Author Archives: Arthur House

North Sea Travelogue

25th April 2014

 

Exhausted, feeling hemmed in,
I took the first northbound train.
Making notes in a moleskine pad
I wrote down everything good I had:
girlfriend, sister, one or two friends,
some skill with words, funds,
historical sense, a musical ear,
a basic working body, an idea.

Past Derby the hedgerows thin.
At Sheffield I felt the light pour in
and old men suddenly garrulous.
But travelling back is a curse.
We’re infants intoxicated by the dust
that furs the photos of the past.
Where the railway skirted the Tyne
I wondered which house was mine.

From Edinburgh I came back
along the North Sea coastal track.
A pebbledash council house, a mine,
limestone, socialism, rainbows, rain:
how can you live without this shoal
of earth, this silting of the soul?
At Berwick I sat on a bench and tried
to remember how my parents died.

Because our great taboo is death
life has become a spectral path,
and mourning screams to be let out
of every glazed object, every route
is blocked by a ruin that isn’t home.
Sadness sits in the frozen form
of jumbled heirlooms we ritualise
and love with antique dealers’ eyes.

I’m tired of hunting. Every week
a new camp and a brief break
and back on the interminable march
to the private castle on the beach.
What better ceremony do we have?
The world happens on the grave
of so much beauty, but the ground
is gouged and distributed to the wind.

Looking for a kingdom by the sea
in Alnmouth I paid for a B&B,
and lay among the shower caps
dreaming of living there perhaps.
This is the way we turn to stone:
glutted on visions of living alone.
I found a private corner by the bar,
read Tennyson, downed a beer.

Later, walking on the sand, I turned
to face the ocean, stood, listened.
The roar of the tide was a mother:
You have nothing left to gather.
The mere fact of your verticality
is enough. Leave this privacy
behind and wander into the future:
remember, love, smash the camera.

 

 

Duck Soup

The first time I had the honour to meet the late Count Pázmány, I lent him my last 20 korona to pay for a bottle of champagne. He said he needed it, and a cursory appreciation of his somewhat frayed appearance confirmed the truth of this entreaty. The Count was good enough to drink my health and to share a glass with me. From that moment, we became firm friends.

I say my last 20 korona, but those of you acquainted with the sad history of my family will no doubt be aware that I had by this time squandered every fillér of my not inconsequential inheritance at the gaming tables, and on women, and, to a lesser extent, on competition poultry. The previous day I had given a gypsy pedlar 200 korona for a batch of geese I felt were sure to sweep all before them at next week’s harvest festival; only to be bitterly disabused by my steward, Tóth, who pointed out that the whole gaggle were one-legged, a defect the wily pedlar had concealed by displaying them side on. In my defence, even Tóth admitted that they looked magnificent in profile.

The truth is that these last 20 korona were a loan from Tóth. He asked me to think of the money as a gift, and, with typical impertinence, suggested that I wasn’t to dream of paying it back. Such a reversal of the natural order of things being, if you will forgive the paradox, in those days all too common. The spirit of the age was one of angry and somewhat pathetic confusion, like an old man who awakens from a troubled sleep to find himself stark naked in the middle of the forest, with no memory of who he is, apart from a strong sense of having once amounted to something. Like, in fact, my uncle, the Count Bánffy, who was very lucky to be picked up and brought home by a party of Austrian tourists before things got out of hand.

I had taken myself off to the village tavern; partly, I confess, to dull the humiliation of finding myself once more in Tóth’s debt. It was frequently my custom to spend the evenings here, rather than dining at home, or in the company of what might be regarded as my social equals. I revelled in the atmosphere: the saltiness of my tenants’ conversation being a welcome antidote to the sterilised and mutually reinforcing anxiety that passed for table-talk in good houses at that time. I will have been enjoying one of these robust colloquies when the late Count Pázmány leant across, and introduced himself, enquiring, with the natural grace and musicality of diction which marked him from the beginning as a man of the noblest disposition, from where I had purchased that handsome necktie of mine, and whether he might touch me for a few korona.

*

This was, of course, a part of the world in which most of us were counts, except for my cousin the Prince Károlyi, who was a prince, and the Baron Berthóthy, who was a baron. I remember when we were younger how we used to delight in holding Berthóthy upside down and asking him, ‘What are you?’, ‘What are you?’, and he would cry, ‘Just a baron; I’m only a baron’, and we would let him go, and share a good laugh.

I remind you of this because I wish to be quite clear that I did not regard it as an honour to meet a man of Pázmány’s rank. Indeed, such was my familiarity with the local nobility, I owned to being somewhat surprised I had not encountered the name before. This was until he explained his family holdings were in Transylvania, at which I joked that I hoped he wasn’t going to bleed me dry, and he pointed out that this was just the sort of quip that had dogged him his entire adult life, even when fighting side by side with his fellow Hungarians, risking his life no less than they were. He hated the Romanians as much as the next Magyar. He found these jokes not offensive, so much as wearying. I agreed this was a jolly good point.

No, the honour conferred by his acquaintance was due to the character of the man, which struck you from the moment of introduction. I mentioned earlier that he did not appear to me in his prime. His long black hair was very obviously dyed, and beginning to thin at the crown, while his mustard corduroy suit had apparently fusted so long unwashed that it seemed to have evolved a separate consciousness, glorying in the offence it gave, and threatening with its powerful odour and ominous rents to cheat at cards and sully your sister: a well-educated thug of a piece of tailoring. Nevertheless, I knew in an instant, here was a man of some standing. Not in that narrow temporal sense with which popular sentiment is so often willing to pronounce itself satisfied. Here was a man indifferent to the tyranny of context. A Socrates. A Beethoven. A Savonarola. His enormous twice-broken nose, a sign of having run up against the world, and not having known when he was beaten.

This much was confirmed to me by our conversation. For Count Pázmány had suffered with our age, even as he superseded it. He had served, he told me, on both the Eastern and when this grew tiresome, on the Western Front. He had lived both as coward and as hero, and observed that the poet was quite wrong when he said cowards die a thousand times, and the valiant but once; the valiant, he said, die each of the thousand deaths they imagine, but continue to fight: this is what makes them valiant.

He had flown alongside the Red Baron. He had tried to help the Ottomans push back against that dreadful Lawrence fellow; if only Brother Turk had listened to him. He had composed a long, dense poem, full of biblical imagery and recondite references, which addressed the problems of our time at once obliquely and head on. He had ridden a winner in the Grand National at Aintree. He had invented an unguent which could assuage both shell shock and ennui. He had attempted to negotiate the peaceful annexation of the Croats. In spite of all this, the Soviets had confiscated his property and driven him from his home. Modesty could not forbid repetition of the Cardinal Archbishop of Esztergom's observation that Pázmány’s experience of exile, state-craft, and penury, taken with his distinctive personal bravery, reminded His Eminence of another man with big ideas and long hair. The Count himself was hardly so impious as to venture the comparison.

Hearing these stories, and discovering that the Count had not yet made arrangements for his overnight stay, aside from a vague intention to ask the inn-keeper if he had any room, I did not hesitate to put my own modest castle at his disposal.

*

It was not long into the Count’s sojourn that he began to take the administration of my estate into his own hands.

The first I knew of Tóth’s dismissal was when the old steward informed me of it one morning. Was I aware that the Count Pázmány had instructed Tóth to collect his belongings and have left the castle by nightfall? Candidly, I had never cared for Tóth: his preference for my father and disapproval of my own lifestyle were all too obvious. Nevertheless, the Tóths had been with my family for generations, and, whatever you said about the man, he had served us loyally; moreover, he knew the estates better than anyone else alive, myself included. I would even say that I preferred him to Mrs Svabó, the housekeeper I had also inherited, and whose lisp unsettled me.

I wondered if this was not a little overhasty on Pázmány’s part, and asked him as much. He answered my question with one of his own. Was I to govern my own affairs or not? And then, being a man of restless intellect, with another. Was I to be master in my own house, or was I to allow myself to be ordered around by a beastly little Croat leech who displayed scant regard for my name and ancient heritage?

At Pázmány’s suggestion I remained in my study reading detective novels while he oversaw the steward’s tearful departure. Such weakness in a man was disgraceful, Pázmány observed, one ought only to weep at the death of a comrade, or the sense of one’s own insignificance when faced by the infinite magnitude and detail of our universe. I agreed.

*

The changes Pázmány made to my estate were considerable. He began by converting the majority of the grounds to the production of champagne. After a lean spell, he firmly believed the continent was in line for some biblical years of plenty; except, this time, in a different order. We were living through an age of unprecedented new technologies; the possibilities for human happiness were without limit, and in such promising circumstances, a man producing sparkling wine was set to clean up. Besides, he was convinced we could market the vineyards as an alternative sanatorium. Sleeping amongst the fumes, he confided, ‘would help to make us all more intelligent’.

These reforms were expensive, and I was already a bankrupt, albeit a happy one. In spite of another loan from Tóth, I was forced to mortgage the estate to a Slovak merchant named Chren. I did not think much of Chren, on account of a lazy eye that I felt belied its name by following you around the room. However, having read through the paperwork, Pázmány assured me that in spite of being a crazy-eyed Slovak scum, Chren offered excellent terms on which I’d be a damned fool to pass.

My own living quarters were unfortunately required for the vats, so while Pázmány oversaw the renovations, I temporarily boarded with Tóth. Pázmány had counselled that for his own good the steward ought to vacate the lodge gifted to him by my father - how would the poor fellow accustom himself to his new life otherwise? - and Tóth had moved into his sister’s cottage near the village.

Tóth’s spinster sister was not to my tastes. The reason she had never managed to find a husband was indubitably her insistence on only ever cooking a gross approximation of gulyás which somehow, no matter the distance of space or time covered between pot and table, conspired always to be cold. The old crone took a shine to me, and clearly fancying herself a countess, spent her evenings making ghastly cooing noises and casting glances of quite chilling covetousness in my direction. Christ, the witch could barely speak. I took to slipping out at the earliest possible opportunity, leaving her gumming maniacally to herself.

It happened that, though I would gladly have escaped to anywhere Tóth’s sister wasn’t, I often ended up at the boundary of the castle grounds, gazing towards my home. Here, through the windows’ twilit glow, I could see the happy silhouettes of Pázmány, together with Chren and other associates, conscientiously researching our product until the early hours.

*

‘I wonder,’ I asked Tóth late one night as I settled into the small bed in which we topped and tailed, ‘do you think his grace the Count Pázmány really has met Charlie Chaplin?’

‘As on all matters, I trust your highness’s judgement,’ he deferred gently to my foot.

‘You’re quite right, Tóth. I’m sure he has.’

*

Making my crepuscular Odyssey one evening in the spring of that year, I was surprised to find the castle quiet. The lamps still burnt dimly, but other than that there appeared no sign of life.

Pázmány had requested I not return until the renovations were complete. ‘You will feel the castle’s currently divested state too upsetting, brother,’ he said, citing the profound distress caused to my young mind by the shock of seeing my grandmother, the Dowager Countess, sans wig and porcelain teeth; a painful and formative experience I had often happened to recollect in his sympathetic presence. Nevertheless, the silence spooked me. This marked absence of the strains of a gypsy fiddle and energetic wassail did not bode well. I decided to risk the Count’s displeasure by approaching the castle.

The great front doors were unlocked. In those days, family, tenants and neighbours were welcome to come and go as they pleased, so this would hardly have been unexpected, had Pázmány not, quite sensibly, insisted on increased security, given the dirty tricks to which he assured me our competitors were likely to stoop. Although all around me I noticed the evidence of recent occupation - empty bottle; smashed balalaika - the air remained undisturbed by even the laboured breathing of a sleeping drunk.

I found a note pinned to the rather gloomy portrait of my late paternal grandfather which hung at the summit of the central staircase. It was addressed to me -


Dear Count ---,

Apparently, you are only legally permitted to refer to sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region as ‘champagne’. This has bitched up the business plan.

I have decided in the circumstances it seems best to relocate. Bottom is dropping out of sparkling wine, anyway, due mainly to stock market, etc. Have some other projects in mind. Will send forwarding address for my effects once said address is confirmed.

Yours,

Pázmány

PS. Chren says the mortgage is now due in full! When sorrows come, etc.

PPS. Chren isn’t a Slovak at all, it turns out, but as Magyar as the nose on my face. Passes as a Slovak for business purposes. Search me. I suspect the thing with the eye is also put on.

 

I heard the great doors close behind me, and a man cough.

‘Thank goodness, Pázmány, you had me going for a second ther-.’

But it was only Tóth. ‘What the devil are you doing here, you old fool?’ I asked. I confess that my accustomed composure felt somewhat rocked.

‘I noticed his Grace, the Count Pázmány, leaving town in a coach some hours ago, sir.’

Tóth began to climb the stairs. Listless, I handed him the note. He read it in silence.

‘Perhaps I should pour your highness a pálinka, and help you to bed? Everything else can wait till the morning. I’m sure we’ll think of something.’

‘Yes, thank you Tóth. I am a little tired, now you come to mention it.’

*

I do not know what became of the Count Pázmány. I have always assumed he met his death during the next war, beneath the unfriendly clouds of some distant foreign sky. But with typical style, of course. It will have been a great loss.

Ré

 

Originally commissioned by Oliver Coates for Harmonic Series at Southbank Centre, London, March 2014 to accompany L'Île re-sonante, a piece of electronic music by Eliane Radigue

 

ile 1

The Île-de-Ré was once an archipelago, three little dots suspended off the coast, before silt and salt fields made of them a comma, a rushed full stop. It is joined to the mainland at La Rochelle, and that bridge is open now, this way, cross it. Thirty kilometres long and five across, the surface of Ré is dappled with sand and savoury grass as it curls out from Rivedoux-Plage, but at La Couarde-sur-Mer the isle constricts, then softly dilates into wan greys and flinted blues should you strike out across the salterns. The west of the isle, where it fades into the Atlantic, is in places barely land, all crosshatched matter and capillary channels where succulent halophile samphire clings to sea-lapped rocks.

Walking to the westernmost part, you will find the village of Saint-Clément-des-Baleines – Saint-Clement-of-the-Whales ­– so called for the great numbers that have washed up there on the shore. The website is deadpan: ‘1522, Madame de la Tremoille requests 7 or 800 pounds of whale from Thibaud Maroy, the receiver-general of the Isle of Rhe.’ ‘1582, December 31, Captain Bruneau de Rivedoux mentions the grounding of a mammal.’ ‘1584, Nicolas Herbin, notary of the lords of Ars and Loix speaks of a stranded whale.’ The village is overseen by a stern hexagonal lighthouse, but refuses its overbearance, remaining an unruly constellation of six hamlets that runs from La Côte Sauvage to the beach at La Conche, where salt marshes join the village to the forest. The marshes stretch out north there, and are scattered with fine-named birds that in flight shake space lazily from their wings: l’Aigrette garzette - Little Egret, le Tadorne de Belon - Common Shelduck, l’Échasse blanche - Black-winged Stilt, la Gorgebleu à miroir - Bluethroat, l'Avocette élégante - Pied Avocet. The water rushes and retreats, washes in and scurries back like the suck and spit of the heart. Systole, diastole, systole, diastole.

Two years ago in Scotland I met S. We were there for so little time, three days, four perhaps, and each one of them too full to speak for more than brief moments. On the last day we walked in the city together to little end save each other, and unsure even of that. We both left, but since then a low crackle of messages has passed between us, preserving what those days held. S is in France now, and here is a partial catalogue of our failed meetings:

London, Summer, 2012
Cambridge, Spring, 2013
Berlin, Autumn, 2013

Each time one of us would pull back, through circumstance or lack of nerve. Instead we’d send parcels - books, gloves, a jar of honey so badly wrapped it coated the postbox and cut a finger. Hoping to do better, I found a squat cork tub of fleur de sel, the damp salt that blooms on the surface of salterns, and Ré was there on its painted front. A man with bare arms and trousers rolled to mid-shin raked an easy pyramid of salt. Far out of season, in winter’s late and mournful days, I asked to spend four days on the isle. S said, ‘I am speechless’.

ile2The Île-de-Ré has produced its ‘white gold’ since the 12th century, when monks began their small-scale operations as the isle was passed between French and English hands, a pawn of royal marriages. In the early 19th century, the apogee of salt production on Ré, almost a fifth of the surface was given over to salterns. Some 30,000 tonnes were produced a year then, on land claimed back from the sea, but with the 1850s came a long period of decline, with pans abandoned and lost again to the waters. These last ten years have seen young sauniers come back to the isle, alert to the premium that can be put on a produit de terroir. The salt they make is shaped by the place, the very geography expressed in each flake and crystal.

Salt evaporation, though based on simple principles, demands considerable technical mastery. Seawater is directed through a long hydraulic circuit, beginning in a large pond, then passing through a series of channels and smaller ponds while the sun’s heat and prevailing winds make the water thick with salt. If the flow is well managed, the evaporation of the water is leisurely, and salts precipitate slowly out from the saturated brine. At the end of this lengthy excursion, the water reaches a final pan where its salts seize into crystals and are duly harvested. The burden of carrying the salt sacks once fell to the island’s donkeys, though to protect them from mosquitoes breeding in the imperceptible flow of the briny pools, they were trousered in pants or leggings of striped and plaid strips.

ile3Our messages became more frequent, then less. The question hung over them, neither answered nor asked again. The conversation had changed tack that day, veering to when one must visit – if your visit to Ré is well timed, all you hear in the moment’s silence between two waves is wind and birdsong – and the insularity of the locals. A few years back, whisper campaigns and vendetta actions forced a family that had immigrated from New Zealand to leave La-Flotte-en-Ré. Rumours circulated that Blair McEwen and his wife Katia Vidouta were torturing cats or selling them to Swiss laboratories. ‘People took matters into their own hands,’ he said, ‘It was like something out of the Middle Ages.’ Katia added: ‘You can't operate in such a situation, in such a village, with the craziness of all the people.’

Saint-Martin-de-Ré is the capital of sorts, and one of the prettiest fortified towns in Europe. The town is popular now with British tourists - ‘It's very clean and very French’, say a group of mothers from Devon. Bernard Dorin, president of the Friends of the Île-de-Ré Association, has reached the end of his patience: ‘We have to take charge of our destiny. Without turning the island into a museum, there comes a point when you have to say stop.’ Some tourists come for the discarded husks of German bunkers, built in the 1940s, and still visible along the shore, their metal fittings rusted by the salt wind to ferrous browns and shocks of orange. They draw bellophiles and ruin hunters, bandoliered with cameras. On the WW2talk forum was tommygunn: ‘I knew there were some good bunkers at this site but I was truly amazed by what I found and I was quickly reduced to a giddy schoolboy.’

ile 4Two months had passed when S surprised me. I’d given up on the trip, thinking my offer had been misjudged and talking myself out of the whole endeavour. It was late evening when the message came, my phone winking green at the corner.

-So what about the trip?
-To Ré?
-Yes                  
-It turns out I can’t go.
-Shame

I sat indecisive, sick at my own limitations. The time to prove this fragile thing before me, I wanted with suddenness to be with S on Ré. I wanted the cold salt air to tighten my face, to walk the star-shaped citadel at Saint-Martin and have the locals look on knowing and amused. I wanted to pass in and out of sleep, to wake in a half-world of grained light and watch the morning blue the walls. I would lie there still, and all the isle around me would heave and sigh.

 

In the Family Way

The ride arrived on time. But its proud gait, gleaming mane and the big red bow tied to its reins at a jaunty angle could hardly disguise the fact that it was a couple of hands short of being a horse. My brother was preparing to ride through a rural Chinese town, headed by flag-bearing heralds, trailed by well wishers, flanked by marching bands and dressed in Macdonald of Sleat tartan, to collect the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. On a pony. Lined up outside the hotel, we smiled politely. My mother told him to hitch up his legs so his feet wouldn’t drag.

Since Thomas had telephoned each of my parents in turn with his usual absent-minded idealism – ‘It just feels right. It’s fate.’ – surprise had faded to resignation. Aware that their son was bullishly stubborn and too distant to sway, the strategy they devised was unilateral support bolstered by a hope that it would all just go away.

I could tell there was, for my father, an uncomfortable sense of history repeating. News of an unplanned pregnancy in 80s New York had sent his own mother into a flurry of disapproval. In Paris, his future mother-in-law had received a letter from Inverness outlining why exactly such an alliance was unholy. Not understanding a word, my grandmother blithely continued her rounds of the cocktail parties of the 16th arrondissement. For the following three decades, my Scottish grandmother feigned incomprehension when faced with my mother’s fur of a French accent. Although repetition blunted this into a family joke, trips north became rare.

A few months before Thomas’s news, my father had in part blamed the disintegration of his 30-year marriage on this intolerance. His son’s impending union with an ‘unknown cultural quantity’ thus provoked a conciliatory attempt to learn from past experience: ‘She’s got pregnant and trapped the poor fool…but we must do everything not to alienate them.’

It became clear in the Skype conferences that followed that Thomas had developed his own mythology of family history. In marrying my mother, my father had done the right thing; by accepting his own twist of fate, he had secured all of ours. My mother opted for faux jollity. For her, China was the antithesis of France: her only concessions to the superiority of the Orient being gunpowder and Ming pottery. She put her son’s Sinophilia down to a relatively harmless example of his oddity.

A month later Thomas’s fiancée Ju booked our flights. The wedding was actually a celebration of a done deal. In China a proposal is swiftly followed by an HIV test for the foreigner, parental consent for the Chinese spouse and a trip to the registry office. They were already married. The 10th of April had been chosen as an auspicious day and soon enough to avoid, as Ju put it, ‘any embarrassment’. Only her parents had been told about the baby. A single mother may be acceptable in Shanghai but not in Qian Jiang. Her hometown is deep in ‘the belly of China’, as she put it proudly.

The wedding had been organised as a package – fireworks, brass bands, planner and catering for 150 guests – and Ju had whittled down the price to 20,000 Yuan (around £2000). Some people, Ju told me, can spend up to 10,000 on photographs. The real financial drain is the dowry. Having a son is a stressful investment: the groom’s family is expected to set up the couple comfortably. On visiting my nephew Euan for the first time a year later, I was told his nanny Xia had been forced to leave her hometown for work in Shanghai to pay for her own son’s future wedding and flat.

After a two-hour flight from Shanghai, we met the rest of the wedding party and were all bundled into vans for the three-hour drive to the happy couple. Marcus, the best man, was an old friend of my brother. After public school and university, he had veered away from the well-trodden path to the City; instead, he had taken too many drugs and embarked on the equally conventional route towards addled recovery. Another friend, Sirus, whose bulging eyes resembled spawn pickled in rice wine, was currently busy opening a café in a village so remote that it made our eventual destination look glamorous. Beside him lurked Richard, a grizzly Yorkshire Buddha who planned to export cheddar to China with my brother as the middleman. If that didn’t take off, he was looking at introducing fudge. He spent the trip handing out tasters, mostly to my mother, to whom he’d taken a fancy.

On our arrival, we were greeted by a beaming Mr and Mrs Wu. But they couldn’t disguise the reflection of our unease in their rictus grins. Mr Wu was a small, squat man with a very firm handshake. He patted us all on the back and nodded with a cheerful ‘Ni-hao! Ni-hao!’ His black hair clasped his head like a rectangular helmet. A colourless mole nestled below his left nostril. Faced with this mismatched assortment of expats and foreigners, Mrs Wu was more distant. She looked like Ju but smaller and more square. ‘Typical Han,’ my mother sniffed and, as if to prove even her racism discerning, added ‘If only she were a Mongol. They are so elegant, tall and gentle.’

Promptly ushered to the local restaurant for the wedding-eve banquet, we were engulfed and back-slapped by the five uncles, identified in order of birth. The only aunt sat quietly. Throughout the trip she became my mother’s neighbour of choice: their befuddled smiles matched. The room heaved with shouts and smells as glasses were tipped back and chopsticks darted forward.

My father, though he doesn’t drink, had thrown himself into the festivities, clinking glasses with the various uncles, interlocking elbows and glugging the clear wine with lips pursed shut. For a man who likes to be centre of attention with minimum effort, this family-in-law was a godsend. He could smile, pat backs and revel in being different without the added bother of pleasantries.

After dinner, Ju, her parents and the battalion of uncles unexpectedly followed us into the hotel. My father had booked a twin bedroom with cot to share with his ex-wife and 26-year-old daughter: a prime example of Scottish practicality. Ju told us to sit down as she ran through the next day’s line-up. We sat on one of the room’s sofas, while Ju sat between her parents on the other, the uncles lurking behind. ‘Have you got the envelopes?’ she demanded brusquely. We looked at each other. We had been asked to bring five pound notes to dispense to well wishers in red envelopes as a sign of British generosity. It seemed like an awful lot of money to give to people who would never spend it. ‘It would be better if you gave it to charity,’ I shit-stirred.  Ju explained shrilly the importance of giving in Chinese culture. ‘What about Scottish tradition?’ my mother quipped from the sofa, eager to claim a racial propensity for avarice despite only benefiting from it through marriage. Mrs Wu stood up and started talking to Uncle Three in a tone that didn’t need translation. Mr Wu thumped his fist on the glass. My brother responded in Mandarin.

For the first time, we thought he might be defending us. Otherwise Thomas was entirely absorbed in the wedding and customs. His usual wry perspective had vanished. Even his English sounded skewed. He said later that he was part of their family now and they were more important to placate.

Mrs Wu carried on shouting. My mother then cut the tension by placing Ju’s specially requested (Chinese models being too small) maternity bra on the table, the deflated cups like two drooping peace flags. Calm was somewhat restored. The money was put in the red envelopes. The day was set for tomorrow.

In a traditional Chinese wedding, the husband and his family and friends progress through the centre of the town to pick up the bride from her parents’ home. They make a racket to scare away ghosts. Accompanied by his band of revellers, the groom charges through his in-laws’ door, handing out envelopes to gain admittance. Traditionally, he reads out a list of his possessions and wealth. Then he takes his bride back to his parents’ home. Until the bride reaches the threshold and they step over a plate of fire, she is entirely cloaked. Stories circulate of the groom lifting up his betrothed’s veil to find the ugly sister in her place.

Thomas and his cohort bounded up the concrete stairs towards the Wus’ flat. The Western guests were formal but the Chinese guests hadn’t changed; only Ju’s mother was wearing a powder pink power jacket. They crowded into the Wus’ sparsely furnished home. Electrical wires dangled from walls; like most of the buildings in the town, the block appeared unfinished. Ju had in fact rented a smart new flat for her parents but they were reluctant to move.  

Looking up demurely, she cowered on the bed in her traditional red and embroidered blue robes. Her headdress looked like a bejewelled sea urchin. Her skin was pale with powder. She tottered on her heels downstairs, my brother holding her hand, and ushered into a sedan cage carried by four men. Onlookers rattled the bars to congratulate. More envelopes were handed out. The procession inched back to the hotel.

In the hall, tables of ten fanned out from the stage and the central catwalk, which was crowned by a bower of white flowers. The walls were plastered with photographs of the couple, each more than six feet high, so that extended family and friends could recognize Ju and the man she had married. They had posed in a kilt and white wedding dress in front of a country house, in thick-rimmed glasses and neon stripes in a golden field of corn and finally in sailor outfits, posturing on deck chairs in front of a serene computer-generated ocean vista. ‘I didn’t know your brother had joined the Chinese navy,’ my father repeated every time we passed the strip in the hallway.

A ticker tape above the stage congratulated them in English and Chinese. Ju reappeared in a white dress, a white fur stole shielding her belly, and walked down the aisle to the stage while ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ boomed out. My brother then bounded down to ‘Paradise City’.

My mother eventually slunk off. The presence of Richard, the absence of Scotch and the sight of steaming plates of unidentifiable floating grizzle and bone – turtle soup – had dampened any spirits she might have retained. Attempts had been made to dress my parents in traditional costume. My father was almost cajoled into painting his face red and attaching a balloon to his head. It was meant to symbolise his delight at welcoming a nubile young woman into the family. My mother was urged to string a vinegar bottle around her neck: a sign of jealousy. They both managed to duck out of the clowning. The next day, Ju told us she had had a surprise. Thomas had given his kilt to Mr Wu to take to the drycleaner. Ju had entered her parents’ room to find her father wearing it, dancing in front of the mirror.

Euan was born five and a half months later, his name a nod both to his Scottish heritage and Chinese vowels. On seeing him, my mother likened his chubby baldness to the Dalai Lama. Ju was outraged by the comparison of her little prince to a Chinese dissident. He is now getting ready for school in September. Ju had to pay a bribe of 3000 Yuan, in three separate envelopes, to get him into one of the best primary schools in Shanghai. His father will not be able to set foot in the school grounds. Non-Chinese nationals aren’t allowed; the school is only for offspring of officials of the People’s Liberation Army. Thomas is his father’s son; he mostly seems relieved he won’t be forced to attend parents’ evenings.

RWMR Has It

 

‘Who wants me dead?’

Cheevers was cowering with Gilman beneath a large desk in the centre of the office. In one clammy hand he clutched a bottle of lukewarm Riesling whilst Gilman swiped and padded a screen, shaking.

‘All of them. Or some of them. Enough of them to raise a bounty,’ Gilman said. Fear condensed on his upper lip as he jab-stammered an explanation. In the urban gloaming the desk well was aglow with the light of the leaderboard.

Cheevers listened, but with difficulty.

‘A bounty? How big?’

‘Seven hundred and ninety eight thousand dollars according to this, sir.’

‘Not bad. Could do better.’

Cheevers goffed more hock as his ego fluttered but failed to fly in the deadened air of the empty floor. He thought about smirking.

‘It’s really not funny, sir.’

‘Actually it is.  And stop calling me “sir”. We’re a fucking internet startup not the army.’ The pounding in his ears caused his vision to throb.

There’s a particular blood pulse you get to the brain when you’re about to sell your startup app to the Central Surveillance Group for $87 billion. What started as an idea in a bar had since plumed into the world’s most sought-after virtual commodity.

RWMR was supposed to be anonymous: that was the hook. Share your secrets in a cuddly font and nobody will ever know it’s you. Spread unsubstantiated rumours: free. It was citizen journalism to piss out the churnalism flame for good and it was fierce.  Think tanks ran dry as cyberstrategists boggled at the force with which the disemvowelled phenomenon took hold. Priests were investigated, banks busted, businesses burned, policemen arrested, construction halted, friendships twisted, families shattered. Through sheer volume of input the app had taken on the guise of a gospel and its weight had warped the world.

‘We’re chronicling the apocalypse!’ Cheevers had squealed as they screamed past 2 billion users in three years. It didn’t make for light reading. Everything from corporate fraud to cookie theft; mendacity and murder; users poured themselves into RWMR like it was an ark setting sail with their souls. They had recently become aware of their dependence on the app as an outlet for self-expression; aware of how much of themselves they had uploaded to Cheevers’ database. The shame was kicking in, but all too late. Other parties had become aware of the value of this torrent: $87 billion aware. Tomorrow they would seal and sign over the archive.

The rest of the team had gone home, leaving these two as nightwatchmen before the day of the deal. Gilman had received several quickfire messages just as Cheevers had opened a bottle in token celebration and they had been forced under the desk.  

THE ONE NEWS STORY YOU REALLY NEED TO READ

RWMR FOUNDER NO 1 IN ONLINE ASSASSINATION MARKET

‘What happens next will blow your mind,’ said Cheevers with hollow irony as Gilman pulled him under.

Almost immediately the red laser show had begun: marksmen dancing their sights through the mirrored enclosure of the office. How many now? Five?

Cheevers twisted in the nook and tried to recline. He had snatched countless units of confined sleep in the pod hotel across the street when he was developing, deftly tapping into their system, dropping two Xomox and crawling into their quiet, cushioned cupboards. He would not sleep here, though it seemed the surest way to make this all disappear.

‘Get comfortable,’ Cheevers said, mainly to himself. ‘Do you have any Xomox?’

Gilman’s pupils filled his sunken sockets as they followed his feed. Indignant storms had blown across the network before but they had been deflected by so much psych-profiling dressed up as a quiz or the subtle distractions of the ‘most outrageous link you need to click today’. This, however, was no storm: this was a whole weather system. The death threat had long usurped the ambiguous and antiquated ‘poke’, but this was all-out war. Gilman clocked the ticker as their demise flourished in real time, in real life.

‘This isn’t happening,’ said Gilman under the shortness of his breath.

‘That’s what I think,’ said Cheevers.

‘Except that it is,’ said Gilman.

The warnings had wailed for a while. Cheevers had been frequently profiled as the man who had hijacked our innermost feelings and exploited the depths of our consciousness for frivolous commercial ends. Plumbing the unconscious, free-form fabric of our online identities, he had lured billions of users into a tar pit and now we were beginning to sink.

The fact is that RWMR was regarded as both true and untrue in almost perfect measure, and its symmetrical logo had come to be seen as the safest repository for almost every confession, accusation, outburst, allegation and utterance. RWMR’s halls were vast and sacred. Now Cheevers was about to tear down the veil and soil the walls . Handing over the keys to the closet at all was enough to damn him, but to the CSG?

Cheevers held no qualms. ‘Privacy is the goldrush of our age,’ he had said in a rare interview with The Times. ‘You can hawk anonymity endlessly and people will always buy it and spill their guts for free.’

It turned out, however, that if you deprived people of something they weren’t even aware was a commodity they got quite angry. In the run-up to the date of the CSG deal, an anonymous online consortium had formed on the darknet to place a bounty on the head of Morgan Cheevers, and now there were at least five assassins, probably more, with their scopes trained on his offices. The threat, according to Gilman, was real.

‘How can it be real? It’s a bounty made up of fake money in a dark corner of the web that practically doesn’t exist.’

‘You know that it exists, sir.’

‘Where? Huh? Where does it exist?’

Gilman’s lenses doubled the look of contempt he gave Cheevers. Crowdfunded killing was the latest tool of retribution. The league with a bounty on Cheevers was one of the oldest and most respected, started by an engineer calling himself ‘Yojimbo’. Anonymous and encrypted, all transactions used online currency. Subscribers could nominate any public figure for assassination and with sufficient proof of execution could claim the reward, such as it was at time of death.

‘C-bits are as real as any of the made-up currencies your governments make you use. You’re up to one thousand eight hundred and sixty five bits, sir. That’s eight hundred and sixty four thousand dollars now. I guarantee you, sir, if you stand up now they will shoot to kill.’

The bounty rose with the tide of anger. As the six figure spike crept towards seven mass interest was piqued. No matter how little a million was now worth it still held talismanic properties that could awaken the basest urges and engage the most passive. More users and more rage meant more money in the pot, the scent of which only tickled more noses.

Cheevers had not yet issued a statement, but his every move signalled brazen equanimity, as if he’d posted ‘What did you expect me to do?’ It was too much for most to bear and many had been driven deeper, darker into the fibres of the network, where amid the sanctuary and security of the deep web they found synchronicity and a common desire to shorten the life expectancy of a figure who had done them injury – real or virtually real.

‘They can’t kill me in my own fucking building!’

‘Of course they can. And technically, sir, this isn’t your building. At least not yet. It’s Ferson Core’s.’

‘The only reason this is not “Cheevers Tower”, or whatever, is because Ferson Core was a man willing to pay a lot more money to have his name on it. Why? Because that’s how some men behave.’

Cheevers’ own father had tried and lost at this trade more than once. The old man’s embittered wisdom distilled was a sour brew of truth and honesty filtered through bleak myopia.

‘Either your name got it or it ain’t,’ he would say. ‘Nothin’ else to it. People want to live in Core 1 – they don’t care for Cheevers. It sounds like a snack family: now they rank lower than the premium real estaters. Simple as. Those Snack’oons’ll stroll into town ev’ry once in a while and play a few rounds but eventually we all get spat back to the fields: little kings in big country. The city ain’t no place for kings. Right here the city is king.’

He looked out through the one sliver of available skyline now at the circuitry of the city; its integrated components stacked and wired, regal towers of resistors and transformers, a thousand diodes of light indifferent to his plight. Trapped in this deadly tangle of ruby threads his capacitor was melting as his thoughts oscillated between his origin and his end. Cheevers had lamented his own name and its lack of prospects since he could lament, and had spent most of the last decade morosely embalming his entrepreneurial streak in alcohol. His prospects now were less than good.

‘What do they want me to do? Share the money? What do they want?’ The dugout boomed with the tone of his raised voice. The laser lockdown twitched. Were they listening in?

‘I’m pretty sure it’s not about the money, sir.’ Gilman’s quivering frame was trying to retain a hold on his ordained shape and on the situation at hand. Both defied control. His confined limbs now cramped against Cheevers, who regarded him with nostalgic disdain.

When he had struck bit-gold with RWMR Cheevers was almost too numb to feel it. It wasn’t until he recruited Gilman, a master coder, that he came to appreciate what he had made. He looked at Gilman now; this pallid, loyal pup of a man. It was Gilman who had lifted his head from the glass long enough to make him see; Gilman who had dragged the vision forward, focused it and sharpened it. Cheevers rejoiced the day he had hired him, and knew that a certain portion of his brain would never need to work as hard again.

When Gilman had first run the analytics in detail his glasses had slid from his nose in greasy shock:

‘You realise, sir, that every secret police in history would have killed for access to this kind of info. I mean, most of them did. You’ve got enough digital dirt here to bury the Pope.’ It was true. He had almost unwittingly compiled a universal dossier of desires, delusions and damnation. ‘You’ve teased out Thought Code. This is extraordinary.’

‘Precisely,’ said Cheevers. ‘I’m glad you’re as smart as I need you to be. I just accessed a particular mode of thought: like hacking a mainframe. I popped up a virtual confessional and waited for the faithful. But that wasn’t enough: there were, naturally, plenty of imitations. But nobody trusts a gossip. Nor does everybody bare all for the priest. The question remains: whose information do you trust? Whose rumour do you believe? Turns out it’s RWMR.’

‘But how?’ Gilman had said, ‘Was it luck?’

‘Don’t be a fool just when I’m beginning to like you. I wrote the program and let it run. People began uploading their brains, piece by piece, willingly giving me their minds. At a certain point, the cumulative input data became sufficient to codify. With enough data you can codify pretty much anything and if you can codify it, you can crack it. Call it “reverse-engineering”. “Codify ergo sum,” my friend. If you can hack thought and still know what to do then you’ll be a man, my son. And you’ll make lots of money. And some people won’t like that.’

Some people didn’t like what he had done with the information they had given him and now he was going to pay an all-too affordable price. His empty reminiscence tilted the bottle away from him and sloshed a libation to an offline god. Gilman’s shivering had given way to a calm and rigid silence. He needed to piss and the soggy odour of carpet wine did not help.

‘I’m logging out,’ said Cheevers.

Another red bead crawled over the empty swivel chair of the next desk along. Cheevers felt the pulse.

‘I knew glass walls were a bad idea.’

 

 

Time and the City

8.15am on a Monday morning in 1908. Ruth Belville leaves her modest house on St Luke’s Road in Maidenhead and walks to the station. She gets there 20 minutes later and boards a train for Paddington. An hour later she arrives in London, leaves Paddington and walks to Edgware Road underground station to catch the tube to Charing Cross, where she changes onto a suburban train for Greenwich.

At Greenwich she exits the station and climbs Observatory Hill, arriving at the gates of the Observatory just before 10.00am. She knocks and a porter lets her in. Once inside she gets out her watch – a handsome John Arnold pocket chronometer, no. 485/786 – and passes it to an assistant. The watch, nicknamed Arnold, was originally made for the Duke of Sussex and had a gold case, but Ruth’s father John had it plated in silver to make it less attractive to thieves.

While she waits, Ruth drinks a cup of tea, warming herself in front of the fire in the porter’s lodge. A few minutes later the assistant returns her watch, along with a certificate confirming that it is keeping perfect Greenwich Mean Time. Arnold is accurate to the nearest tenth of a second.

Belville walks back down the hill and heads north, descending into the Greenwich foot tunnel, opened six years previously to allow workers living on the south bank of the river to reach the docks to the north. She walks under the river to the Isle of Dogs, where she takes the Millwall Extension Railway from North Greenwich to Millwall Docks, alighting at Shadwell to visit her first customers: clockmakers and horologists working for the shipping industry.

After completing her business, Belville returns to the station, catching a westbound train and getting off at Fenchurch Street, from where she heads north up the Minories. On the edges of the City she stops off at the offices of various nautical instrument-makers – precision engineers producing the tools which allowed sailors to find longitude while out at sea – before catching the overground train to Farringdon Station.

Next Belville heads into the City, before crossing the river to Borough to see a customer there. She travels through central London and on to the West End, to Bond Street, then back onto the Strand were she visits watch sellers and the newly opened store of Mappin & Webb the silversmiths. Finally she heads further west, visiting the private houses of millionaires in Kensington and Chelsea, before returning to Paddington Station and getting a train back to Maidenhead, her exhausting work, trudging the streets of London, selling the time, over for another week. ‘On an average day I make about 30 calls each Monday after visiting Greenwich’, she told a journalist at the time, ‘and it is a hard day’s work.’

*

Immanuel Kant walked with such regularity round Königsberg that people would set their watches by him.

*

Ruth Belville, ‘the Greenwich Time Lady’, was a time courier, delivering the time – accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second – to clockmakers and horologists around London. She plied her curious trade from 1892 until 1940. Her father John Belville had worked at the Greenwich Observatory, and had started a subscription service selling Greenwich Mean Time to London clockmakers.

Before the invention of the electric clock, regulated by its oscillating quartz, it was difficult, and expensive, to be sure precisely what time it was. Public clocks kept notoriously bad time, and clockmakers, who needed a reliable master-clock against which to check their work, were forced either to strike a transit themselves, using a telescope to monitor the passage of heavenly bodies (increasingly difficult in London, with its pea-soupers and light pollution), or to buy the time from a reputable source.

By the time Ruth took over what David Rooney calls the family’s ‘time cartel’, Greenwich had become the centre not just of London, but of world time. Urban space was organised temporally: the city became a clock, and the mechanism of time’s dissemination was straightforwardly hierarchical:

A primary standard sits at the top – the stars passing over the Royal Observatory every night. A clock is set by the stars. Another clock, set by that clock, sends out time signals to intermediate time stations – post offices, for instance. Postmasters use the incoming time signals to set their office clocks; people visit to check their watches against the post-office clocks, and so on down the line.

Time flowed down from Observatory Hill and through the streets, carried by wires or pocket watches to regulate the great mechanism of the city itself. If you couldn’t afford a subscription to the electronic regulatory systems, or didn’t trust the wires, then Belville was your only source of truly accurate time.

By 1880 Greenwich Mean Time had become the legal time for the whole of Britain, but it was only publicly visible in a few places: at the Greenwich Observatory itself, via the red ball that signalled to ships waiting for the tides on the river; on the telegraph company’s time ball outside Charing Cross railway station; and in the window of the London clockmaker Gledhill-Brook. Greenwich’s symbolism as a center of time-keeping, and thus of order, may have attracted the French anarchist Martial Bourdin, who accidentally killed himself with a bomb just outside the main gates of the observatory on Thursday 15 February 1894, in an act that was later immortalised in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, in which the anarchist Verloc mounts a failed attempt to destroy the observatory with a bomb carried by his wife’s mentally-impaired brother. 

*

Modern London, by which I mean Victorian London, was erected by and around time. The great commuter suburbs of the city were created by the public transport network, which ran its arteries into previously outlying land, oxygenating the grey tissue of metroland and reducing the time it took to get to the centre of town. Migration streams followed the paths of least resistance. ‘The new kind of travel was to be central to the growth of the modern city,’ writes John Lanchester in his brief history of the District Line, ‘with London as the first and biggest example of its importance: the map of London, the modern city, was created by commuting.’

And the price commuters had to pay for this newfound space? Time. Travelling took time, and people had to think of new ways to fill this dead time as they were rushed along the tracks. New forms of entertainment were developed: on the railways and underground time was killed by reading papers or novels, newly available from railway kiosks. Time gave birth to new literary forms, new modes of entertainment.

Commuters live their lives by the clock, and measure their rewards against it. In Wanderlust, her history of walking, Rebecca Solnit writes about the ‘time in between’ our daily routines: time spent moving from place to place, running errands, time spent travelling, on foot or otherwise, time spent commuting and travelling around. ‘That time has been deplored as a waste,’ writes Solnit:

reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations. The very ability to appreciate this uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating, as does appreciation of being outside – including outside the familiar; mobile-phone conversations seem to serve as a buffer against solitude, silence and encounters with the unknown.

This is an old story. Gradually, in the city, time itself became a commodity as its psychological dimensions were eroded. In E.P. Thompson’s classic study of the tyranny of clock time, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, he describes the history of labour in terms of the increasing tyranny of the clock. ‘In Madagascar time might be measured by “a rice-cooking” (about half an hour)’, Thompson records, ‘or “the frying of a locust” (a moment)’, but in Britain during the industrial revolution, the clock began to have the last word. Previously, the working day had been task-orientated, and people worked to the rhythm of their jobs: fishermen attended to the tides, farmers to the seasons. As factory work became the most prevalent form of employment, however, so time was colonised by the ticking hands of the clock. People punched in and out, accounting for the locations of their bodies in space and time. Labour was measured not in terms of tasks completed but in terms of hours spent at it. And with the invention of billable hours came the rise of the idea of leisure. Time spent not working had to be pleasurable, or it was deemed to have been wasted .

Time, once a form of public knowledge, was gradually privatised. In 1698 the pendulum had been introduced to clock-making, providing household clocks with much greater accuracy. But even then most grandfather clocks only had an hour hand (in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy describes a primitive idyll when ‘one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day’). By the turn of the next century the second hand measured out the lives of workers.

The first adjustable alarm clock was patented by Antoine Redier, a Parisian horologist, in 1847, and by the 1870s, after the imposition of the 12-hour working day in England, alarm clocks became popular and, more importantly, cheap. After the advent of the alarm clock, and the changing labour relations it engendered, time was ‘spent’ rather than ‘passed’. At the beginning of the 20th century the philosopher Henri Bergson lamented the loss of the durée, the subjective truth of ‘lived time’ which had been replaced with the mechanical ticking of the clock. People had become enslaved by their clocks, and the mass-mobilisation of the commute, the machine of the city, with its traffic-light escapements; its hooting factory horns and daily commuter rhythms, that dominated lived experience.

In The Mechanic Muse Hugh Kenner argued that the urban crowd, and the poetry which gave voice to it, was itself a product of this new time-consciousness. The poetry of T. S. Eliot, whom Kenner calls ‘the chief poet of the alarm clock’, was made possible only with the invention of new ways of engaging with time. According to Kenner, modernism was a temporal phenomenon not just in terms of its privileging of lived as opposed to clock time, but by virtue of its very mechanisms. Kenner points out that much of Eliot’s poetry, poetry of or against the mass, was dependent on the fact that, sometime during the early 19th century, it became possible to mobilise vast forces of civilians all at the same time for the first time in history: the alarm clock ensured that crowds of people who flowed across London’s bridges each morning and evening could do so with mechanical precision. The city became a self-regulating machine. It still is. ‘Eliot, as so often,’ writes Kenner, ‘was bringing news. He had discerned, beyond the clocks, what the clocks enabled, the new world of the commuter, in which a principal event of the day was waking up in the morning under the obligation to get yourself somewhere else, and arrive there on time.’

And Belville was the herald, the outrider, of that time consciousness. By the turn of the century, she was faced with increasingly strong competition. But she was a persistent thorn in the side of the more advanced telegraphic time-regulating systems that were being developed to replace her. In 1908 Sir John Wynne, a director of the Standard Time Company, which sought to disseminate time telegraphically, gave a speech to the Royal Geographical Society, calling Belville’s method’s of time-couriering ‘amusingly out of date’ and suggesting, scandalously, that ‘she used her feminine wiles to secure the rights to check her watch and Greenwich.’ ‘Surely there should be some censorship as to the time kept by clocks exposed to public view in the streets of London’, argued Wynne, ‘highly desirable as individualism is in many respects, it is out of place in horology. A lying timekeeper is an abomination, and should not be tolerated.’ Yet despite his best efforts, Belville’s service remained popular, and she would continue to deliver the time to London’s clockmakers until 1940. She died three years later. There was no one to take over her business.

Why We Should All Go to North Korea

‘The sun always shines in Korea,’ one of our two compulsory guides declares. We have nicknamed her the Laughing Policeman. Not only does she never smile, but – being a state-sponsored guide – her job is to keep an eye not just on us but on anyone with whom we come into contact, which includes the other guide.
        
Her comment tells you all you need to know about the delusion underpinning daily life in North Korea. Firstly, the sun is most definitely not shining. Instead, the drab concrete buildings of Pyongyang glower under a grey sky. It was the colour of the sky that prompted our initial question about whether North Korea enjoys different climatic seasons. We are genuinely interested. Yet our curiosity is fobbed off with a blatant fabrication. Secondly, we are in the only part of the world which continues to insist that Korea is still unified.
        
We are holidaying (and I do ask myself whether I need to place that word in ironic quotation marks) in a place known internationally as The Hermit Kingdom. But with its doublethink, denial and propaganda, my husband and I have dubbed it The Truman Show. Everything feels stage-managed. In the capital, Pyongyang, shop assistants switch on their store lights as you enter, to reveal sparsely filled glass counters of stamps or posters, only to then switch them off again to save precious electricity before we’ve even left the building. Locals in blue Mao-like suits walk the pavements as if choreographed. And clumps of tourists travel on the underground – in theory to see real North Koreans going about their daily routine – but only ever between Puhung and Yongwang stations. There is also no advertising on the walls or in the streets. All is for air-brushed show.

We follow cars and minibuses carrying couples or parties from other countries visiting monuments, more monuments and the stamp shop. No local ever meets your eye. Instead you only bump into other tourists as you are all chaperoned around the carefully controlled itinerary. In the countryside, the fields alongside the highway taking you directly to the Demilitarized Zone, (the strip of land running across the 38th parallel which acts as a buffer between North and South Korea) are immaculate and abundant with crops. Back in Pyongyang we’re forbidden from taking photos of thin-looking farmers perched on top of a battered truck full of logs. And at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang, our second guide looks astonished when I confess to being uninterested in war.

The stilted choreography of life in North Korea hits home most at the Mass Games, a breathtaking cross between the UK’s Royal Tournament and the opening of the Sochi Olympics. Thousands of school children are creepily pose-perfect in synchronised displays of dance, gymnastics and tableaux depicting events from the country’s history. We see no fat children. We see no disobedient children. Disciplined is not the word. We decide on the term ‘brain-washed’.

It isn’t just children who take part in the Mass Games, but it seems like it, because everyone in the country is so infantlised. The hero-worship of Kim Il-Sung, the leader who died in 1994 and grandfather of Kim Jong-Un, the current leader, speaks of a nation cowed in the belief that without strong leadership they will die. Most tourists have gained entry to North Korea on tours arranged by companies in China, and a pre-tour briefing in Beijing not only stresses the need for tourists to respect their Korean hosts (which translates as a hope that no one will try to convert the locals) but also requests that no journalists ever write up their trips. The paranoia in the country is deeply ingrained.

Two moments stand out in our four long days in North Korea. Firstly, our visit to Kim Il-Sung’s enormous mausoleum prompts the one crack in the Laughing Policeman’s stoic demeanour. To pay our respects, as advised in advance, my husband and I have shed our touristy garb and are wearing something more chic and contemporary, chinos and a Liberty tie for him, Louboutins and a Molly dress for me.

The Laughing Policeman always carries a fake Chanel handbag, inviting the question, how does she know this is remotely covetable, if no-one is allowed to know anything about the outside world? At the sight of our outfits she suddenly comes alive. What are your outfits called? She grills me. What are they made of? Where did you buy them? What sort of events would you wear them to, at home? Do you wear them to work? How much do they cost?’ Her change of tone, and her immense curiosity in us as people from another place, is abrupt and admittedly short-lived. But it is so genuine and so ordinary – how many times have women from different cultures bonded over clothing? – that one cannot help but feel that deep down, despite the brain-washing and the regimented life, ordinary North Koreans long to interact as much as we do.

The second memorable event takes place on our final day, a Sunday. We are taken for a walk in Pyongyang’s park. It is meant to be a quick stroll, but at one point we meet a group of elderly locals. We watch enchanted as a sort of teadance takes place, under a pavilion, the men in short brown jackets, the women in pleasant skirts. One chap, cockier (braver?) than the rest can see us laughing and smiling and asks me to dance. You can feel the Laughing Policeman tense up. But hey, I love dancing. Who’s going to stop me?

And so I step forward and start to try to dance along to music I have never heard, with steps I have never learned. But the chap, as well as being quite cocky, is also a very good dancer, very clean in his lines. I find him very easy to follow and before long, I can anticipate the tune, the steps and the feel of the dance. He and I are dancing beautifully together. Everyone on the dance-floor is half-watching, on-lookers are clapping. We dance three dances. Our second guide is loving it, and even the Laughing Policeman is beginning to thaw. I finally bow a good-bye and we continue our stroll.  

But word has got around the park. Other groups of local dancers want to find out about this tourist who joined in. And we want to meet them, these locals who are so obviously longing to make proper, spontaneous connections with strangers.

This is why we must travel to North Korea. Yes, the money we spent probably ended up in the state coffers. Yes, we were on the receiving end of the most dreadful propaganda (did you know North Korea actually won the Korean war…?) and in some sense simply had to suck it up for the sake of our guides who would be treated harshly were our behavior to shame them. But on that Sunday afternoon, I made a genuine connection with a group of strangers, communicating through dance, which I shall never forget.

Twenty-four hours after the ‘sunshine’ comment we are driving – crawling would be a better word – from our hotel to the airport. We have just been told, by the now smiling Policeman, that although we paid for our tour some months back, they haven’t got around to buying our return air tickets. The fog, exacerbated by pollution from the nearby factories, is so thick around us that we cannot see the end of the bonnet of the car. And for one scary hour, until last-minute tickets are miraculously produced (cue much forced laughter all round) we imagine we might be trapped in a country locked in its skewed pathology.

And yet, we are relational creatures. We long to connect. We owe it to the North Korean people to reach out to them and show them, by our kindness, our patience, our interest in them and yes, maybe also in our materialistic chinos and Liberty ties, that there is a fascinating world out there beyond their borders, one worth engaging with, if only out of curiosity. Bridges have been built on less.

 

Partying with the Bayaka

The pygmy village of Yandoumbe stretches for about a kilometre along a road of red earth outside the small town of Bayanga. Banana and mango trees shade the wooden huts with their palm frond roofs, and slash-and-burn manioc plantations peter out into the pristine rainforests beyond. This is the real deal, the full on, tits-out Africa of the National Geographic and countless harrowing news stories, but we are here to get stoned and listen to music.

Our Hiluxes are driven by regular Central Africans from the town. They are slightly bemused, maybe even irritated, by our interest in the Bayaka pygmies who make up the indigenous population of the area. While one driver, Nanas, happily chats with the Bayaka, the other is sullen and stays in the car. Later, I will see him bark orders at a Bayaka like a slave driver. If he’d been born a few years earlier, he might have actually owned some pygmies himself. Many Central Africans look at the Bayaka – who average about five feet and spend half their time living as hunter-gatherers in the forest – and see animals. ‘They say we don’t have the same blood as them,’ one Bayaka woman tells me.

The Bayaka’s height and assorted dress certainly distinguish them from the townspeople. One child is in a torn Barack Obama tee shirt with the word ‘Change’ emblazoned on it. Adult men sport everything from military camouflage to school uniforms to boxer shorts. The women are more ‘traditional’, wearing brightly coloured cloth skirts. Some have face tattoos and scarification, spindly designs and teardrops on the cheekbones and foreheads. A few people of both sexes have alarmingly pointed teeth. I assume they are filed down to those points, but in fact it is done with a chisel.

Semi-naked children, dozens of them, play in the dust outside the huts. The adults get things together to take into the forest, loading beautiful hand-woven baskets, picking up spears and nets for the hunt. The scene looks timeless, clichéd even, the stuff of a thousand well-meaning gap years, but the village is only 20 years old, and the man who founded it is a six-foot 58-year-old from New Jersey.

***

Louis Sarno was listening to an Amsterdam radio station in 1985 when he heard a broadcast of Bayaka music. An enthusiast more than a musicologist, Louis had wandered around Europe, lived on a remote Scottish farm and then married a Dutch girl. By the time the marriage ended, he had little idea of what to do next. (‘It was amicable,’ Louis says. ‘We split a PO box without any mail and a bank account without any money.’) But the music he heard that night was intoxicating, and he made up his mind to go and meet the people that made it. He gathered together a little money, bought a tape recorder and a one-way ticket for Bangui: the sweaty, scary capital of the Central African Republic.

When he finally made it to Bayanga, far to the south-west, the images he had conjured in his mind of a pure forest people of genius musicians were challenged by a somewhat different reality. The Bayaka lived in the shadow of a wailing sawmill. They wore cheap and tattered clothes. Some weren’t even that short. Worst of all, they were constantly prey to the non-Bayaka population of the town. Always in debt to the Bantu neighbours, always being beaten up for not working to repay them, and often drunk on the palm wine their culture had almost no experience of. But at night, when the sawmill closed, the music would begin, and Louis remembered what had brought him there in the first place.

Pygmies have no chiefs. Watching the Bayaka make decisions is to see consensus meet anarchy in the middle of a foggy bridge. Miraculously, Louis managed to buy some land and convince the Bayaka it would be better for them to move away from their taller neighbours. An immense struggle with the local authorities broke out, one that is documented in Louis’s book Song from the Forest (1993) and  the subject of a feature film, Oka! (2011). The film, starring Kris Marshall of Love Actually fame, is almost certainly the worst I have ever seen, and Louis tells me he would write the book very differently if he knew then what he knows now, but still. Eventually, after being threatened with deportation and worse, the village of Yandoumbe was born. Now it is home to a community almost 2000 strong. At its heart is a black hut on a concrete base and a fence beyond which the children aren’t allowed to shit. It is at Louis’s house that we begin our journey into the forest.

***

We are doing the Mad Dogs and Englishmen thing as the Bayaka sensibly sit in the shade. Some of the men vaguely try to sell us necklaces but commerce is clearly not the pygmies’ forte. They are excited about going into the forest though. We will be paying for the trip. It is the dry season and most Bayaka would normally be spending it tending to their manioc plantations. Everyone wants to come with us. As the 36 skilled adults, hand-chosen by Louis for their forest and musical skills, prepare for departure, so do at least 30 more. Louis struggles to get the Bayaka to listen. This hunter-gatherer society that spends half its time on the move has absolutely no political organisation. Louis is considered an elder. One of the Bayaka will later tell me that they respect elders. That’s probably true but they don’t listen to them very much. An exasperated Louis eventually reads out his list of names like a schoolteacher doing the morning register. The shouting subsides and eventually only about 10 extra people join us on the trip into the forest.

Like something out a Victorian expedition, the Bayaka carry everything. With impressive strength and poise they carry most of the cargo on their heads. A 13-year-old boy strides past me balancing 12 litres of water on top of his head like a paper crown (we are too chicken to drink the crystal waters of the streams we cross). As we all trek through the manioc fields, one box languishes at the foot of Louis’s breadfruit tree, or possibly in the back of Nanas’s Hilux, or maybe it has been stolen by a Bayaka, who are known for their relaxed view of property rights. It is the box containing all our food. The porridge, pasta, tomatoes and cheese we have brought for ourselves so we don’t have to rely on a successful hunt.

***

The rainforest is dark and much cooler than the village. The Bayaka lead us down trails cut by forest elephants, by far the most dangerous animals around (there are about 1500 in the area according to the WWF). The going is remarkably easy; the land is flat, the elephants scarce, and the streams easily forded. Only twice does someone shout ‘jaku’ – meaning driver ants, whose vice-like pincers will tear you to pieces given the chance.

As we sit down for our single stop on this half-day walk, the pygmy men begin to roll massive spliffs in unison. Some shove handfuls of the sticky greeny-brown weed inside torn pages of exercise books, others in trimmed semi-dry leaves. The joints burn brightly as the Bayaka take deep drags and pass to their neighbours. They must have smoked an ounce in ten minutes. None of them seems fazed.

Two hours deeper into the forest, and with almost no word of warning, the Bayaka turn off the trail and head straight into the thickets. Shin-deep in leaf litter and hemmed in by vines and undergrowth, for a minute it feels like the pygmies have led us the wrong way. Again, with no discussion or deliberation, they suddenly stop, put down the cargo and—without missing a beat—begin clearing the jungle.

Everyone gets out a machete. There are five-year-olds cutting down saplings. A large area is cleared of bushes and little trees in less than 30 minutes. The twigs and leaves are swept away as men start hacking at the earth to remove the root balls. We are left with a nicely graded arena of soft dirt. Perfect for dancing on.

The women begin to make beehive huts for their families. Bent saplings and vines are tied together and big oval leaves attached to keep out the rain and provide some privacy. This being the dry season, we have no way of testing the weatherproof credentials of these humble dwellings, but they are reported to stay dry in even the fiercest of tropical downpours.

We only realise a hunting party set out earlier because they now return with quarry. The Bayaka staple has been caught. The blue duiker is the smallest of the forest antelopes, about the size of a small dog. Shotgun-toting poachers from the town have decimated the duiker population in the forests around Bayanga, posing what Louis sees as the most severe threat to the Bayaka’s ancient way of life. Nonetheless, the Bayaka have been lucky today. So have we, as we don’t have any food, and a haunch has been reserved for us.

Mkuti, an extrovert, porcupine hunter, harpist, tree climber and raconteur heads back to try and rendezvous with the car that might have our food. If it doesn’t have the food, he has a list for Shamek, the solid-gold Mauritanian shopkeeper in town. Shamek acts as a bank, a delivery service and an all-round fixer. Too bad he never gets our list.

We borrow rice from Louis. It will be more palatable than manioc, though I’m tempted to dive into Bayaka cuisine more thoroughly. I cook the rice on a campfire, getting it just right, while Louis’s girlfriend Agati stews our duiker with tomato paste and ‘forest garlic’, a fragrant root. The bushmeat is delicious.

***

There is quite a lot of hanging around. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were in the middle of the rainforest with a bunch of miniature hunter-gatherers, you might even say it was boring. I begin to wish I’d brought a book.

Men start to casually drum and women sing. It’s a bit like an orchestra tuning up. Giving in to the inevitable, I submit to the Bayaka entreaties and start smoking their joints. The weed is surprisingly strong, and smoking out of a bit of crumpled A4 paper not nearly as bad as it looks.

One Bayaka, a 4’10” teenager with a lisp and the torso of an action figure, has been busy hacking at things. He has created an improvised bench for us to watch the proceedings from. We arrange ourselves on it as the darkness falls and the wailing and drumming pick up.

Louis has told us to expect an eboka, which is basically a party: a marijuana-infused drumming, singing and dancing session for the whole community. Certain ebokas happen in particular places and at specific times, and Louis assures us they are always better in the forest than in the village. We are to witness a boyobi, a specific type of eboka when hunting spirits (called makundi) appear to bless the following day’s hunt.

The spirits are in fact men and teenage boys who have been initiated into special rituals. A raffia cloak, a dome of twigs and the darkness of the forest at night disguise their human form. The idea is that the women don’t know that the spirits are really men in costume. Of course, the women know, and the men know they know, but no one breaks the illusion.

Imperceptibly, the eboka begins. It segues from casual tuning to serious music, until it reaches a sort of critical mass when everyone realises something big is going on. The Bayaka gather in the middle of clearing, the men drumming furiously on plastic tubs, cooking pans, empty mineral water bottles and their own machetes. The women sing louder and louder, harmonising in rich polyphony until the camp feels insulated from the forest by a bubble of loud human sound—probably a good idea with all those elephants. People begin to dance. Women stuff special leaves into their waistlines, men make elaborate leaf headdresses and wands. One man, the one who is to summon the makundi, leads the dancing into a trance-like, ecstatic crescendo. This is far better than any rave I have ever been to.

We had been told that when the spirits are about to appear, all lights must be extinguished. The darkness is necessary to preserve the illusion that the makundi are not human. The pale blue LED beams that criss-cross the clearing go dead (other than the machete, the LED head-torch must have done more to improve the Bayaka’s lifestyle than any other invention), the fires are put out, the Bayaka even refrain from relighting their spliffs.

As almost total darkness falls, the forest floor is lit up by tiny flecks of light. The effect is caused by a kind of bioluminescent mould that grows all over the rainforest, mainly on the underside of dead leaves and bark. It creates the impression of a starry night at your feet.

The drumming suddenly stops, and a falsetto, squawking voice is heard from the trees beyond the camp. The makundi screech orders at the Bayaka, apparently wanting them to sing louder to coax them out. The Bayaka and their spirits communicate in call and response until the drumming begins again, louder than ever.

When they finally emerge from the trees, the effect is astonishing. The makundi have strapped the bioluminescent mould to their bodies. Designs, which the Bayaka call ‘stars’, are placed on what are probably their elbows, knees and torsos. It means it is impossible to tell exactly how many makundi there are, but also what part of which body is making any specific movement. When two makundi near each other they appear to merge into one, and when they creep along the floor they move more like insects than humans, the glowing fungus vibrating to the rhythm and the alarming squawk accompanying the music.

Louis explains that the BBC, National Geographic and a host of others have all tried to film the spirits. The makundi are too fast, and their ‘stars’ are too dim for the ceremony to be captured on camera. There is something deeply satisfying about 21st Century technology being unable to deal with hunter-gatherer rituals that probably date back millennia.

The atmosphere is highly charged: couples retreat into the huts to canoodle, a Bayaka man goes off to masturbate near the edge of the clearing. When the makundi take a break I am set upon by four or five Bayaka girls at once. They drag me to the floor murmuring my name and putting their hands under my clothes—I am slightly shaken. When a head-torch is lit nearby, they run away, giggling. In answer to my concern, Louis replies, ‘yeah, they can be pretty forward... If you stuck around here you’d probably find a wife.’

As is sometimes the case, the respect for a ceremony is confirmed best when it is threatened. Mkuti, the gregarious porcupine hunter, has not met the truck he was sent to meet. Instead he got drunk on palm wine. As he stumbles into the ceremony, half-cut, obnoxious, with his head-torch shining, the spirits slink off, crawling on their bellies so as not to be seen. The crowd erupts in disapproval, with some shouting in French (for our benefit) ‘Ce n’est pas bon!’ and whistling and jeering until he turns off his light.

After another hour of Mkuti’s bad behaviour the spirits decide to call it a night. Louis, egged on by several of the women, gives Mkuti a hard time, calling him ‘imbecile’ and castigating his drunkenness. Embarrassed, he declares to the camp that he will leave then and there, and that he doesn’t want the white people to see him now he has been shamed. After 10 minutes, and a conciliatory word from Louis, he relents, and plays the harp until dawn.

 

***

Buzzing from the boyobi ceremony, I get almost no sleep. The vague reverie I might be enjoying is terminally interrupted at 5am by the drums.

The women begin their incantations. ‘They are singing quite sexualised lyrics,’ Louis says. 'Stuff like “the penis is weak, the vagina is strong, the penis gives up but the vagina keeps going.” That’s why all the men have gone into their huts.’ Sure enough, the Bayaka men are looking on from the sidelines, clearly embarrassed.

We pack up to leave the camp and go hunting. More accurately, we watch the Bayaka hunt. Spreading a hand woven neat out in a circle of about 100 metres, they flush out animals towards the edge, where other Bayaka stand ready with spears. They catch a porcupine and a white mongoose in a three-hour stretch. This is a bad haul: a few years ago they would have definitely got a duiker, Louis says.

“When I first moved here there were songbirds, monkeys. They’ve all been shot by poachers. You have to go much deeper into the forest to even hear a monkey now.” With the nets and spears of the Bayaka going up against the shotguns of the poachers, it is easy to see why Louis is worried for the future.

***

A month after we said goodbye to Louis and the Bayaka, a group of armed men arrived in Bayanga. They were the Seleka, representatives of a loose, violent, mainly Muslim militia that recently ousted the government in Bangui. They had a list of ‘rich people’ they want to see. Louis Sarno was on the list.

Tipped off by Shamek the shopkeeper, Louis took his family and friends from Yandoumbe into the forest. When the Seleka arrived, they were determined to find Louis’s treasure. Looting his hut, they turned up nothing but medicine for the children and reams of notes Louis intended to turn into his next book. They burnt everything. For the first time in his 28 years in the CAR, Louis was forced to run for his life: by staying, he would have endangered his family.

By the time the Seleka themselves were overthrown less than a year later, Louis had returned. A new, vicious anti-Seleka force had arrived in Bayanga. They forced Shamek, and all the other Muslims, to flee to Cameroon. They looted his shop, and burned all the Muslim homes down. At least Louis was not on their list.

He is back in the forest now, with the Bayaka. They are living a life that has changed little in thousands of years. Hopefully, they will be able to live it in peace.

 

Working Space Thinking

 

‘But inasmuch as any entity within-the-world is likewise in space, its spatiality will have an ontological connection with the world’ – Heidegger

I.

I’m on a couch at the back of Columbia University’s Social Hall at a poetry reading. It is quiet, though we laugh when it is appropriate. The Geordie poet Tom Pickard invites us to

Fuck the sonnet, I piss upon it
and those who seek to launch a sinking reputation on it

I’m taking notes furiously. This is odd because it’s a poetry reading, and because I’m not (yet) imaging a future where I might refer back to them, and because I heard these same poems read two days earlier. They are dubious notes; apropos of nothing, a slap-dash cartouche contains ‘Anna Pesto.’ I don’t know who spoke this near-Pynchonian poetic pun and it doesn’t clarify anything. Of course, I’m in a lecture hall, surrounded by other students and poetry-positive New Yorkers – the Moleskine set – and so I’m not the only one writing. But it is the pleasure of writing, here, in this room, that is overcoming me, and although I’ve never been in this building before I’m shocked by my relative comfort.

I prefer working in rooms that are well-thought-in, where I am able to imagine myself pulling minor epiphanies out of the rafters, rather than confronting writing as a solitary figure on a frontier. In the past four years, I’ve moved from Canada, to the UK, to Canada again, and now to the United States, pulled nose-first by an abstract ‘there’ I assume will be more productive than ‘here.’ The further away the city – or even country – the easier it has been to imagine it as cohesively Where Someone Else’s Great Thing Got Done. When I stood in my Dad’s studio in Toronto and scanned a lease on a room at Wolfson College, I was already anticipating the industriousness and inspiration that Sylvia Plath found on the other side of Grange Road. Were Betty Smith to have advised my most recent move, I’m sure she would’ve pointed out that today, each tree that grows in Brooklyn seems to find three or four manuscripts in its shade. All of this is to say that I assumed I could break through (something, I’m not sure what) by working under someone else’s sky. But I’ve found that, while I may like the idea of moving, I’m not terribly good at it, and it takes several months before my industrial comfort is truly unpacked. Suffice to say, it takes a fair bit of working a space to make it a workspace, and the first step seems to be the attempt to name the space as such – taking it from space to place.

In my experience, living in New York seems to mean being subject to a hybrid obligation: an avowed Newness renovating the spectral precedent of York (and Amsterdam before that, insists a popular brand of cheap gin). We’re here innovating inside of a historical tradition while historicising innovation. At the risk of putting too fine a point on things, One World Trade Center topped-out the day after we moved-in. And as a sort of nested doll within this diachronic frame, this particular Social Hall impresses its own hybrid frame: built in 1910 as a part of the Union Theological Seminary and now on lease to Columbia, it educated a generation of liberal priests before becoming a cauldron for the labor movement. But the very idea of a Social Hall – a space that declares interaction no matter who else is inside of the building – is pushing me to consider the way my note-taking, or writing of any kind, feels like socializing with a space, rather than just in it. I’m recalling that the feeling of total inhabitation that accompanies a really good afternoon or all-nighter seems like a step towards understanding the way working works. It’s a chance to really feel related with these environments we’ve made for ourselves for making something else. Maybe my satisfaction with a finished piece is as much a function of my presentness as it is of my productivity. Maybe it’s hard to really work in a space you don’t know, but you also don’t really know a space unless you’ve worked in it. Emerson beings his essay ‘Experience’ by asking existentially ‘where do we find ourselves?’ and it’s worth attending to the po-faced answer, which is always going to be some form of ‘where we brought ourselves to be ourselves working’.

On my way out of the reading, I overhear one of the other readers – who named his most recent book after a resort where he’d been staying and writing – complaining about the resort refusing to give him a free room as a courtesy for the title. I can only assume that he asked, and that he felt this room to have already been his. Hopefully he’s moved on.

 

II.

I’m in my office in Brooklyn thinking about being wrong, about working on being wrong and working-on while being wrong. This isn’t an immediately promising approach. If the Social Hall at Columbia pushed me to consider the relationship I have with the space in which I work, being ‘at the office’ – even one that is only separated from my bedroom by a set of French doors – is naif shorthand for working when one would just as soon be doing something else. April Bernard has written brilliantly about the author’s house as an inhabitable intentional fallacy – the belief ‘that visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work’ – and one’s office is this exactly same false-space, at least, until it is proved otherwise. Time goes up in flame by the heap. Just being in an office can feel oppressively metonymic, as its etymology betrays; the Latin noun officium carries the connotation of a duty or service, despite being derived from a verb compound of opus and facere, ‘work’ and ‘to do, to act.’ It’s a space we carve out for ourselves, but one to which we are as obliged as it is to us.

I’m finding it worthwhile to tease these two conceptual spaces apart, looking for the moments where the space of duty and the space of working are at their most distant, if only to provide myself with a clear trajectory back to the one from the other. In some cases, this means trying to work where it feels wrong to do so. It’s easy to forget how common this is – after all, ‘I have to go to the office’ is shorthand for going to work on something that one would just as soon not be working on. John Ashbery’s most famous, least representative poem, ‘The Instruction Manual,’ begins in precisely this situation:

As I sit looking out of a window of the building

I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,

And envy them – they are so far away from me!

The speaker has separated from the work circumscribed by the space metapoetically – as writing a poem seems to obviously not be writing an instruction manual – but the tinge of green shows its obligation lingering. Even if the writing of the poem confirms the space’s creative potential, the speaker is, at that moment, literally in the wrong. This wrongness gives rise to the entire poetic occasion, pointing-up writing as a process for working through wrongness. This isn’t just wordplay, even if it is.

Maybe this is specific to someone that is, as I’ve said, dreadful at the whole process of moving away from home, but in each new place, you’re forced to figure out new habits, new patterns of behaviour, a new way to be. And this doesn’t happen right away – you develop concentric circles of familiarity around your home and office, building first impressions on top of the relatively well known. A lot of first impressions have the texture of facts, because you have no contradictory evidence to hold them against, but they are rarely absolute. The first best cup of coffee is usually just a good cup of coffee. You revise and move on. I think this has an important precedent in childhood, when you seem to be ready for every fact to have been misapprehended, to be open to completely destabilizing new information. As you get older, it gets harder find yourself, ahem, ‘in’ the wrong unless you get away from the familiar.

Sometimes wrong isn’t simply being incorrect but is felt as a pervasive ill-fittingness or out-of-sortsness. This is how Heidegger talks about the stifling affect of Bad Moods – they unavoidably colour the entire space, and certainly I’ve tried working in spaces wholly inappropriate for doing so. I ludicrously tested the unsuitability of the bathroom of an overground from East Croydon to Saint Pancras, which I’m sure any other passenger could have confirmed. Heidegger infamously names the Counter Mood – our strategy for finding pockets of harmony within these Bad Moods – without gesturing towards how a mood might be countered. Thinking of one’s office as an island or a refuge is a hopeless cliché, and one that does nothing to reflect the moments when these Bad Moods, these discrepancies between work and obligation, settled around our desks. But if working is, at best, a working-out, the ideal beginning might be a situation one wants to get away from. On a macro-level, this squares with the itinerance I’ve fallen into. But for the mundane day, I wonder if each great-actually-just-good cup of coffee, each shortcut-no-longcut, doesn’t help to keep things just a little bit uncomfortable. If that separation between duty and productivity isn’t itself productive. I’m unequivocally more productive with one set of doors to my office open, and the other closed.

 

III.

I’m at a party in one of NYU’s faculty apartments in Greenwich Village. ‘We’ are thanking the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson for coming to New York and talking to us about her new chapbook Thinking Spaces. The entire south wall of this 14th floor apartment is windowed from the waist up. The immediacy of the lit-up financial district reminds me of the urbane sleaze of eighties thrillers like After Hours and Cruising. A fluorescent uneasiness leaks in through the windows and I have eaten all of the salami, quickly.

Robertson and I are both from Toronto and spent time in Cambridge, her as a prestigious Judith E. Wilson fellow, me as an MPhil student. Though we missed each other by 10 years, Cambridge is extremely something we can talk about. She’s telling me about the inveterate college poet Jeremy Prynne telling her about the deceased poet Veronica Forrest-Thompson because I asked her to and she’s much nicer than I could’ve expected – no one from anywhere else can say ‘oh for sure’ with a Canadian’s perfectly genial timbre. I can’t articulate how or why, but the whole time I’m thinking about Cambridge’s unique spatial disclosures. Its tall brick walls broken-up by loose iron fences, openings from which the distance between feeling in a space and just perceiving that space becomes osmotically thin. The buildings huddle monastically, sharing ideas that might still hold currency even if their credit is about a hundred years expired. As Robertson wrote, while in residence, ‘Doubt crumbles open.’

This new chapbook is wonderful and challenging. A canny art critic as well as a poet, Robertson famously refuses to distinguish between her ‘poetic’ and ‘critical’ work, which can estrange and discomfort even the most flexible readers. Thinking Spaces reckons with historical examples of libraries that were arranged in such a way as to encourage certain shapes of thought, or thought processes. Each begins with its most basic necessary constituents – ‘a table, a book, and an opening to the outside’ – and the way they were organised in a given room was meant to correspond to the forms of thought each room was meant to encourage. Most enduring is her description of the Warburg Institute’s elliptical reading room, which was inspired by Johannes Kepler’s theory of elliptical planetary orbit. Kepler accounted for visual imperfections and inconsistencies by speculating that planets orbited around two points, a positive (the sun) and a negative (the ‘equant,’ a point of absence that was actually used to account for velocity). Aby Warburg wanted to inspire his fellow art historians to direct their thoughts along this trajectory; from concept to doubt to affirmation, or the reverse, discomfort to comfort to unease. Robertson sees this shape inflecting her own memory of the Warburg library as well:

Remembrance happens in an actual space, a proscenium or cosmos. But the ellipse is an image not of memory, nor of refinement, but of time itself: it wobbles, its centre shifts, it doesn’t pertain to hierarchy…Warburg called the ellipse a space for thinking, and for him his library with its elliptical hub was a lantern, and it was an observatory.

The space itself recast as the light that reveals both perfection and imperfection.

I step away from Robertson/ the empty snack tray, and over to the window. When the Empire State Building was being completed, Le Corbusier was so disappointed by the American approach to urbanization that he speculated about what a ‘Cartesian skyscraper’ might look like. He predicted a structure whose interiors would feature no walls: ‘Why repudiate richness itself: floods of light coming in.’ But he was unable to anticipate the nightscape of this setting, the eerie infelicity of opening out onto the black sky (no stars, of course) punctuated by so many other spaces – other rooms opening onto, or more accurately ‘out to’ each other – like an A4 covered in periods. In New York, tonight, easier to imagine a sort of fricative energy vibrating across all of these spaces, a city full of elliptical thoughts, the doubt illuminating each room. 

 

The Secret History of Longitude

On the BBC’s old General Overseas Service, every news bulletin began the same way. Twenty-eight seconds before the hour: ‘This is London’. Next, the jaunty tune we call ‘Lilliburlero’. Five seconds before the hour: the six pips—the Greenwich time signal. The time would then be given in 24 hour clock, Greenwich Mean Time, and the studio cued to start the BBC World Service news programme.

This was the time signature of the British Empire: for an Anglo-colonial living in Northern Rhodesia in 1950, or wherever or whenever, the present instant bore a single, one-to-one correspondence to the London ‘now’; the BBC Overseas Service recognised them both, and maintained the relationship between you and GMT faithfully and reliably. You knew where, not to say when, you stood.

Anybody in regular communication with someone who lives in a different time zone will testify to the strangeness of Skyping not only across space but across time, into a different ‘now’. Talking face to face with the dark while you are in the light is an experience of profound asynchrony, an experience of simultaneous non-simultaneity. The FaceTime is out of joint.

These feelings stem from fundamentally contemporary experiences: they are the result of cheap travel and free telephony’s flinging of us out of time, through space. Jetlag, too, is asynchrony incarnate, the unpleasant somatic repercussion of moving ‘unnaturally’ fast through space, into the wrong time. They reveal the old BBC ‘now’ to have been an illusion. Time-zone difference is natural; the sun sets at a different time across the world. The way we deal with that phenomenon – the way we map time – is not.

The BBC's Greenwich Mean Time is essentially – although not to a fraction of a second – the same as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary standard by which the world sets clocks and calculates time. Greenwich Mean Time is what it is, and the world coordinates around it, because of agreements made at the International Meridian Conference of 1884. As Adam Barrows puts it in The Cosmic Time of Empire (2011), this was a very serious moment in the history of modernity, providing ‘a global grid whereby the minutest spatial unit and the most infinitesimal duration of time could be measured in relation to Greenwich, England’. The conference was held, however, in Washington D.C.

The meeting was the brainchild of a very hardworking individual named Sandford Fleming. Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy in 1827, across the Forth from Edinburgh. He started studying under an engineer aged 14, and at 17 emigrated to Upper Canada with his brother. There, he qualified as an engineer and rapidly became a seriously industrious industrialist, producing the first maps of his adoptive town, Peterborough, and running enormous expansions of the railways. He founded the Royal Canadian Institute and designed the Threepenny Beaver, a postage stamp with a beaver on it. He always suggested using iron instead of wood, so that things couldn’t burn down. In 1885 he was responsible for the final connecting part of the line that linked the Pacific and the Atlantic. Sandford Fleming liked to connect what hadn’t previously been connected.

Trains and clocks have a fairly storied association. Airports are full of blinking digital time-telling screens, but the great train stations are old enough that gigantic clocks loom over all of them. Think of Waterloo’s majestic four-faced clock, hanging down the centre of the concourse like a big benevolent spider, or the great towering beauties of the Gare de Lyon in Paris and the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof.

How do you make the trains run on time? Thinking about it hard is a good start. All that frenzied work on railways planted a seed in Fleming’s mind. He decided to universalise time-keeping, and started to harass the world about it. Adam Barrows quotes him as saying that uniform civil time reckoning would be a ‘cosmopolitan’ system benefiting not only ‘men of business’ but also the ‘entire family of man’.

Fleming devised a conference to debate the regulation of time, the reckoning of longitude, and the adoption of a prime meridian. This latter measurement is the line connecting points of equivalent longitude that defines longitude’s zero degree. That line covers half the world, pole to pole. The world is round and thus is wrapped in 360° of longitude: on the other side of the world, the zero degree loops into the 180°.

In order to understand why this has anything to do with Universal Coordinated Time, we have to see how longitude and time have always been inextricably bound up with one another. The story lies in the place after which the prime meridian was named at that conference: Greenwich. The Royal Observatory there was founded by King Charles II in 1675 to solve the serious problem of how to measure longitude at sea by observing the heavens. The problem with longitude is that, unlike latitude, you can’t figure it out by looking at the sky.

As Dava Sobel explains in Longitude (1993), 'The Equator marked the zero-degree parallel of latitude for Ptolemy. He did not choose it arbitrarily but took it on higher authority from his predecessors, who had derived it from nature while observing the motions of the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, and planets pass almost directly overhead at the Equator'. The case is the same for the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which are determined by the sun.

By contrast, Ptolemy could put his prime meridian, the zero-degree longitude line, wherever he liked. This difference made finding latitude fairly easy, but made the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into a problem that nobody seemed able to solve. Columbus could sail a straight parallel according to latitude pretty easily, but he couldn't turn corners.

What Columbus needed was a clock that worked at sea. If you want to figure out longitude while on a boat, you need to know what time it is on your boat but also the time at the place you sailed from. You need to figure out the spatial information contained in that time difference: because it takes 24 hours for the Earth to revolve completely, each hour is 1/24th of a 360° revolution. Fifteen degrees of longitude east or west, in other words. If you have both times, all you have to do is set the clock on your boat according to the noonday sun. Every hour of difference between you and the home-time is another 15 degrees. Conveniently enough, 15 degrees of longitude at the equator is 1,000 miles. That distance of course changes as you go up or down the world: but the time difference stays the same.    

The real problem was the difficulty of making a precision instrument work well on a boat. Pendulums, for example, do not like constant rocking motions. For proper navigation of the world’s seas, somebody needed to invent a better clock. For lack of good timekeeping, hundreds of British sailors used to die in single shipwrecks when they foundered on the Scilly Isles approaching the south-west coast of Britain. In 1714 the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which established a huge reward for the person who could come up with a ‘Practicable and Useful’ means of determining longitude. That man was John Harrison.

Harrison was an English clockmaker, who devoted his life to the project of developing the science of portable precision timekeeping. And he achieved it: Harrison invented the marine chronometer, although it took him a long time and didn’t make him terribly popular. Harrison’s first really successful marine chronometer, the H4, was small: about 13cm across. It looks pretty much exactly like a pocket watch. Harrison’s great idea was that earlier chronometers were too big: the bar balances inside them were affected too much by the ship’s unpredictable rocking.

Before the marine chronometer, everybody – Magellan, Drake, Balboa – just sailed straight and crossed their fingers. The famous ones are the guys who got lucky. They could use dead reckoning, of course: contemporary dead reckoning is a sophisticated process, but back then it just meant throwing a log in the sea and trying to adjust for currents by looking at how quickly and in what direction it was getting away from you.

Having to follow predetermined shipping lanes to keep from getting lost makes you very vulnerable to piracy, aside from everything else. In the light of all these problems, the early phase of European exploration and colonialism seems crazily hubristic. Simply setting off in a boat was in itself madly dangerous – but the great mariners didn’t seem to care.

By the 1880s, of course, the world was everybody’s oyster. Sandford Fleming had hoped that the prime meridian would automatically become the standard of a new Universal Day, where time zones would be coordinated from a defined starting point – the prime meridian. This suggestion was met with considerable anger by delegates at the conference who had neither expected the issues to be conflated, nor all been invested with power by the nations they represented to vote on matters of time. This was a radical moment: nobody had really suggested standard time seriously before.

A eurocentric and universalised time standard was highly controversial among the delegates. For example, Barrows quotes the representative for the Ottoman Empire as arguing that 'the majority of our population is agricultural, working in the fields, and prefer to count to sunset; besides, the hours for the Moslem prayers are counted from sundown to sundown'. What could a straight line running through London have to do with the temporally-inflected religious cultures of other countries?

For the conference delegates, the problem of time regulation was so thorny that they mostly concentrated on the feasible project of the prime meridian. In a very loosely worded, non-committal document that notionally joined the Universal Day to the prime meridian conceptually, however, the conference delegates signed Greenwich Mean Time into existence. Barrows says that it happened almost by accident. By 1920, the last abstaining countries (notably Turkey) had acknowledged a system of time zones based on GMT as the Universal Day.

Greenwich Mean Time didn’t come out of any top-down dictum from Queen Victoria, or transparent mutual agreement between the world’s nations, but Fleming’s sleight of hand. It was about money. Barrows describes ‘transnational investors who used (or misused) the [conference] ... to synchronize countries to precisely coordinated capital flow’. The campaign for a standard time was initiated by American and Canadian engineers. The ruling class in England didn’t seem terribly interested.

As United States delegate Mr W. F. Allen said at the conference, ‘Exactness of time reckoning is an imperative necessity in the conduct of business’. As the railways expanded and businessmen exported goods across great distances, Universal Time came to be required as a commercial tool. But Universal Time also synced the world’s markets together, greatly advancing the connectivity and thus sophistication of international commerce. The conference is a milestone in the history of globalised capital.

Functionally, Universal Time ended up doing something of the same work as the British Empire. The pre-chronometer chaos contrasted strikingly with the later British industrial mania for precision and productivity: think of the clock looming over the factory floor. Timekeeping was put to use in the colonial context as a weapon, in the form of new clocktowers in old towns, or plantation bells controlling the movements of the workers. In the most brutally Benthamite fashion, technologies of time not only facilitated the movement of Europe outside of Europe, as it were, but also functioned as a tool of oppressive social engineering.

Here, we come back to the BBC and its unflagging, precise broadcasting of those six pips that kept the empire in step with ‘real’ time. The global vision of time regulated by the BBC World Service – the world map coloured pink – is no more. This is not to say, however, that the global vision of time today is an unmediated one, or that nobody has any power over it.

British 1907

The mapping technology that we carry around in our iPhones and Blackberries was developed by the U.S. military between 1973 and 1994. It was deployed and tested in the First Gulf War. As the Department of Defense reported to Congress in 1992, it was very helpful. The U.S. military granted civilian use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1983, but the civilian signal was kept at a much lower level of accuracy, and only entered the commercial sphere in the Clinton administration.

Even now, the U.S. military restricts civilian use of GPS: all super-powerful receivers are classified as munitions. The U.S. military has a pretty big monopoly on finding things. The technology of mapping time and space, just as it was in 1884, is a form of knowledge that entails a great deal of power. Sandford Fleming’s conference did legitimise the carving up of the globe's surface into a system whose zero was London; but it happened almost by accident, amid international indignation, in order to sync up the commercial networks that would become today's globalised markets. While screen GPS feels more objective, less ideological, than the map coloured in pink, it is truly the Royal Observatory, Greenwich’s inheritor. Mapping is a form of knowledge bound up with the flow of capital, the exertion of military might and the threat of implicit violence. In some ways, geopolitics and chronopolitics are the very same thing.