sisyphus

Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus

In his book Promises to Keep: Thoughts in Old Age, distinguished English academic Richard Hoggart, 92 at the time, wrote most affectingly about the phenomenon of ageing.

I go for a short, late afternoon walk along pavements crowded with schoolchildren of various ages heading for home, most of them continuously laughing and joshing. I do not envy them. It was lovely to be young; only a curmudgeon would begrudge them that part of life. A slight regret and one kept well in check is all I register. I remember that time warmly and try to imagine how they see me now, a slow old man with a stick.

Some make way for me politely. Others look at me as at one from another planet, at which they can never conceive themselves ever arriving. A few look at me as though I am a bit of a nuisance, slowing things down. Hardly any will see me as a survivor because that would link them emotionally with one who was once their age but now occupies a point in space and time towards which they do not yet see themselves slowly moving.

Tolstoy spoke for many when he noted to his diary that ‘old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man’. It steals up like a burglar in stockinged feet, but with a cosh. Some of us take the pension but ignore the indicated age and suddenly realise, perhaps at 80, that we have become old, as my wife and I did.

And commenting on the pleasure that memories of children and grandchildren bring in age, he sounds a poignant note.

Among the memories (of grandchildren) that stay most firmly in our minds is that of the oldest turning to his mother, at about four, and asking: “Shall I be happy all the days?” Almost heartbreaking. It made her want to hold him tight forever.

Shortly before my mother withdrew into the shady place she inhabited up to her death in 2008, she expressed Tolstoy’s surprise when contemplating the onset of age. Anger and frustration were her principal reactions to having been ambushed by the years. Still entirely on the ball at that point, she talked of an interior self that had arrested at around age 30 but that was now trapped within a body that refused to do her bidding.

Within a few weeks of the conversation in which she expressed her exasperation, she experienced the first of a series of transient ischaemic attacks, or TIAs. These small strokes forced her further and further into that hinterland of consciousness that those who are past the first oddly liberating stages of middle age begin to contemplate increasingly.

Always one to avoid the physical excesses of sport (whilst ready enough to exercise strenuously enough if some extrinsic gain was the goal – as in my current gym attendance), beyond some arthritis, I’ve not become victim to crumbling cartilages, dodgy hip joints or an impacting spine. And although physically I do have to do a great deal more to achieve a good deal less, that interior 40-year-old is maintaining fairly convincing control of the mental and physical extremities. Thus far, the aftermath of sarcoidosis and prostate cancer has wreaked more psychological than material damage and – pro tem at least – I maintain an uneasy (and sometimes violently breached) truce with the demons that whisper of oncoming dereliction, decay and dying*.

Old age, Bette Davis declared, is no place for sissies. With three young children, two grown-up offspring, two grandchildren and a partner younger than myself, my investment in life is substantial. I see old age, physical infirmities notwithstanding, as a further rite of passage no less rich and challenging than what has gone before and what prevails now. If at 92 I can reflect with some of the acuteness of perception and write with the passion that clearly still drove Richard Hoggart at that advanced age then I’ll lean on my cherrywood walking stick and cup my ear and speak from the vital centre that so evidently can prevail.

*Anxiety as a condition – particularly health anxiety – is a topic for separate consideration at some point.

:::

Sadly, my mum’s sustained vigour in age was taken from her and she lingered ignominiously for too long. Shortly before her death, I wrote a poem about an ageing process deprived of choice.

STILL LIFE

Each morning they organise your bones
into the wheelchair, stack you leaning
out of kilter. Thus I find you, wall-eyed,

feather pulse and mouth ajar. This is
a stillness you are learning as silence
silts up your blood. I name you: ‘Mum’.

I call, quietly at first, as if this were
only sleep and you might resent the passage
interrupted. But your shade is walking

a broken road on the far side of dreams.
I keep my coat on, lean in the doorway,
breathing in the alkalines and salts

that are your presence in this world.
Beyond, through narrow windows, rain
drifts like smoke. The trees shift

their high shoulders, hefting their leaves
like heroes. I can see the lift and fall
of their evergreen breath, the slow,

dispassionate pulse. Such senseless beauty,
propping up the sky as if there were no
tides turning or falling stars, no ashes to dust,

no time at all. You speak – a half-word,
cracked in the middle. Syllables drift
like fumes. Somewhere in that steam

of meaning, the filaments of memory:
the horn’s tip of a lover’s moon,
a song’s dust, the eye’s tail catching,

not quite catching, doorway phantoms,
window ghosts. Grief crosses my mind:
its hydrogen release – from local pain

to lachrymae rerum, all in one ball
of fire. It would be a simple thing
to self-cauterise, here against the lintel,

watching not the rise and fall of your
fish-breath, your insect pulse, but
the immortal trees beyond. Too easy;

but death looked in and turned away,
indifferent, and now it’s down to me,
the blood-bearer, to wish away your life

for you. The house ticks and hums.
A voice calls out, thin and querulous;
another coughs. I turn down your light.

There, against the window, dusk outside,
you are becoming your shadow
cast against the shifting of the trees.

At this time of the year in the countryside, given a couple of days break in the cloud layer and temperatures that slip a notch above the seasonal norm, something fleeting but magical might be witnessed. Defying the driest of English irony and the most palsied of English upper lips, something vibrates in the febrile air; people stop in the street and look up into the sky; and, against all training and protocol, strangers actually greet each other.

And if one is actually amongst ‘the groves, the copses and the meadows’, as I was this morning, driving through rural North Hertfordshire, the impact is all the greater. Stop the car and turn off the engine and you’ll hear the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Look around and you’ll realise that you’re in a sort of bosky limbo between Housman’s Land of Lost Content and Holst’s Another Country. And everywhere, above and below, is the hum of the force that drives the green fuse through the flower…

I am, of course, trying very hard indeed to be drily ironic; to diminish through parody the full effect of something that actually has real substance and power for me, but that I acknowledge awkwardly and with reluctance. Lacking either religious faith or a sense of my nation’s manifest destiny, I feel none of the urgings of that darkest synthesis of the sacred and profane, patriotism. I do not believe that Arthur will rise again from the Lake and, with a miraculously unrusted Excalibur, liberate us from the current oppressor. My childhood memories of rustic Kent are vivid and detailed, but, inevitably, they are gilded and embellished in the recalling. I accept this and I maintain a pragmatic, creative relationship with them; they don’t dominate my sense of how things actually were way back when. The manifestly ordinary, workaday present is more important to me than any notions of a haloed past or a bright world to come.

So this wholly unexpected uprush of elation that infects the spirit without warning on a summer’s day somewhere in rural England – and Wales and Scotland – always ambushes me and leaves me momentarily baffled. And generally I settle for baffled because the rationalisations that always trail the experience and will not easily be uprooted make me feel uncomfortable. It’s the small, clear voice that states: I am glad to be English and I am glad to be in England. It’s as if behind the bulwark of radical convictions, the fierce rejection of the myth of Merrie England, there lurks the unreconstructed soul of an old buffer, a tweedy, harrumphing conservative who is at his happiest when stumping across the furrows with a stout willow stick and a good dog.

Because when all’s said and done I actually do feel a strong and deep connection with the country of my birth. There are parts of it in which I feel comprehensively at home. The West Kent orchards near my birthplace, now fast disappearing under South-East London spillage. The Surrey Hills where I walked with my parents. The chalky Hampshire hills where I used to live. The Sussex Downs, where Emma was born and grew up. The Yorkshire Dales where I spent the greater part of five years at boarding school.

For most of the ‘80s my parents lived in the south of France and year after year during Lin and Zoë’s childhood & adolescence we spent idyllic summers in the dry, white heat by the ridiculously blue Mediterranean. But for all the very real allure of that part of France, I could never quite convince myself that here amongst the olive trees, the lavender fields, the cicadas I could happily end my days. I would miss the thick, dark green trees growing in the moist earth, and, yes, the rain rattling against the windows.

And that’s the best I can do for love of country. I am indifferent to flags, monarchy, traditions, national identity, our glorious heritage – the whole crass backyard imperialism that seeks to turn England’s absurdly contradictory topography and polyglot culture into some kind of national homogeneity. England is where I was born and it’s where I live. I belong to it in some indefinable organic sense and it belongs to me. And in truth, behind that barrage of passionate beliefs about how we live now and how we might live differently, I’m comfortable with this kind of love of country.

 :::

I’m very conscious that much of my poetry speaks to this hesitant, tentative love of country. The poem below appears again in yet another slightly revised – hopefully refined – form. It’s about a small hill farm in Medbourne, Leicestershire where, between the wars, my father and uncle spent long, slow summers watching and listening miles from the cities and decades away from trunk roads. Subsequently my cousin Linda and I caught the last of it before Medbourne became a manicured rural retreat a four-wheel drive commute from Leicester.

:::

SHEEP ON THE BROWN HILL

There are sheep,
hopeless, round-shouldered clouds
of wool. They have the eyes
of demons

yet the mouths
they clamp round nettles
seem innocent of teeth.
They have the cloven hoof

yet their legs
seem afterthoughts, a child’s
charcoal lines
drawn at all four corners.

Knee-high again,
I hang like a casualty
on the barbed-wire fence,
gaping, contemplating

sheep in orbit
around the hilltop house.
No route or destination;
no sense of purpose

to be found within
this witless shifting traffic.
I look for patterns,
signs of navigation.

Sun moves through thin clouds;
wind wraps the house,
sings in wires.
Sheep crop and shuffle

all day long. Nothing alters
on the brown hill.
One generation inhales;
its descendants sigh.

I am an old coat now,
stretched on thorns.
Night slides across and finds me,
purposeless yet blessed.

:::

Maggie Holland has written the song that is for me and many others the alternative English anthem, representing not monarchy and nation state but ‘common wealth and common ground’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i9IUHwW-2A

Man is a self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped, and electro-chemical reduction plant, integral with the segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent activation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries, millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems, crushers and cranes, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for seventy years if well managed, the whole extraordinary complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, the turret control being closely allied with an air-conditioning intake and exhaust, and a main fuel intake.
R. Buckminster Fuller, “A Definition of a Man”

So far, so good. You’d think that so sophisticated a piece of kit might engage with the world to generally purposeful and efficient effect. Consider…

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr. Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for North West Gas said, “We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It’s possible Mr. Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that destroyed his house.”
(The Daily Telegraph)

After being charged for a overdraft, 30-year-old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards. The bank has now asked him to close his account and Mr.Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance, by cheque, made out in his new name.
(The Guardian)

Irish police are being handicapped in a search for a stolen van because they cannot issue a description. It’s a special branch vehicle and they don’t want the public to know what it looks like.
(The Guardian)

Finally one from 30 years ago that has gone down in Air Traffic Control legend.

The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport were renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expected one to know one’s gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them. So it was with some amusement that we (a Pan Am 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground control and a British Airways 747, callsign Speedbird 206.
Speedbird 206: “Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway”.
Ground: “Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven”.
The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop.
Ground: “Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?”
Speedbird 206: “Stand by, Ground, I’m looking up our gate location now”.
Ground (impatiently): “Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?”
Speedbird 206 (coolly): “Yes, twice in 1944, but it was dark and I didn’t land.”
(Reigate and Redhill Advertiser, in interview with a recently retired Gatwick Airport ATC operative.)

Press Release following the ‘Trans-Sib’ book launch.

On Monday evening, June 6th, at about 7.30, after months of stop-start journeying, always trailing a good head of steam but sometimes impeded by obstacles on the line, the Trans-Siberian finally arrived! Not in war-torn Manchuria, but at the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place, Bloomsbury.

But first, the story behind the journey. Having in 2014 submitted the final draft and the completed illustrations, translator Dick Jones’ and artist Natalie d’Arbeloff’s version of Blaise Cendrars’ epic poem ‘Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France’ – the ‘Trans-Sib’ – went to publication with Nicolas and Frances McDowall’s Old Stile Press. Known to collectors, libraries and universities worldwide as the premier specialists in hand-crafted limited edition books, Nicolas and Frances integrated text and images into a beautifully produced, landscape-formatted run of 150 volumes, details of which can be found on the Old Stile Press website. The book has been available for several months now and we’re very pleased with initial sales.

When planning the book’s launch, Dick and Natalie decided to offer something a little more exciting than the conventional format of a brief reading from the text prior to the consumption by the guests of multiple bottles of wine and assorted arty canapés. This version of the ‘Trans-Sib’ being a collaboration between writer and artist with text and images fully integrated, it was clear from the start that any presentation of the contents of the book must accommodate both equally.

So Natalie created a video version of the illustrations – a DVD slide show with each image sequenced in a series of carefully timed slow, graceful dissolves and cross-fades designed to be projected against a screen in coordination with Dick’s live reading of the text. It was also decided to incorporate a live musical soundtrack to provide further colour and atmosphere to what was now emerging as a performance piece.

Managing the coordination between pre-set image sequencing and live reading was the main challenge. And with inevitable small variations in the pacing of different readings constant adjustment was necessary. The software that Natalie selected as most suitable for high quality formatting required that if a single timing adjustment had to be made in a particular section of the display then the entire sequencing either side had to be recalibrated too. So in the weeks running up to the presentation Natalie and Dick were in constant communication, exchanging audio and video clips via the internet and rehearsing and recording both separately and together as they edged closer towards an optimum balance between the fixed running of the DVD and the live reading.

The third element in the presentation was the music. Guitarist Doug MacGowan, an old friend and musical collaborator of Dick’s, composed an accompanying score for acoustic guitar to run alongside the image projection and reading, reflecting the constantly evolving visual and oral narrative. Coordinating the musical accompaniment was somewhat less of a challenge than was met in the matching of slideshow and reading. Doug, a skilled improviser, took his cues from the pacing of the voice, adjusting bar lengths and slowing down or accelerating minutely as necessary.

The London Review Bookshop is one of the great bookshops, airy and up to date, but also providing a powerful sense that, for all the digital advances that have been made in communications media, the book remains the prime repository of all things cognitive, creative and cultural! At street level it’s commodious – packed with books on shelves and tables, but still providing plenty of room to move around. The staircase down to the basement leads on to a book-lined mezzanine level, which has a flight of central steps opening onto a square floor area, also lined with bookshelves. Chairs were arranged within these two areas facing a large screen lowered in front of the shelves at the far end from the mezzanine entrance way. Dick was positioned to the right of the screen and Natalie and Doug sat to the left.

Upstairs, arty canapés weren’t on offer, but the wine was decent enough and the guests arrived, met and mingled upstairs, old friends being greeted and new friends being made. Then, downstairs, the audience in place, the presentation began with the dousing of the lights and the commencement of a brief projected sequence of pictures of Blaise Cendrars, showing his evolution from callow youth (the adolescent protagonist of the ‘Trans-Sib’, maybe) to the gallant one-armed French Foreign Legionnaire of the First World War through to the lined and Gauloise-smoking visage of his old age. With the fading onto the screen of the first image from the ‘Trans-Sib’ and the shifting of the music from introductory overture to thematic accompaniment, the depiction of the great Trans-Siberian odyssey began.

All successful performance depends upon a synthesis of hard graft and providence and in the event both ensured a near-seamless coordination of reading, images and music. Feedback after the presentation was gratifyingly positive with such eminently quotable quotes as “…an exceptionally fine integration of text, imagery, music and speaking voice…”, “…an experience that I shall remember for a long time”, “…such an inspirational evening”, and “…a truly captivating and immersive experience”.

And so the ‘Trans-Sib’ – so long in the preparation and then several months post publication – was officially launched. There are plans in discussion for further performances of the video/audio presentation so, hopefully, at some point in the not too distant future the Trans-Siberian Express with Blaise Cendrars and Little Jeanne from France on board may be pulling into a station near you…

:::

These music clips are theme samples emailed to me prior live rehearsal by composer/guitarist Doug MacGowan.

TRANS-SIBERIAN THEME (subsequently altered)

JEANNE’S THEME 1.

JEANNE’S THEME 2.

EXOTIC THEME

BELLS MOTIF

A man alone on an uncomfortable chair outside Jamaica Blue in the Lion’s Yard shopping mall in Cambridge. Kids & Emma roaming the denser regions of the retail jungle, hunting & gathering while I muse. Current topic: do they make these chairs uncomfortable so as to discourage customers from lingering over their Wallingford Estate Jamaica Blue Coffees? Subsequent topic: through my reading glasses the passing crowds look like polychromatic ghosts, their colours smudged against blurred light. Through the haze I hear three languages in swift succession – Mandarin, Arabic & Spanish. Now my deliverance comes – the girls have benefitted the Accessorise shareholders to the tune of several quid and we’re off…

A bit of design tweaking going on. Any observations?