth is rooted in a rich and unique soil; you. 

And so our fantastical images of lands we have yet to see are doubly precious.  First, because they represent a pure, virginal, untrammelled vision.  There are no problems.  If there are beggars in these lands, they are picturesque and touching, like something out of the Old Testament; if there are endless strikes they seem more like eternal fiestas, celebrations of the indomitability of the human spirit; if the food is tasteless and repetitive it is because our Western palates are jaded; we can learn.  The images are precious too because they are shaped by all our previous journeys.  The future affirms the past.

As we build Luxor brick by brick, and sculpt the long-eared figures on Easter Island, we draw on that huge library we carry within us, modifying our fantasies only when some external authority like a guidebook offers incontrovertible evidence on the outward form of things. Otherwise, these possible cities populate a purely internal landscape.

Which is why we may ultimately be loath to confront them with reality. It always turns out that Venice smells, or Samarkand has six-lane dual carriageways.  Dreams and truth are uneasy bedfellows. Sometimes, however seductive the invitation to the voyage may be, we might prefer to refuse it, and so, paradoxically, to retain it.  To reap the many pleasures of travel requires many courages; but none is more basic than that of daring to cross the divide which separates the imagination from the image.

(22.11.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker) 

Index

The havs and the hav nots

Tolstoy's neat oppositional pairing of war and peace has prompted others to try their hand at the game. An obvious candidate is death.  Woody Allen's attempt, love and death, is plausible, but ultimately undercut by the fact that his film of the same name is a parody of War and Peace. A more appropriate though more cynical pairing might be money and death.

Certainly in these days of leveraged buy-outs and mega-mergers, death seems the only thing which can stop the juggernaut of the great god Dosh.  This is sadly not true of love which, whether through a lack of moral fibre or simply through diminished fashionability, gives up so easily.  And, as often as not, to money.

Without death, money would be unstoppable and omnipotent. There would be no way to fight back; power would lead to more power, lack of it to less.  One of the reasons for the early success of the Christian religion among the Roman slaves and poor was that it promised everything to those who had nothing. More: it even suggested that the old wielders of power might be barred from entering heaven because of that power.  It broke the cycle. 

Death, like the Christianity based on it, changes the money equation.  It is a truism that you cannot take it with you, but few plutocrats realise you cannot even leave it behind - it can only be left.  Money is promiscuous; once you are gone it belongs to someone else.  Cash has no memory.  Which is why the rich hobnob with artists, commission and buy works from them.  What they seek is a vicarious immortality normally granted to artists alone because they alone can create outside time.

People may say that there is no difference between a pile of money and a pile of manuscripts.  Once you are gone neither will do you much good.  And yet still artists paint, write, compose.  Many are not sure themselves why they do it.  Proust, for example, believed the only true, eternal experience was that of unconscious memory.  Conscious evocation - through writing for example - was a sham. But he wrote, and wrote with a driving obsession which kept him alive against all reasonable odds.

The reasons for this seem to be twofold.  Creating for posterity is, it is true, a pretty barren activity. There is some marginal satisfaction in knowing that your name will live on, that your actions will have made a scratch on life's parchment.  But most artists like everyone else live for now.  The works they create - whether they are printed, read, performed or seen or not - are created for themselves.  They represent for the artist a distillation and justification of their life so far – a proof of existence. 

A minor but perfect example is Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav.  This fantastical conflation of place and memory is more than intricate variations on the theme of travel, of destination, of elsewhere.  It is a kaleidoscopic view of Ms Morris' internal world, all her Venices and Istanbuls and Moscows rolled into one romantic whole, an impossible but uniquely precious landscape of minarets, statues, towers and fountains.  By creating it, she has achieved something which others have not; she has saved part of her life; and the wealthiest are poor in comparison.
 
(8.2.87)

Index

Gouldberg variations

It is all too easy for the fastidious highbrow to dismiss Glenn Gould.  For a start, his Canadian origins must count against him. According to the canons of the strictly Eurocentric ruling culture, Canada stands in about the same class as Switzerland - whose main contribution to Western civilisation, as Orson Welles reminded us, was the cuckoo clock.  It is not even clear what Canada's cuckoo clock might be, unless the Royal Canadian Mounted Police can be regarded as a kind of living sculpture in the tradition of Gilbert and George.

Neither did Gould do much to endear himself to the prevailing coterie, which had very decided opinions on what a pianist - even of genius - could and could not be or do.  Instead of the brilliant prodigy, early photographs show a gauche young man, the sort that would routinely inhabit a blue anorak today.  The later pictures show the angular hermit's body grown old, the unkempt hair thinner and greyer, the face gaunter, but the eyes burning with the same unswervable conviction.  Even his undoubted gifts as a pianist were vitiated by tiresome eccentricities - the impossibly low piano stool, which made him look like something out of Balzac; his refusal to give live performances, since he preferred instead to memorialise his playing on records; his almost belligerent choice of repertoire, which combined a dedication to Bach with an eschewal of any fashionable 'authentic' keyboard practice; and his distracting habit of singing along with the music - as if the audience were not there.

And yet anyone who has ears to hear knows that Gould's performances are a revelation. This is no mere cliche: Gould's unique pianistic style seems to strip bare the music, literally revealing it to even the most jaded of listeners.  And it is this overwhelming sense of a singular personal vision which makes all the incidental details of his life irrelevant.

Take the Goldberg Variations for example.  In many ways it is probably the perfect work for Gould - which may be why he recorded it twice and chose it for his debut recording. Like many of Bach's works, it represents a summation of Baroque compositional practice; and yet unlike other great keyboard works such as the Well-Tempered Clavier or French Suites, it is a totally organised creation. Gould's response to this kind of masterly control in Bach's music seems to have been particularly rich.

Indeed, note-by-note control is what characterises his own playing. Listening to it, you feel, as with no other pianist, that Gould has thought out every sound of every note of a piece.  Which is why his performances blaze with an unmatched clarity; you can hear every line as it is built up.  And yet that process is never cold or clinical, or merely academic, but is informed by a passion for the music, and for the act of playing the piano.  The latter is a crucial part of Gould's magic: his sounds - be they silky legato, spiky staccato or previously unheard-of varieties between - are instantly recognisable and totally personal.

As is the singing. It is Gould communing with his playing, a muffled, ecstatic hymn to the composer and to music. But it is also the sound of angels joining in, as they recognise the ageless music of the spheres.

(4.8.87)

See also Moody Sonnets – Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

Index

Lake District knowledge

On one of the Ordnance Survey maps which covers the Lake District, there is a single tree symbol placed in the middle of what is otherwise a large and featureless grassy area. Reference to the map's key reveals that the symbol indicates a wood or forest.  But there is no forest or wood at this particular point; there is just a single tree, the only one for miles around.  Clearly some cartographer was so moved by this vision of the solitary tree that he or she cast professional restraint aside and commemorated the fact with the spurious symbol.

The Lake District commonly inspires such acts of affection. It must surely be one of the most cherished natural areas in the country, possibly the world.  What sets it apart from all the other great parks or open spaces, the mighty Yosemites and soaring Alps, is the sheer density of named and recognisable features within it.

The Lake District is small, certainly compared to its international equivalents. And yet by some miracle of sympathy, the whole scale of perception has been reduced in proportion.  Whereas the unsurpassable Himalayas form a huge jagged sea of peaks, some barely named or known, the Lake District has been notated down to the tiniest outcrop of rock, the slightest bump of contour, the merest trickle from a tarn.  The Lake District is thus perhaps the most knowable and known landscape on earth.

Returning there is like visiting an old friend.  Every feature is immediately familiar; gazing across a valley at the close-cropped grass blanketing the soft curves of the hills, and seeing the fine mesh of intersecting streams is like scrutinising a loved face with all its subtle contours and minutely-etched lines.

This natural tendency to anthropomorphism is made easier by the scale of the place.  However grand and sublime the vistas may be, they never lose touch with the human.  In a day you can walk from one end of the Lakes to the other, or climb several of its loftiest peaks. In a day you can sample all its delights; the shimmering tarns hidden away on the hip of a mountain; the dizzying drops of the sheer scree-falls; the velvet-like valley floors; the labyrinths of frothing streams as they cut through the rocks; the huge distant glimmers of the great lakes themselves, reflecting back the rounded lines of the hills in their infinite autumnal gradations of browns and purples and greens.

No wonder then that the area has inspired so many. The Romantics may have been the first to articulate its wild beauty, but for millennia people were hymning it in their own way. The very names which are sprinkled prodigally across the hills are a paean and a tribute to its glory: Bassenthwaite, Skiddaw, Glaramara.  It is like some forgotten ancient language; the Lake District is its greatest poem, one which is sung by walking it, a poem such as another timeless people, the Aborigines, sing as they walk their own world into existence. And walking that poem today it is clear that the language is prelapsarian, that the Lake District is a tiny Eden.  Could it be that the solitary, miraculous tree marked in the middle of this land by an inspired cartographer is in fact an apple-tree?

(2.8.87)

Index

Alpha and omega

We are often happy, but it is rare for us to be serene. That serenity is a product of both happiness and a deep sense of security; the latter is notoriously hard to achieve in this troubled day and age.

Which is perhaps why my own period of true serenity dates from the time just before I went up to Cambridge. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, the world seemed to consist of little except possibilities. The future was an infinitely distant horizon, without even a hint of the coming storm clouds.  With the worst of adolescence's dark mysteries behind me, and the challenges of university still ahead, those two years at the head of the school represent a kind of endless in-between time.

Certainly my memories of them are of one long summer, with blue skies and the sun roaring through the classroom windows without a break. Outside,  young loins girded themselves as leather struck willow on luxuriant bottle-green grass.

And yet it is not for these commonplace boyhood visions that I value those years.  In truth, such elements formed only the most dimly perceived of backdrops to the real excitement, and even the real world, which was to be found in the classroom.  For at this time I and my fellow classmates attained a kind of intellectual acme, a virtuoso mastery of a subject, which was never to be matched.

And what a subject - mathematics, the root of all science, the root, that is, of all knowing.  At its best, mathematics equips you to see the universe as a huge equation.  It reveals the inherent order of things. Of course this is only an approximation, or rather, the real equation of the universe is too complicated to solve.  It is this terrible fact, learned later on, which embitters and defeats many a mathematician.  But at the age of seventeen or so, there are no such doubts.  You have reached an enchanted plateau of knowledge where for the first time you can analyse and comprehend an entire world, albeit idealised.

And analyse it we did.  I remember well the frisson of excitement as I read each problem.  The desired result was always painfully elegant, consisting perhaps of just five or six symbols related in a strangely new yet harmonious fashion.  The thrill was not just in taking the seven or eight fundamental formulae and winning through to this unlikely yet beautiful result; it was in the sense of being initiated through that result into another mystery of the world, of another corner of the curtain of creation being lifted.  Each problem solved was a conquest of life.

In those brief years, I felt as if I were totally in command of the external world.  True, my version of that world consisted of frictionless rods, smooth slopes, and perfectly inelastic spheres.  No matter, I had dominion over it through my obedient alphas and omegas.  Allied, then, to the happiness I derived from solving problem after problem, of producing like a sculptor or musician the final, balanced, perfect form, there was a deeper, pervasive sense of calm that flowed from that never-to-be-repeated sense of control. Whence my cherished, but lost, sixth-form serenity.

(6.8.87)

See also Moody Sonnets - AI’s Secret

Index

Food's grammar and graces

Solecisms are typically either social or grammatical.  It is not done to go up to total strangers and ask "how much do you earn?" any more than it is to say "if I was you" instead of "if I were you".  These two apparently disparate manifestations have an interesting nexus in the meal, which with both a grammar and an etiquette, admits of breaches in both. 

Although food occupies us for considerable parts of our waking day, and - as the explosion in the number of restaurants attests - increasingly represents a favoured activity, we remain blithely unaware of the hidden structures it contains; we prefer instead to concentrate on superficial details such as the constituents of the sauce, or the aesthetics of the decor.  And yet implicitly every meal is both an instance of food's formal grammar and a statement about class dynamics. 

The social dimension is more manifest.  Meals occur at myriad levels, from the fast food takeaway to the formal eight-course banquet, all of which have their corresponding social index.  Between the extremes there are a number of well-established modes, including, in ascending order of formality: the sandwich; the ploughman's lunch; the Sunday roast followed by pudding; the canapé and buffet; the standard three-course restaurant meal, and its later avatars which add progressively a soup course, a fish course, cheese and so on.
 
Attached to each meal is an etiquette that becomes more stringent with increasingly formality.  Breaches occur in two ways: mixing etiquettes by ordering a burger in a three-star restaurant is the most blatant; more subtle is the misappropriation of the meal's associated machinery in the form of cutlery, glasses, bread and condiments - all of which have their own mythologies and rites that must be strictly adhered to for the meal to be correctly executed.
 
Perhaps more intriguing than such essentially snobbish concerns is the underlying grammar of a meal.  Not surprisingly, this is culturally specific; indeed, one of the best ways of alerting yourself to your own society's assumptions at the table is to eat abroad.
 
Meals clearly have a syntax, expressed in terms of the order of courses.  Equally clearly, that order is largely historical - there is no imperative reason why soup should be served before the so-called main course, or why sweets should not occur at any point in the meal.  And yet in Western society we have been brought up to expect a certain progression of foodstuffs, a characteristic eating rhythm.  Beyond this basic syntax there are also rules about what foods go with each other, how they should be prepared - though in a novelty-hungry society many of the unspoken taboos are being breached - and how it should be presented on the plate.  Other peripheral elements include what cutlery is to be used - witness the array of differentiated knives and spoons that must be dealt with - how the table is set and even basics such as when certain types of meals can be taken.  Given the astonishing complexity and cultural burden borne by such a basic human need as eating, it is no wonder that it has come to be one of the solecism's primary sites.

(10.12.89)

Index

The smell of the new

Growth and evolution are matched and marked by widening ambits of consciousness. The earliest and most primitive organisms interacted only through body to body contact; then the sense of smell developed - the ability to detect chemicals originating at a remove - followed by hearing - an awareness of larger-scale changes in the physical environment - and only much later through sight, which allows distant objects to be perceived through the complex computational process of extracting implicit order from light.  Similarly the new-born child initially knows no world, only itself. Later, as it ages and orders its senses, it apprehends its mother, its room, the wider landscape, until finally as an adult it can assimilate the experience of the universe.

This progression, to knowledge at a distance, is related to a corresponding movement to action at a distance manifest in mankind's obsessive refinement of weaponry.  To know through touch or smell usually implies being known in the same way - always in the case of touch, which is mutual by definition; heard knowledge is safer, and that gained from sight safer still.  It is the same with weapons; the whole sorry thrust of their development has been the desire to inflict pain and death without risking either.

There are therefore deep and ancient reasons why the more perilous modes of apprehension - touch and smell - should remain so charged for us, and why our society becomes daily more and more visual and hence aloof and isolated.  Touch is obviously intimate, its own symbol of closeness; but the sense of smell tends to be ignored and undervalued, even regarded as the most feral and hence base of the senses - though it is capable of moving us powerfully and unexpectedly.

For example, most have experienced that jolt of recognition brought about by encountering a smell that immediately conjures up a long-forgotten scene, perhaps from earliest childhood - a sense of what could perhaps be called déjà flairé.  Such catalysts are rare and involuntary, But there are other, more routine smells that can grip us almost as strongly.

That moment when you step into a brand-new house to be greeted by the scent of fresh-sawn wood, the clinging odour of carpet, barely-dry paint and putty hanging in the air like a tangible cloud.  Or when you sit inside your gleaming new car, and are overpowered by the smell of leather and a rich melange of plastics.  Or the first time you switch on a new piece of electronics, a television or audio system, and you savour the pungent aroma of pristine components burning in, of exotic, unnameable resins, latter-day frankincenses.

These are the smells of the new, the smell of an object as it is before it becomes clogged and soiled by use, and by us.  In those first few encounters we are put back in touch with things as they are, things met close up; in those brief moments we return to our origins as simple animals, as children; for an instant or two, we experience the world without the cleverness and fear which maturity and evolution have instilled in us.

(29.10.89)

Index

Looking down the catenaries

It is easy to understand why every manufacturer loves anniversaries; it gives them an excuse to wheel out commemorative items, to put a new spin on workaday objects, individualising them with an anniversary label which both signals their immediate reason for existing and guarantees their imminent obsolescence. For the consumer, complicity in this specious commemoration offers the chance to live an enhanced life: each day, manufacturers tell us, is special because by an amazing coincidence something happened ten, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago; buy a useless token and you validate your otherwise pointless life.

There are, of course, more worthwhile acts of homage to the past.  The wedding anniversary can be an occasion of true remembrance for all the joys of a relationship; too often, though, it degenerates into routine or sham. The birthday usually escapes that fate if only because it is principally a selfish occasion, centred entirely on one person and on the less equivocal celebration of their continued existence.

But anniversaries and birthdays serve a more pragmatic if covert purpose: they are markers in time. Imagine life without birthdays, without ages; many people would find it hard to locate sequentially their past and the events it contained; instead, they would enter the great bag of memory, to join and augment the hopeless jumble already there. We need anniversaries as signposts to tell us where we are in time.

Time and space are the two most fundamental givens of every human being's existence; perhaps because of this deep commonality, we take them totally for granted.  Space is easier to come to terms with.  Space is defined by the presence of objects in it, and they in turn are predicated upon a physicality - which, by definition, is graspable and apprehensible. Time offers no such handholds. Its analogous definition is through one-dimensional durations, which lead to the idea of things existing for a time; unfortunately this timefulness - the correlate of spacefulness or extension - seems not to imply any useful idea corresponding to physicality.  Although we exist temporally through our thoughts which occur in time, that time proves a worryingly slippery concept.

How, for example, do we manage to think back over time for these anniversaries and commemorations?  A distance we can theoretically travel over again to re-win the experience; time is a one-off.  It is almost impossible to say how we conceive of time - we lack the appropriate words. The nearest I can get to articulating the idea of the past, of years, of centuries, is to visualise time as a suspension bridge made up of a series of spans stretching away into the far-off, misty past. In this image, each span is a century, with the hundred years hanging from the main steel cable like fluttering tags.  Clearly, this is a crude attempt to formulate a spatial analogue of time. For me, centuries are mapped neatly if arbitrarily onto catenaries - the name of the curve followed by such heavy cables suspended between two points. Why, I do not know; but without this construct, I would have no idea of a continuous, structured past; to our present-day anniversaries' besetting fault of false piety would be added the far more frightening one of complete meaninglessness.

(9.12.89)

Index

The bellyache of an architect

Architecture is the most public of the arts, and in some ways the most totalitarian.  When millions read a best-selling novel, or buy a new album, they will do so voluntarily; nobody forces them to read or listen.  Architecture, by contrast, is foisted on you by the physical fact of its existence.  Shutting your eyes is hardly an option when you need to cross the street, and moving town seems rather drastic.  Nor does time necessarily help; a building's relative permanence means that any initial offence can continue to fester through the years.  No wonder that of all the artistic debates which periodically rage in the media, it is the architectural ones which are the most acrimonious.

Pity then the poor architects.  Not for them the privacy of the workshop followed by the fait accompli of publication or unveiling. They must work with the knowledge that their final plans will pass through many hands, and be subject to many gazes. Some of the scrutineers' concerns and demands will be mutually exclusive; many will be ill-informed or the product of blind bigotry. And yet the architect is defenceless.  To build requires an enormous investment of money and time; those holding the purse-strings are bound to see them more as leading-reins which can guide the errant and wilful draughtsman.  Thus architects become the most abject of artists, forced to humour the whim of their philistine masters, to wheedle small favours out of recalcitrant committees, to compromise time and again lest the tantalising apple of a realised commission be snatched out of their hands once more.

Given the contumely which is poured upon them in the perpetual open season of public debate, and given their own sense of unending humiliation which is their calling's lot, is it any wonder that architects seem a surly crew? That their ranks are riven by constantly shifting factions is explicable by a need to band together against the enemy; the vitriol which flows so freely simply reflects that the fragile basis of their lives - an intense belief in themselves and their work - can brook no alternatives.

The situation is exacerbated by the amount of time architects are forced to spend waiting for decisions of boards and planning sub-committees and public enquiries.  During this time they may be required to tinker constantly with their original and by now mutilated visions.  Apart from being distasteful work in itself, hacking at the beauty they have created, it neither encourages commitment to other projects which will prove equally heartbreaking, nor offers sufficient distraction for the beleaguered spirit.  As a result, architects seem to spend much of this barren period firing off salvos in the form of letters to the newspapers and polemical articles in magazines.

Ultimately the architect is a sad beast.  Look at the biography of the greatest of them; many spend the bulk of their lives dedicated to the hopeless pursuit of a vision which is never realised.  Instead we are left with the detritus of their careers, the crumbs of genius. To be an architect is to engage in a perpetual and thankless struggle, to end up with miscegenated designs, and to find that the few of those which reach fruition will call forth only the obloquy of a baying, ignorant public.
 
(2.7.88)

Index

The poem of urban choreography

Our late second millennium cities swell daily; as the press of the residents' and visitors' bodies grows, so the sense of an underlying meaning to their movements diminishes, is lost in the apparent mob and rabble. But find a high place - an office-block or bell-tower - and look down over the surging world; then, the hidden order reveals itself.

First you are amazed that all these precarious human tops stay upright. You watch their forms change; as they move directly beneath you, these long and spindly beings compact themselves into small, sliding creatures with enormous heads, flowing freely over the surface of the earth. Then you begin to see the patterns.  Each pavement conducts two opposing streams, their strands constantly interweaving. The dynamics of open spaces are more complex: bunches of people progress like spongy billiard balls, groups that meet, mingle, re-form and move off. Other stationary huddles suddenly shatter, scattering their personal fragments.

It is a hypnotic sight. From up there you begin to feel as the gods must, looking down from on high at the tiny people. You see the larger scheme, the origin of the mysterious forces curving people's paths and lives. You see for the first time a huge, graceful urban choreography.

To pick out the other players in this ballet, you need, ideally, a helicopter.  As you rise over the city, above the spire and skyscraper, the human scale vanishes; the people and their patterns are lost.  But another emerges.  The cars, hitherto simply defining the street boundaries of the human realm, now become foregrounded; you see them as dancers in their own right, following their own score, different from that of the pedestrians, but equally rich, and counterpointing it subtly.

The traffic coalesces into long, wavering, metal ribbons, the individual cars rows of pearls on invisible threads which criss-cross the city like a vast cat's cradle. The urban surface becomes alive, as if a million beads of mercury were caught by hidden magnetic lines.

This revelation of the cars' ordered movement is even more surprising than that of the people.  Ten times their weight in metal careers along at ten times their speed, each object just feet from its fellows, cutting across paths with a military precision.

We take this constant pulsing flow of traffic for granted, and are shocked when it ceases, when the magic breaks down.  The instant an accident happens - two cars crash or nick each other - everything grinds to a halt.  Pedestrians stop and stare; other drivers crane their necks, stop and get out of their motors.  Worse, the cars act like camels: the sight of a dead or dying vehicle seems to induce death in others; more crashes occur as people avoid or are distracted by the first one.  Soon terminal gridlock, that transportational thrombosis, threatens the city which already teeters along a knife-edge of barely-matched infrastructural supply and demand. It is only when it stops that we become fully aware of this great choreographic poem that surrounds us; only when it stops that we appreciate the necessity of our skilful participation.

(31.10.89)

Index

Unshod for water

In Venice, during the eighteenth century, there was a craze among women for a curious kind of shoe called the zoccolo. In design it was very similar to the worst excesses of modern-day platform shoes, possessing soles of truly ankle-twisting dimensions. Historians have speculated that the fashion was introduced by men as an attempt to limit their wives' scope for running around after lovers in the husband's absence.  Although good historical precedents exist for using footwear as a form of social control - the deranged Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim went even further in the tenth century by banning the production of women's shoes completely - there may be another explanation.

Perhaps far from being wildly impractical, these shoes were, on the contrary, eminently sensible, and designed to cope with that uniquely Venetian phenomenon: Acqua Alta, those conjunctions of wind and tide which contrive to raise the water levels and so flood the city.

As anyone who has experienced Acqua Alta knows, this produces an extraordinary change in a city already unreal.  Where before you had a delicate but well-defined mesh of land and water, of two superimposed but distinct worlds, now you have some indeterminate state.  Along the Zattere, facing the Giudecca, the waves wash slowly in over the stones, covering them to a depth of several inches. The clear boundary between firm land and inconstant water is suddenly gone; you are left only with a sense of vulnerability, of the unnaturalness of dry land when confronted by the dominant mode of this planet – water.

That element's dominion is perhaps demonstrated most clearly in the central locus of Venice: the Piazza San Marco.  Beloved of tourists ever since Canaletto started producing his definitive vision of spatial harmony, the paved arena and its embracing architecture depicted as the quintessence of control and civilisation, under several feet of water the Piazza's area becomes instead a huge mirror of the lowering skies above, and hence nothing so much as an absence.  Its disappearance proclaims the dissolution of all that hard-won order, the peremptory annulment of Venice's presumptuous ancient marriage to the sea.

Elsewhere in Venice its particular geography - it has no hills, only areas more or less above sea-level - means that any rain is condemned to lie where it falls, until the smaller piazzas and streets and passageways become similarly full of spreading sheets of water.

As a consequence, it is almost impossible to walk in Venice at Acqua Alta and to keep your feet dry. With the exception of fully-fledged galoshes, no type of footwear is immune to the effects of the omnipresent water, crept out now of the lagoon like some ancient monster, to take its revenge on the impious inhabitants of this impossible city built on mud-flats and staves.  And so at this time there is an additional melancholy, born of the sight of all the world walking around with cold, sodden feet.  Just as their forebears did one hundred, one thousand years ago.  If nothing else, this water should remind us that it is part of the human condition to get wet feet in this world: to walk on water is only given to the divine.
 
(25.12.91)

Index

Intellectual love

The pulse quickens, the breaths shorten, the hands begin to shake; there is a churning in the pit of the stomach. Your attention becomes focused, you can think of only one thing, nothing else matters. It is clearly love. But love of a special kind: intellectual love.

It is the love we feel before a masterwork we know so well, but which we also know with a certainty will thrill us when we return, and will reveal ever more beauties and depths the more we return. It is the love we feel for rich and complete worlds of the spirit like Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Intellectual love may also occur for the ephemeral, something that comes round with a comforting regularity designed to serve for a limited time, but which manages to remain fresh, constantly exciting and surprisingly durable despite its origins.  In this class fall collective works of genius like the weekly Village Voice.  In it we find a brilliant kaleidoscopic stream of ideas and opinions that never fail to test our own mettle and demand that we respond with our own thinking.

Other works we love in this way may be part of a finite series, the gradual building of which induces a sense of expectation and even of climax tinged with the inevitable disappointment which will follow completion. For example the Hyperion Schubert series, the complete lieder sung by diverse singers accompanied by the incomparable Graham Johnson, and released in thematic groups devised by him which lend a coherence and intellectual rhythm to the project over and above its larger structure.

A different kind of finitude is offered by the works of a living artist.  As we await for the next opus in the growing sequence, we must also suffer the fear that it will not come, for one day we know that death will cut off that series. And so it is for geniuses like the fearsome Peter Greenaway, each of whose films is individually exciting but is also contaminated with the frisson-inducing thought at once terrible and delicious - that the latest work we now watch could be his absolute last. 

A rather strange but wonderful category of artists who can provoke this intellectual swooning are those who are already dead, and thus unable to add to their oeuvre, and yet whose output is so immense that we are constantly surprised by new and wonderful works. Perhaps the prime example here is Picasso, who at various stages in his life was creating several canvases a day.  In exhibition after exhibition we come across yet more astounding works from him, as if somehow he were breaking all the rules again and smuggling works down from Parnassus.

Perhaps, too, we feel an additional joy in meeting Picasso's works for the first time because they mostly date from his huge old age, and in their constant searching and sense of artistic enquiry they offer us the sight of pure intellectual energy sustaining the creator almost despite the body.  It is this death-defying energy we love when we read Proust or the Village Voice, listen to some of Hyperion's 600 Schubert songs, watch a Greenaway film or gaze enraptured at another Picasso masterpiece.

(8.2.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Watching Water Wrackets

Index