The route well travelled

When the nights get longer, and a weight begins to gather in the bones, walking in nature is a most restorative and agreeable activity.  There may be other reasons for such heaviness, and walking is about the best thing you can do for any of them.  Escaping the sofa, Liam and I went to Queenswoods and we walked the route I’ve walked so many times before.  Up the path to the autumn gardens, missing out the redwoods this occasion, (those trees that have stood longer than we will live), and through the vital gleam of colour with the ingenious gate closing mechanism that impresses some and befuddles others.  Through Cotteral’s Folly, a dark alleyway of looming trees I remember walking with someone long ago, with a path through the middle that darkens and deepens before emerging finally into the clearing, with the light and sense of space a contrast from the confined darkness, and the metaphor of some kind of rebirth springs to mind, with a new perspective, a new clarity.  If only. 

            Then on to the viewpoint where that idea of perspective is confirmed and you can sit watching the horizon, considering it all together with a kind of gentle blankness rather than honing in on specific things, looking at how everything is quite small and can be looked at in more detail through the viewing scope but then you lose the overall, in which all the details which add depth and richness are actually quite insubstantial.

            And after a time, a quiet return, not retracing your steps but looping round the quarry where I used to climb and scamper, past memorial benches and a monkey puzzle tree and those redwoods we didn’t have time to consider and on home.

RIP Leonard Cohen - thank you for the songs that furnish our sorrow

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I awoke this morning to a text from an old friend that started “Sad day.”  He didn’t have to elaborate, I knew what it would be.  I googled the name Leonard Cohen to see that indeed he had died.  While sad, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.  The last three albums have seem to actively anticipate this event, to be a kind of preparation.  I went on and saw the facebook tributes, quoting his lines, sharing his songs.  I thought of what song I would share, what I could say, but felt a more in depth tribute necessary for the artist that has had the most profound and lasting effect on me.

            I bought the Best of Leonard Cohen many winters ago when I was fifteen.  The first obsession was the beautiful evocation of a riverside visit to Suzanne.  The song made life sound like it could be beautiful, that our encounters with other people could have deep and lasting meaning.  I also remember the impact of the Sisters of Mercy, who “have not departed or gone, they await for me til they think that I just can’t go on, and they brought me this comfort and later they brought me this song…” I felt then that comfort only came at the bottom of the well, where the light is barely visible, that when it is almost too late for hope a soft singing comes from the darkest corner of the room.  It wasn’t until a decade later I heard that the benevolent sounding sisters were in fact prostitutes from the Cohen scored western McCabe and Mrs Miller.

            This was around the same time I got hold of a vinyl copy of Leonard Cohen’s debut.  I listened to it in the dark, sprawled out on my sofa in a flat without a bedroom, smoking cigarettes in a mood of utter despondency, but as the smoke turned in the black air and his voice climbed through it seemed to validate and beautify that despair.  I played that record a lot, and still play it sometimes.  I wrote about The Master Song in my essay ‘Is Matter Holy – the Entanglement of Flesh and the Spirit in the writing of Leonard Cohen’ that focused primarily on his novel Beautiful Losers, a transgressive, post-Joycean speed-fuelled eruption of inelegant thoughts expressed with the most perfect eloquence.  It seems madness that his poetic career had come to so little, but if it had flourished, we wouldn’t have had the canon of songs that we have.  Songs of the utmost sincerity, and the most profound poetry.  Songs to shepherd us through the tangled forest of life. 
           I feel lucky to have seen him twice in concert, and been witnessed to the most admirable humbleness, sincerity and grace you could expect to see in a popular performer.  Cohen sets an example for all performers, all people even, who if they ever get any success in life, they maintain their humanity, integrity and sensitivity.  I saw him once at Big Chill with my mum and sister; and another time in Birmingham with my friend Amy.  I was rapt throughout at the timeless music and truth of the performance. 
           Though he has left us now, though there will not be another album, we have a legacy of wonderful music that is more than any human being could hope to produce.  Knowing his music you will probably imagine that despite the spirituality that crystalized and grew later on in his career, life for Leonard was not a picnic by any stretch, that along with moments of great beauty there were times of intense difficulty and serious introspection.  I hope the God he always kept a place for accepts his ‘cold and broken hallelujah’.

The Individual and the Crowd - reflections on identity post-Barbican Spiritualized gig

Yesterday I went to see Spiritualized perform their critically lauded album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space.  This is an album that had a huge impact on me at release, and I have listened to sporadically throughout the years.  An album I like enough to wear on a t shirt.  But I feel now that it symbolises a sort of crisis of individuality, that who I am is not unique to me, but a subscribed set of signifiers lifted from the proverbial peg.

The show was the second of two consecutive nights where they played this album in its entirety.  From the rousing, cyclical opening title track to the more understated closer Cop Shoot Cop (which sounded slightly like an afterthought, one of my less generous reactions to the show) we were taken on an amazing journey.  It was a fantastic performance, touching in its quiet moments, and becoming tangibly intense as squalls of free noise were regularly dealt like pummelling blows from an angry musical mob.

            But when I walked in something puzzled me.  I thought it was to do with the majority of people being men in their thirties and forties.  But it wasn’t just that.  It was a stylistic homogeneity that was apparent.  In Hereford I feel I belong in my group of friends but I feel that the way I dress suits me as an individual.  I feel I have some sort of identity that is uniquely me.  I don’t see myself as belonging to any particular type or clan.  But who does?  Maybe goths identify as goths for example, but they probably feel like a unique type of goth.  I don’t know.  What does being a goth signify?  That you value sadness and paradoxical nonconformity.  I could get down with that, but all the make up seems too much like hard work.  I suppose I’m ‘indie’?  It seems sort of pitiful when you label it.  I chose the most bookish glasses in Specsavers because I think of myself as a nerd, and value literary expression.  I wear a cardigan because I’m sensitive and like to make a nod to grunge.  Corduroy doesn’t really clash with the twee programme.  The addition of a band tshirt that nobody will have heard of featuring white geometric outline shapes on black serves only to feed the cliché of cultural superiority.  To see the collective expression of everyone’s quite similar aspirations towards hipness and intelligence was frankly disorientating, and calls to mind the swimming abyss of noise conjoured by the Spiritualized song The Individual.  It is not well defined.  There is nothing to hold on to.  Under the conditioned desire to be seen as alternative and cultured is a vast and terrifying abyss.  My sense of who I am is as brittle and shallow as it is arbitrary.  It is predictable by a Spotify algorithm.  The identity I pursued in record shops and charity shops is simply another demographic.  I don’t know what good it does admitting this.  I don’t know who I can become.  I feel like a husk hung with fabrics. 

It makes me think of the live version of Jeffrey Lewis ‘The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane’ when he details his lysergic thoughts on identity and taste, particularly a notion of ‘coolness’, which is, in his then view, constructed from at first an influential person defining a song (or book or painter or whatever) as ‘cool’ and then you collect a load of things that resemble it in the same box marked ‘cool’ in your head until someone updates or upends your notion of cool and you throw everything out and start collecting different stuff.  But in the end none of it means anything.  They’re all just sounds that you’re ascribing meaning to, and that meaning changes.  But listening back to this album for the umpteenth time I do feel there is something inherently beautiful in it, that it transcends its time as well as spanning genre, and that, all in all, it’s as good as any to wear on a tshirt.

in the blank depths something stirs - resurrecting a blog

this blog has been dormant for a while.  I was driving with Elspeth and we were talking about what could be surmised as personal education - the things we interest ourselves in and read about - and the possibility for journalising such an interest (to force a verb) as being potentially interesting and constructive as a developing document and maybe of passing interest to others.  So I might write about Edward de Bono's Art as Therapy that I got out of the art college library, or Adorno if I ever get on to him, but I got talking about my wish that whenever I thought of something of some interest my response was to write an article about it, which really isn't such an impossible wish, rather something to just do, so I've written what could generously be called a 'meditation' on identity following going to see Spiritualized with Bizzy and realising everyone was dressed the same.  Expect more 'meditations' on everything from coffee culture to the space programme, semiotics and sandwiches and everything imbetween.

something

I have no words to explain it

But these –

The hollow thwack of rotted wood breaking,

A wet leaf falling to the ground,

A snail traversing a dual carriageway,

The sigh as I realize I cannot explain.

Wish

I wish I could dazzle you with my words

But they glow too softly.

They glimmer like dim coals

When I require fireworks.

I want to sing to you,

To enrapture you,

But this voice is cracked

And I can hardly muster

A whisper. I want my speech

To be more beautiful than

A bouquet of wildflowers

Carried from the top of

A mountain. Instead they are

Wilted in the garage forecourt.

I wish I could dazzle you

With my words

But they glow too softly.

You’re looking well

It’s hard to know what to say

Sometimes I forget

How the last ten years drifted away

In a medication fog, in drifts and flurries

Of psychosis that divert life’s road

Down dismal cul-de-sacs.

Watching television

Five minutes at a time,

Listening to a radio

That knows you by name.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner

On a plastic tray.

It took me seven years

To get a degree. My brain

Is as full of holes as my CV.

I have lost loves

Along with my marbles.

It took a part of me.

It’s a tough thing to explain.

Diagnosis doesn’t ease the pain

Of feeling cursed and different

With a rotten shadow for a soul

To drag through endless days

And no one else to blame.

I wish it came with greatness

Like the myth. I wish I was

Hemingway or somebody.

Under treatment it’s just

Weight gain and lethargy

And increased risk of diabetes.

Maybe it will all burn itself out

I’m just twenty seven, there’s a chance

It might. Or someone might save me.

I might find the strength and reason

To fight harder, to feel better.

If there’s a real cure it’s love.

Under the moon and stars where I huddle,

On this baffling rock where my days sit,

Before I pass the sun for the last time

Let me be cured.