Author Archives: Arthur House

Deep Shit

25th April 2014

In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked: ‘What is it like to be a bat?’

In 2013 I set out across Mexico to direct a BBC film crew following the thousand-mile migration of a small and unusual animal, the lesser long-nosed bat. After co-existing with these and many other species of bats, tracking them into their deepest sanctuaries, and living with the men and women who study them, I still have no idea what it is like to be a bat. But I do know about the world beneath them.

Guano is the excrement of bats and birds. Rich in nitrogen and phosphates, it is useful for growing things, or blowing things up. Nations once vied for its trade and ownership. Reincarnated guano propelled shells and shattered earth. Spain fought Peru and Chile for it in the Guano War of 1865. The United States’ first foray into colonialism came with the Guano Islands Act. To this day, if you are American, federal law allows you to claim an unclaimed island for the USA if it contains guano.

Bats are very clean animals. They groom themselves and each other fastidiously. Most have little scent to us, while some even smell pleasantly of the fruits they eat. It is beneath them that the horrors begin.

The lesser long-nosed bats' migration took us through some of the most diverse and spectacular bat caves in the Americas. These are my experiences of living in guano.

 *

RIVERS OF GUANO

In the area of Juxtahluaca there is a mountain, underneath which lies a network of caves. Thousands of years ago humans sought shelter deep within them. Their trepanned skulls and femurs litter the floors, grown over with young stalagmites. Paintings of their jaguar and snake gods stand watch over empty grottoes where the oxygen has run low, five kilometres into the mountain. It is quiet, apart from the dripping. But approaching a certain part of the cave complex, the temperature starts to rise and bats start to flit about. The humidity increases steadily to almost 100%, as you approach the Chamber of Hell. Named on account of the 40°C plus heat that the bats generate and which remains trapped in the cave, it could equally refer to the marsh of bat dung through which we ploughed.

In the Chamber of Hell there are more than a dozen species of bat – vampires roost alongside tiny insect catchers and bats that sip nectar like hummingbirds – and their faeces accumulate. The combined gloop that they produce has lain undisturbed for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in this cave, a gut history of past animal lives. In some parts, where rivulets penetrate the rock, the crap turns liquid and knee-high. Within this, if you pause to look more closely, you can see life flourishing. Worms and grubs swarm over the corpses of cockroaches and fallen bats. The surface gently boils. I spent my 30th birthday in this cave. At one stage, climbing down a high slope of pure shit, illuminated in the dim red light of our head torches, my producer Peter started slipping through the mire, accelerating towards a fearsome drop. Somehow he clung through the faeces to a rock and avoided the edge. The guano texture here was like expensive hot chocolate. The smell was bearable, but after five days working there, it was good to leave.

 *

TOXIC MAYAN GUANO

In the ruins of the 7th-century Mayan city of Palenque we'd been given permission to spend the nights among the obelisks, sacrificial altars and temples. After sunset, the white stones glowed against the forest and we started exploring some of the deeper chambers, where the scientist we were filming, Professor Rodrigo Medellin, hoped to find some bats. The Mayans worshipped a homicidal bat god called Camasotz (literally 'death-bat') and named their darkest month after the animal. Through a series of arched rooms we came into a dome neatly cut from interlocking pieces of rock, still firm after 13 centuries. Bats flit-zipped past us, and Rodrigo caught a few in his hand-net. It was very peaceful and there was little guano. But there were some small white fuzzy patches on the floor here and there. Rodrigo, a man not prone to alarm (his idea of a joke was to prod army ants into my arm to show how their jaws cannot unlock) was surprised to see these and quickly beckoned for us to don our masks, which we hadn't thought we'd need. The fluff was a particularly horrendous lung-infecting fungus called histoplasmosis, which thrives on the guano of insect-eating bats. From this point onwards we'd wear the masks in every cave we penetrated, sucking air hard through the soggy fabric, our gasps amplified. Later we wandered the temples in the night. Trees were growing through the pyramids, their roots churning the stones. The seeds are dropped by bats, who act as nature's vanguard in the tropics. Their guano contains the embryos of the hardwood trees which germinate amid the altars, reclaiming the city that briefly flourished among them. 

 *

A GUANO VOLCANO

In the rainforest near the ruined city of Calakmul there is a sinkhole, 300 feet wide and 200 feet deep, where the ground beneath the surface has hollowed out and collapsed, leaving a maw in the jungle. We abseiled into it, then pulled our kit after us on ropes suspended above the fallen boulders and trees. At the bottom of the pit was a large horizontal crack which penetrated deeper underground. Waiting inside this, we knew, were some two to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, charming creatures with faces like pugs. They eat insects. Every night, the bats in Calakmul consume some 20 tonnes of bugs, many of which would otherwise ruin local crops. I don't know how long the colony has lived in the sinkhole. The smell from within was pure ammonia: so strong it stung our eyes some distance away. We decided not to go in.

As the sun set, a few bats started to emerge, and as the shadow of the sun crept up the wall of sinkhole, thousands of them streamed out. They formed a living tornado around and above us, hundreds of thousands of bats in a vortex the height of a block of flats. The smell of their guano vanished in the cool wind of their combined wings, so strong that the branches of trees swayed, their leaves rustling. All mosquitoes were done for. Birds of prey – jays, owls, falcons – crashed into the vortex, carrying off struggling bats, but for an hour, into the night, the swarm continued to emerge. Unbothered by humans, they'd often land on us, crawl up our bodies, and take flight from the tops of our heads. Guano fell from high above, bouncing off us like light hail, but we didn't care. I loved the bat volcano. We climbed out and left, grinning like huge, hairy, dirty children.

 *

FLOWER GUANO WITH ADDED SNAKES

In the forest of Kantemó on the Yucatan Peninsula, where the rock that killed the dinosaurs (and most other things) landed, we crawled into a beautiful cave, swallows flitting around us. The rock here was limestone; over time water had percolated through, dissolving much of it, leaving a Swiss cheese. A hundred yards in was a pool of water, where no light penetrated. In this water live blind shrimp, blind fish and a blind eel, all ghost-like and translucent. There is a fragile, diverse ecosystem in these caves, nourished by the guano dropped by the bats as they fly in and out. It is this guano, compacted into strata over thousands of years, that silts up in the gaps in the Swiss cheese, leaving four-foot-high passages that we stumbled and crawled through, avoiding holes that suddenly appeared. The temperature was brutal and the guano floor very dusty. We turned rust orange with the disturbed faeces coating our skin, hair and equipment.

Despite this, the cave was extremely calm, and as we set up our cameras Rodrigo declared that he could sleep in a cave like this. The bats flitting past made sounds like gentle clapping. The cave is called the Cave of the Serpents, because scores of rat snakes, which live in the maze of holes, have learnt to come out and hang from the ceilings, jaws open to catch bats as they pass through. They would have been disturbed by our lights, so we lay down in the soft dust and turned off our head torches. Only our cameraman, George, could see by his infra-red camera the snakes starting to emerge and hang from the rock all around us. For some hours he gently repeated the phrase ‘Oh dear god’. We filmed a snake catch a bat and swallow it, dislocating its jaw and forcing its own head into two split halves to accommodate the asphyxiating bat. Some of the bats in this cave must have fed on flowers as their guano seemed packed with pollen. Bats pollinate many plants that we depend on. The bats that we were following nuzzle the flowers of the agaves, from which tequila is made. Afterwards in Mexico City a honey seller gave me some pollen to eat. I retched uncontrollably at the association.

 * 

VAMPIRE GUANO

In the lush cowboy country of central Eastern Mexico, the arrival of Europeans, and their cattle and horses in particular, proved a bonanza for the vampire bats. Populations exploded, and they can now be found almost anywhere. The cave of the vampires that Rodrigo led George and me into was small and shallow, moist, very humid, and full of the lung-infecting fungus. In a far corner lived the vampires, two species out of the three in the world. In their lair they are very cautious, so we positioned our infrared lights and lay down in the guano, which was like a cassoulet. Eating only blood, the vampire bats excrete a substance that is rich and dark red, and extremely oily. In the rotting blood things moved and squirmed, penetrating our clothes and skin. The vampires emerged, crawling on their wings like tiny hyaenas, craning their faces towards us, shivering their heads as they echolocated our outlines. We often lost track of where they were. But despite their creepiness, the vampires are highly intelligent, social and caring bats. They share blood with friends if they haven't fed, and nurture each other's young. They remember individuals and form lasting relationships. Their teeth are so sharp they cut straight through one researcher’s gloves, perfectly slicing the skin underneath so that it wouldn't stop bleeding for more than a day.

* 

SEXY GUANO

The final cave we visited was the one we looked forward to most. It was on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, near beaches prized for their beautiful sands and hatching sea turtles. The cave at the centre of this island, safe from most predators, was chosen by the bats we were following, the lesser-long nosed bats, as a haven in which they could gather in great numbers to mate. In a tiny crevice in the cave, more than 50,000 of these endangered bats had come together. And despite the sea washing out the cave floor, the smell in the deepest parts was the worst we'd encountered. We were prepared for this with special full-face gas masks, more serious than the flimsy ones we used in other caves. But they were uncomfortable, and misted up. Wearing only thin trainers, in which we'd waded ashore, the oozy crap would squeeze into our shoes. In Ian Fleming's Dr. No, the eponymous baddie is killed when James Bond buries him alive in guano.

The Bristol Stool Scale handily lists a number of types of human faecal consistency, for the diagnostic use of physicians. Number 1 is 'separate hard lumps, like nuts'. Tiny bat versions fell constantly. Our bare shoulders were quickly covered in specks, but it was the tiny biting flies I found difficult. Above us the bats were mating. Their seduction technique is to cover their own backs with faeces, semen, saliva and urine and let this ferment in an oily spot. The smell from this is so attractive to the females that they bury their heads in it, and go into a trance, which the males use as an opportunity to mate with them. They mate just once a year. We spent a week filming beneath this orgy. We took shifts, and washed in the sea regularly. Outside, our boatman dug oysters from the rocks, which we feasted on before returning to the sex cave. The walls look like rock, until you touch them. Then they scuttle away in glistening waves of pure cockroach. Every surface was covered. Rodrigo has spent his life in caves, but still cannot stand cockroaches. Hushed Mexican swearing echoed through the mating chamber.

* 

DEEP GUANO

Over a quarter of a year we drove, rafted and trudged thousands of miles, from the jungles of the Guatemalan border to the Sonoran desert. I might never have to go into a guano-filled cave again. This is a conflicting thought, because they are both beautiful and horrendous places.

Guano doesn't just fall in caves – in their hidden billions, bats traverse our skies each night, incontinent across every continent. Their dung contains the bodies of pests that haven't plagued us and the pollen of the plants we need whose lives they have sustained. It's thought that if the bats went, our civilisation would shortly follow. And if we go first, their guano will plant the seeds of forests to rip apart our ruins.

*

Natural World: The Bat Man of Mexico, narrated by David Attenborough, will be on BBC 2 on Friday 13th June. You can watch it here.

Making Of

16th September 2013

Jon’s initial plan is to smear a teddy bear with dog food and drag it through the streets of Kilyos. The town is full of stray dogs, so he hopes that by the time we get back out into the countryside we’ll have a comet’s tail of mongrels chasing after our two cars. We’ve come to Kilyos to help him make a film for an art show he’s putting on in London. The film will be only be 30 seconds long, like a car ad, and it will also have the glossiness of a car ad, except for the frantic dogs. There are six of us in the crew – me, Jon, Jesse, Samara, Ali and Mihda – plus Esteban, Mihda’s dog. Esteban is theoretically still a puppy, but he’s already so huge that when he treads on your foot it feels like he might have broken a few of your toes. Apparently his breed was developed to hunt wild boar. His white coat matches the colour of Mihda’s dad’s car, a four-wheel-drive Porsche Cayenne, and whenever we leave him on his own even for a second he gets into the driver’s seat and sits up with his paws on the wheel looking like ­­Rick Ross. Esteban is not here to act in the film. But he’s not just a shark-eyed mascot either. We think of him as key grip.

Kilyos, a resort about 15 miles north of the centre of Istanbul, has had most of the life sucked out of it by the local mafia. The satellite dishes on the roofs here are so brown with rust that they make me think of oversized forest mushrooms. We find that there isn’t nearly enough manoeuvrability on these little streets to do our Pied Piper act, and also the dogs are already so well fed that they may not have much interest in our meaty decoy, so instead we just eat some spinach börek and then carry on to Gümüsdere Beach. On the way, alongside the cabbage fields and cemeteries and go-kart tracks, there are fences which have repeating patterns of blobby holes cut out of their struts, as if eaten away by some meticulous weevil. Jesse explains that the wood must be the interstices from a type of automated woodwork called CNC, so these struts are like the leftover dough that you guiltily cram in your mouth after you’ve stamped out a dozen heart-shaped biscuits. There are also so many strays by the side of the road that when we pass a few cows for the first time there is a terrifying moment when I take them for gigantic horned mastiffs.

After a while we come to a stretch of beach that looks about right to Jon, but all the beach resorts here are privately run, so they all have gates, and the gates here are locked. They do look a bit rickety, but there’s a CCTV camera nearby, and Jon doesn’t want to do anything that might get us arrested. Ali goes to speak to some old men in a café nearby, and they tell him that the guardian of the gate is somebody called Mr Hasan in the village. I was excited to come on this trip because Jon said we’d have to pay a lot of bribes and I’d never paid a bribe before. Surely, I think, Mr Hasan will be our first bribe. But when we eventually track his son, he tells us that he can’t unlock the gate for us but we’re very welcome to break in if we want. I wonder if there’s any chance we might be permitted to bribe him anyway, just for the experience.

After Jon has wrenched the gates open, we have the beach to ourselves. The row of holiday homes further up the slope are all identical in their architecture but in various stages of dilapidation, so from the rear they remind me of one of those anti-drug posters showing the slow decline of a meth user. We’d hoped we might be able to swim for a while, but the grey sea is far too cold. The Bosphorus has a one-way system that changes direction every 12 hours, and by the time we leave so many ships will be queuing up on the horizon that they look like a manufactured coastline. Jesse, Samara and I walk up the beach to look for some stray dogs. Our progress is slowed a little by Samara’s scavenging. Her art is full of creases, furrows, and stains, so she’s finding a lot of treasure on the beach that she wants to take home with her. In this briny wind, everything erodes at the speed of a time-lapse video, so the half-buried tarpaulins and plastic buckets look as if they’ve been here since the Hittite era. Eventually, we do come across three fairly photogenic strays, but just as we’re making our first shy advances with a bag of sliced sausage, two teenagers from the riding school nearby come cantering across the beach, and the dogs go straight for their horses. They really seem to think they have a shot at taking both horses down like cheetahs against gazelles.

We don’t have a hope of catching up. So we’ve failed to assemble a cast of unknowns. But of course our star has been right in front of us all this time. As a test, we tie a length of twine to the teddy bear and dangle it in front of Esteban to see if he’s interested. The teddy bear has a disconcertingly Lolita-type posture and when squeezed sings ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Esteban is interested. Esteban is very interested. Esteban is so interested that it soon becomes clear that wrestling the teddy bear out of Esteban’s mouth between takes will constitute a full time job for at least one member of the crew (I remember reading that the same was true of Jack Nicholson during the filming of The Departed). Afterwards, I grope the muddy bear again, hoping to hear a slurred and atonal rendition of its little song, like a damaged robot’s, but evidently it’s been traumatised into silence.

Jon has a shouldermount for his camera, but the spring is too weak, so whenever he tries to use it the camera lolls around like a concussion patient. Instead, he’s going to steady the camera by hand. Since I have nothing in particular to do, I join him on the cargo bed of the second car, from which he’ll be filming the action. The sun is setting, and we are entering what’s called the Golden Hour, that divine burnishment which has inspired filmmakers with its fugitive beauty since the very advent of Technicolor: perfect conditions, in other words, to get a few takes of a big dog running after a cuddly toy. Communicating with walkie-talkies between the two cars, we begin filming. The teddy bear is dragged at high speeds behind the Porsche like Hector’s body behind the chariot of Achilles. With three bodies in independent motion, this feels like something between exceptionally complex stuntwork and a total farce. Esteban seems to be having the time of his life, presumably assuming that this entire game has been arranged for his benefit. I find myself wishing that being a novelist involved a bit less sitting alone in small rooms and a bit more riding in the backs of pick-up trucks at high speeds.

By the time the dog finally tires, Jon has come to accept that we aren’t going to get the smooth 30-second take he was hoping for. But he’s got quite a few shorter takes he can edit together. As we’re packing up the equipment, we see that at least one other party has taken advantage of the gate we left open. A guy in one of those stubby, top-heavy delivery vans has driven on to the beach and is now attempting to do donuts on the sand. It’s like watching Esteban practising pirouettes. After a while the guy gets out of his car for a cigarette, so Jesse and I decide to go over to say hello to him. It’s only when we’re within a few paces that I realise I’m still carrying the filthy, ruined teddy bear on its noose of twine like some sort of avant-garde handbag. The guy looks at the bear and then looks at me. I look back at him. Nobody says anything.

Magnetic Mountain

16th July 2012

Last Monday, having convinced myself that a thirty-five hour train journey was the only way I was going to read the last four hundred pages of Anna Karenina - a course of reasoning that my abject and ongoing failure to complete the book suggests was entirely flawed, and that, after careful consideration, appears not so much a poorly conceived plan as an elaborate feat of self-deception to guarantee and prolong my failure - I boarded a sleeper at Kazansky Station and set off for the Magnetic Mountain.

The journey was in two legs; first, overnight from Moscow to Samara, where I would spend a night, and then on through the Urals to Magnitogorsk, which translates roughly as Magnetic Mountain City. There are few better feelings than falling asleep on a night train bound for an unknown destination. It’s the perfect synthesis of two of my favourite activities, namely going somewhere and doing nothing. The train facilitated both, propelling me towards an untravelled world while rocking me gently to sleep, and in that blissful state I wondered whether it was possible to fall in love with a machine. I was awoken the next morning by a soft breeze from Tatarstan blowing through the open window.

Samara is famous for beautiful women, beer and space rockets, and unsurprisingly, 24 hours there wasn’t nearly enough. But the Magnetic Mountain was beckoning, and on Wednesday afternoon I climbed into my third class carriage for the eighteen hour second leg of my journey. A placard in the window confirmed my destination: Magnitka: Magnitogorsk’s nickname, but also the name of the mountain of pure iron ore, a geological anomaly, that had brought the steel industry there in the first place.

I wasn’t expecting the Orient Express, but the exiguous confines of the platzkart, an undivided dormitory car for about seventy people, were rendered more uncomfortable by the vast proportions and poor respiratory health of most of its occupants. My immediate neighbours were  representative of the whole carriage: the elderly couple below my bunk were almost spherical, and snored in contrapuntal duet, while the shaven-headed squaddie opposite had a vicious, barking report of a cough that woke me with a start throughout the night. My romantic notions of Russian train travel were left behind in Samara; I was trundling through the Urals in a mobile hospital ward for the terminally ill.

Upon arrival in Magnitogorsk the next morning I understood why my fellow passengers had had a cough; it was because they were from Magnitogorsk. I soon became aware of an unfamiliar, acrid sensation at the back of my throat, accompanied shortly afterwards by a dull but persistent headache. I’d anticipated an industrial city with a bit of smog but hadn’t bargained for an ecological disaster zone. Magnitogorsk ranks as one of the most polluted places in the world, due to the sulphur, lead, heavy metals and other toxic chemicals spewed into the air day and night by the iron and steel works, built in a punishing frenzy of forced labour as part of Stalin’s Five Year Plans in the 1930s. The workers, mere cogs in the Stalinist machine, were accommodated as close as possible to, and downwind from, the steel plant, in a supposedly model (but largely inadequate) city, while the bosses lived in a separate village carefully situated to avoid the poisonous fumes carried on the prevailing winds.

Since its foundation, there has always been work in Magnitogorsk, and wages there today are higher than the national average. Sixty-four thousand people out of a population of 420,000 are employees of MMK, the semi-privatised company, controlled by billionaire Viktor Rashnikov, that now runs the works. But what provides a living for so many also deals them and their families a slow and premature death. The hospitals are bursting with cases of bronchial diseases and lung cancer. In winter a black crust of soot settles on the snow, and the soil is contaminated for miles around. According to local doctors, only 1% of children born there are healthy.

I took a taxi through a grid system of drab and neglected tenement blocks – the city centre, apparently, although it was hard to tell. This wasn’t the sort of town that you stroll around. I had a few hours until I met the first of my two local contacts, so I went to my hotel for a much-needed nap. The concierge seemed confused by my visit. The city was closed to foreigners during the USSR, and they’re still pretty rare today. I waved my copy of Anna Karenina at her but she didn’t seem to understand. I could hardly blame her.

A few hours later, Andrei and his mate Rostislav arrived to take me for a spin around town in a clapped out Lada with The Offspring blasting from the stereo. We stopped at an enormous monumental statue of a worker handing a newly forged sword to a warrior, built to commemorate the pivotal role that Magnitogorsk played during World War II, when it produced (as local pupils are still taught) every  second tank and every third shell for the Soviet war machine. On the other side of the River Ural lay the steel works, a dreadful panorama of blackened superstructures and belching chimneys. Andrei explained that effluent from the works gets pumped directly into the river, and I was horrified to see people bathing in it. We then passed a leisure centre, ice hockey stadium and gleaming new church, all of which were built by MMK for the local population. They still haven’t got round to putting proper filters on the factory chimneys.

Andrei and Ros had both graduated from the State Technological University of Magnitogorsk with diplomas in the Pressure Treatment of Metals. This is the sort of degree that’s available in Magnitogorsk. The two universities in the city were established, like everything else, to serve the steel works. Andrei had worked as a supervisor at the plant for two years, before deciding that he couldn’t take it any longer and jacking it in to pursue his bass playing. ‘The steel works eats people’, he told me. Ros was a car salesman and guitarist in his spare time. We picked up their drummer, who introduced himself as Bert Molotov, and his uncle Tim, cranked up some Rage Against the Machine, and drove off into Bashkortostan to go swimming. The lake was mercifully clean.

Loud guitar music and frequent road trips into the Urals were the main ways these understandably disaffected youths seemed to cope with living in Magnitogorsk. Bert Molotov was also heavily into computer games, sci-fi and fantasy, and at his house later that evening he presented me with one of his own exquisitely detailed drawings, an apocalyptic vision of a huge flying metal insect destroying a city of burning skyscrapers.

I asked them what locals thought of the air pollution and got mixed responses. Andrei said that most people still clung to a Soviet attitude which valued work over everything else, including health. Ros added that the pollution didn’t kill people straight away, so they ignored it. Bert quipped that it was -40 in winter and +40 in summer, so why would anyone worry about a little air pollution.

We spent the night drinking beer and roaming the mostly deserted streets while the steel works blazed and roared from across the Stygian river. We stopped at the palatka, a tent-shaped memorial to the first prisoners’ encampment established here in 1929. Before the city could even be begun, hundreds of thousands slaved incessantly in this inhospitable climate while living in tents and building the steel works with their bare hands. Thirty thousand are said to have died in the process.

My second and final evening in Magnitogorsk was spent in the company of my other contact, Pasha, who drove me around in his camper van with his girlfriend Katja and the baby-faced Alexei, who didn’t speak a word of English but insisted on smashing high-fives and urging me to swig from a bottle of warm imitation champagne. I asked to take his photo but he wouldn’t have any of it, worried that I might be a member of Interpol. We crossed the river and Pasha scrambled the van, emblazoned with the legend ‘Wipeout’, up the side of an enormous slag heap. From the vantage point at the top we could see the glowing city, black river and livid, chemical fires of the works burning eerily in the distance as in the background of a Bosch painting.

As we took in the view, Pasha informed me proudly that the River Ural was the boundary between Europe and Asia. We had just crossed into Asia, he said, and now we were looking back into Europe. It was like the Bosphorus in Istanbul, where by the way he’d been. I said I hadn’t been there yet. I wanted to, but I’d come here instead. Why, he asked. Why did you come here? I said maybe it was the mountain. It was magnetic, perhaps it had drawn me here. Oh no, he said. The iron ore ran out a long time ago. There’s no magnetic mountain left. 

The Future of Memory

In his À la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust writes of memories unfurling and unfolding like Japanese paper flowers suspended in water – from small seedlike bundles into fragile and exquisite miniature villages. Try as he might to control and artificially instigate the flow of reverie and trance into which he is so often plunged – whether from the confines of his cork-lined room or while he retraces his steps in the twilight hours – he finds that he must wait for the past to descend upon him.

Perhaps the most famous episode in the book is his encounter with a small cake, a madeleine, which brings back a world about which he had largely forgotten. For the great master of remembrance, the world is pregnant with such sensory triggers – madeleines – keys to unlocking forgotten doors which lead to vast networks of significance, cascading layers and delicate schematics of voice, tone, shade and place, that we had forgotten were contained within us, and which we may feel are in danger of dissolving into dust at a touch.

Recent experimental research on memory seems to at least partially confirm aspects of this Proustian picture. It suggests that the act of remembering is like taking something out of a jar, reconstructing it, and placing it back. Like a drawing that has been endlessly retraced, or a whisper that has been endlessly repeated, the image may gradually diverge from the original. The more we remember something, the more it takes on a character that the original experience may not necessarily have had. The greatest potential for revelatory reminiscences – madeleine moments – lies with those memories which have been least touched, least coloured by their position within the ever evolving edifices that we are.

This goes against long held conceptions of memory as a fixed impression of events which can be recovered through probing and interrogation – from Plato’s view that through a dialectical process of anamnesis, recollection, we can recall the eternal truths that our souls were acquainted with before we were born, to the psychoanalyst’s view that through a discursive process of personal archaeology we can peel back the layers to uncover the truth of the past. We constantly rewrite ourselves and remould our past. Those neglected extremities which are strangely fresh and less familiar to us are either re-illuminated, and hence redrafted, or otherwise remain shrouded in obscurity. After successive redrafting one might reasonably expect harmony and resonance to win out over accuracy. Meaningful shapes come into relief out of the raw blocks of sense, becoming more familiar with every recollection. These shapes are shoehorned into recognisable motifs and recurring patterns, which characterise not only the near and distant past, but also our immediate experience, as it settles into our malleable mental wax.

This process of fixing and reforming, reworking and remoulding is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. First and foremost, we formulate and negotiate versions of occurrences in language, which furnishes us with our universe of meanings, an immense constellation of semantic planets, small centres of gravity around which sense and memory can cluster. For millennia we have translated, transformed, and transfigured our individual and shared memories into conversation, ink, paper, singing, music, painting, performance: ornate figures, steps, the vibration of vocal chords, string, reeds, pipes, brass, patterns of colour depicting scenes with increasing accuracy and  resemblance, aided by mirrors and secret techniques.

*

 Technologies that capture and reproduce light and sound have dramatically enlarged the possibilities for articulating and retelling what happens to us, such that we have been able to sing with moving images and paint with sound. By moving from a state of speculative investigation and serendipitous discovery to highly organised reconnaissance raids on creation’s secrets, our vocabulary for representing things has expanded at an astonishing rate. We are creating an increasingly rich electronic echo of our experience and of the world around us – harvesting light, sound, movement, signal, speech and touch, transmitted and synchronised using invisible waves and configurations of light and magnetism. While we still think of memories being captured, stored and replayed in the form of physical objects – paintings, books, wax discs, tape cartridges, compact discs, hard drives, and electronic devices – we are moving towards a world in which our memories will surround us, whether through new display technologies, retinal projection or direct neural interfaces.

One wonders how an all-encompassing electronic echo might affect the way we create and relate to our memories. What are the implications of having a comprehensive record of all we experience? What if we could be confronted with an all-singing, all-dancing sensory reproduction of those precious, Proustian madeleine moments? What if the complete annals of the recent past, previously consigned to the book of nature or the mind of God, were thrown open to us? Would our experience of recollection be augmented by access to all of this detail – or would it destroy our ability to form memories, like a sculptor who is unable to let marble fall from the block?

Will direct and continuous access to the stuff of memory give us privileged insights into the nature and shape of our lives as a whole? Will it help to lift us up above the corridors of time, to reflect upon our whims, habits, decisions, or to give us insight into the texture of our existence? We hear that those on the brink of death see their whole lives flash before them in an instant, often accompanied by a feeling of ecstatic revelation. Jorge Luis Borges writes of the realisation that the paths that one has taken in life trace the contours of one’s face. In a Borgesian moment, W.G. Sebald recounts a dream in which he realises that the maze in which he has been wandering represents a cross-section of his brain. In these moments of revelation we are raised up above the accumulated sprawl of sense, the tangled morass of crossing paths, and we witness shape and meaning in the whole that it was not previously possible to perceive. In the fifteenth century, painters used a technique known as anamorphosis to create paintings which apparently depicted strange chaotic scenes or monstrous landscapes, but which, viewed from a specific spot, revealed saints, sacred visions or secrets. Being able to witness our whole lives spread out before us could well be an experience akin to that of seeing the earth from space for the first time: an unexpected, awe-inspiring apparition that, at least temporarily, transfigures our time spent in the thick of things.

Perhaps we might imagine that being given access to an archive of our every moment might help to give us a perspective on our life that usually evades us in our imperfect, partial, and ad hoc acts of sense-making and reflection that we engage in every day. While our mind and sensory apparatus grasp things and concepts which are forged from the heat of a colossal subterranean current of innumerable instances– from our earliest experiences of a given object or idea, to our most recent acquaintances with it – what would it be like to be confronted with every case at any moment? While we may have more or less insistent hints and insinuations of past experiences in our daily lives, what would it be like to be able to see every apple that we have ever seen, to witness every shade of blue, to access every interaction with a given person, to see the context of our hearing, reading or speaking any given word, to call to mind every time that we have stood at a certain spot, eaten a certain combination of foods, listened to a certain song, tilted our head at a certain angle, breathed in a precise volume of air, witnessed a certain hue combined with a certain humidity?

How might we utilise such a rich record of the past? We usually ignore, discard or overlook the shadow of transactional detritus that accumulates around us as we move through our lives. Might our electronic echo mimic the functioning of our memory and strategies we presently employ to keep what we need and value close, and to consign what we do not need to distant perimeters? One can imagine algorithms to assist us with emphasising and de-emphasising aspects of our echo. Perhaps our technologies to artificially augment recollection will imitate the natural functioning of our memory in the same way our floating and flying machines imitate insects and birds. Perhaps our electronic echo will recreate not only the stuff of memory, but also the ways in which we filter, select and posit patterns, the inscrutable manner in which certain memories present themselves to us. Or perhaps we might conceive of radical new ways to explore, organise and analyse our memories – synthesising disparate aspects of our experience or sorting the past by some arbitrary attribute: to see an alphabetical list of every word that we have spoken, to see every ellipse or rectangle of given dimensions that we have seen, to feel every motion within a given range of velocities, to witness every episode with certain light conditions accompanied by a given temperature, to see every mass or structure that has risen before us at a certain angle, with a certain shape. In addition to new kinds of forensic autobiography one can imagine the emergence of new cultural forms: elaborate synesthetic symphonies, immersive sensory collages, concatenated litanies of time.

*

While we will no doubt continue to contrive ever more cunning machines to capture and reproduce our experience of the world, ultimately we must all confront the finitude of our situation, which is the end of all remembering. While we may be able to leave behind us an archive of all that we have seen, heard and felt, the significance of these things is difficult for others to comprehend without our being present to confer meaning on them. When we attempt to communicate to others the significance of things that happen to us we either assume a background of shared experience, or – through conversations or cultural artefacts, paintings or Proustian narratives – we must attempt to reconstruct a picture of our past which highlights why something holds meaning for us in the way that it does. While the tree makes fruit and the bee makes honey, we humans manufacture and traffic in meaning, and the sensory stuff out of which this is created is like dust or pollen. Artefacts that we leave – whether paintings or photographs, recordings or receipts – gain significance insofar as they relate to the narratives or sensibilities of other people, as agents of meaning. Without us there to frame, contextualise, curate or explain it, our electronic estate, the raw register of our experience, would appear as a colourful vapour encircling a black hole. It is strange to contemplate that while people of the past have left us ruins and fragments, one day we will leave incomprehensibly vast electronic corpora, like complexes of buildings and spaces, staircases and corridors, exhibition rooms and waiting rooms, lobbies and altars, gardens and libraries – with tables laid, fires lit, and objects arranged in anticipation of we know not what, without a person in sight to explain what any of it means.

 

Cemeteries by the Sea

30th May 2012

A few days ago I finished translating Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière Marin. I was pleased to finish, considering that it must have taken me a little over two years. It’s easy enough to lose track of time, but I know that I can’t have started more than three years ago. When I picked up my copy of Valéry’s poems from an Oxfam bookshop, I noted the date inside the front cover. It’s not something I normally do. I have a private ritual of writing my name in all the books I buy, but I don’t date them. I assume I did so only because a previous owner had – with the enigmatic timespan ‘82-83’. I can’t think what relation existed between Pamela Sneddon’s ownership of the Poésies and that particular year, unless she had decided to circumscribe her interest in Valéry to a set twelvemonth. If I come across her copies of du Bellay and Éluard, marked ‘83-84’ and ‘84-85’, I’ll know that she was engaged in a carefully timetabled programme of self-improvement. It seems unlikely, but we shall see.

I dated my Valéry, though, and so, in February 2012, I know that I may have taken as long as three years to finish my version of the Cimetière. The work wasn’t constant. I had, and still have, projects more pressing and less redundant than trying to translate a symbolist meditation on death in the high noon of a Mediterranean cemetery. But it still amounts to a considerable chunk of time and effort. And if the task didn’t obsess me from day one, I certainly stepped up my hours towards the end. As the final stanza came into view, and it seemed like I might actually complete what I’d started, I spent full days – and weeks – concentrating on reaching the finish-line. Which, finally, I have.

Toward the end, I thought more and more about the experience of translation, how it feels to try and alter something so fundamentally while not altering it at all. First of all, I wanted to explain and justify the decisions I had made. This is natural enough: a mixture of pride and defensiveness comes with the territory. I remembered an exercise I went through several times at university, comparing and contrasting an Italian poem with an English translation. The examiners chose poetic translations that, necessarily, departed from their originals in one way or another. This game of spot the difference had a predatory edge; it was difficult not to take pleasure in the translator’s weaknesses. First resorts were pointing out the untranslatability of a word or phrase; failure to replicate the secondary connotations of a line; an elevation of connotation over denotation; a strangeness of syntax flattened; a metaphor unnecessarily tautened. More fairly, more rarely, we would note where the translator had been successful: a phrase turned into a perfect English equivalent, pitched and placed as in the original tongue; a musical effect miraculously reproduced. Looking over my own translation with the same eye, the more I wanted to defend and the more I wanted to explain. Sometimes I wanted simply to throw up my hands and make clear that something was just impossible to translate, other times I wanted to point out the deftness with which I’d managed to deal with an expression or line. And of course, I wanted to make sure that English readers would understand just how hard Valéry is in the first place.

All of this is as petty as it is understandable. And it’s unnecessary. Translations are odd, hybrid things, but they need to get by on their own. It shouldn’t – doesn’t – matter that certain stanzas took as long as six weeks for me to crack, others only a few hours. Nor does the experience of what I think of as a linguistic synaesthesia that comes with reading as a translator. This is important to me: the strange and dynamic intermingling and superposition of French and English; the experience of a rhythm or rhyme momentarily appearing bright in the sidereal gap between two languages. But that is a private and fleeting thing. If I were to try and pull the reader into that space I would be defeating the point of the exercise. Though that experience and the processes stemming from it are the fabric of my English Cemetery, I’m content to leave them latent in it.

What has begun to seem more interesting to me, as I go over them again, are my reasons for starting the translation – my reasons for coming to, and coming back to the Cimetière Marin in the first place. This too is a private experience, but not, I think, such a specialised one. Though perhaps they have the occasion to feel it particularly strongly, it’s not reserved for translators. It has something to do with the idea of reading tout court; with the way that certain texts and pieces accrue significance in our lives.

I didn’t embark on the translation because the Cimetière Marin is an important piece by an important writer. It is, of course. Valéry was one of France’s most lauded and laurelled men of letters, and the Cimetière Marin is a defining piece of twentieth-century literature. But important poems and important writers, rare as they may be in any one era, have accumulated over the years; Valéry is not the only one. Nor did I embark on the translation out of personal affection for the poem, or for Valéry. What affection I have for Valéry is cut through with a sort of reflexive and Protestant scepticism for his navel-gazing. He cuts a quintessentially French figure of the intellectual, whose interests extend to all fields except the practical. And he represents a version of culture of which I am, more than anything else, suspicious: a form of establishment in which high-culture is crafted by statute, rather than by the unreliable graces of friendship or public and academic interest. This is not a world with which I’m particularly comfortable, and Valéry’s writings exist at its centre: the work of a uniquely incisive mind happy to live in the ivory tower built and protected by such cultural conditions. The Cimetière is symptomatic of this protected distance from the world. It transforms a graveyard in the killing heat of a Mediterranean noon into a theatre of classicism, music and metaphysics: gods keep troves of light, marble tombs guard shadows, doves and sails exchange presences above miraging waves. Even as larvae burrow through the tear ducts of the dead, it is not dying that worries Valéry but – more abstract altogether – death. And all this across twenty-four stanzas of dense and classical French. Shaping a world where Zeno’s paradoxes can be made to bear the burden of mortality’s pain, Valéry’s language  is seductively smooth; the poem orchestrates its gathering resources until a point of near resolve and returns to its beginning, brooding on a bright void. It is an astonishingly beautiful thing; for me, almost problematically so.

I did not, then, start translating the Cimetière because I like it – though I do – or because it is important – though it is. I translated the Cimetière because of the way in which it came to stand for the relationship that I have ended up having with Valéry over the past eight years or so. That relationship is a strange sort of aleatoric acquaintance that has grown at hazard since I first came across an essay he wrote. I was nineteen perhaps, possibly younger. The text was in a collection of twentieth-century literary essays and came with a note on Valéry’s career and major works, where the Cimetière Marin took top billing. The essay is on poetry and prose as analogues, respectively, of dancing and walking. Prose is going somewhere: it’s all about destination. Poetry scorns destination: it’s rhythmic movement; a concatenation of measured, aimless beauties calculated to stir the soul into something just beyond itself. I know why this appealed to me so much at the time, when I found it: I would have welcomed anything that exalted poetry over her plain sister. But I didn’t get round to reading any more Valéry for a while after that. I didn’t have the French, for a start, and my intellectual curiosity wasn’t piqued enough to go looking too far. That one essay seemed like enough to be getting on with.

Some time later, though, I ended up buying a copy of his collected writings on poetry. I found it by chance in a cavernous second-hand bookshop, in a corner with a persistent leak in the roof. The collection, and T.S. Eliot’s introduction to it, aroused my interest a little further, but, again, not far enough. I slotted it on my shelf, between same-sized hardbacks. A good year later still, in the same bookshop, beneath the same leak, I found another Valéry: his dialogues, introduced by Wallace Stevens. Like Eliot, Stevens professed Valéry’s influence on his work. I read one of the dialogues, but other reading projects pressed; I slotted the book next to the first Valéry, between the same same-sized hardbacks.

Slowly, though I kept not getting round to him, Valéry became the person I was going to read as soon as I had time. When I left university, I moved to Paris in an attempt to learn French. I failed to fall in love with the city. I was broke and lonely, despite the presence and generosity of three good friends. Paris – whatever anyone says – is not a fun city to be even temporarily poor in. Despite having no money and only tattered remnants of GCSE French, I took refuge in the bookstalls that line the Seine. From walking these over a few months, I began to realise just how much Valéry had written. In the course of the year I picked up copies of excerpts from his notebooks (Tel Quel, one and two), a treatise on Leonardo da Vinci, and the dialogues. I found Tel Quel alternately enthralling and infuriating. I still have difficulty with the idea that someone could say, with a straight face, ‘Syntax is a faculty of the soul’. Then I worked my way through the dialogues. They are extraordinary, strange and beautiful. For positive and negative reasons they continue to strike me as something that no one else could have written. At one point in The Soul and Dance, Socrates turns towards a doctor with whom he is sitting and asks him if he knows a cure for the poison of all poisons, venom of venoms, the evil that calls itself l’ennui de vivre. Well, says the doctor, that is a good question; life blackens on contact with truth the same way a dubious mushroom blackens on contact with air. Their conversation moves on. I return to the passage occasionally, when I feel in need of cheer. 

A more sensible person would have stocked up on cheap copies of Verne, or Camus, even, who has the benefit of being readable for someone with relatively basic French. But I stuck to Valéry. His name was an island of familiarity in a sea of French authors I’d never heard of, and his books were cheap, too, by dint of ubiquity. Besides, when I wasn’t reading Valéry himself, he never seemed to be far away. I caught up on Borges that year; in his famous story ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’ the eponymous author is credited with a list of publications that include a transposition of the Cimetière Marin from decasyllables into alexandrines, and an invective against Valéry, representing the precise opposite of his true opinion of the great man. During the same six months, I also read Jorge Semprun’s Le Grand Voyage. Sadly little known in England, Le Grand Voyage is one of the great testaments of World War Two, a fictionalised memoir of Semprun’s time in Buchenwald. Among the horrors, Semprun recounts how the camp’s French inmates held secret assemblies in which they tried to hold on to what remains of their culture they could. On instruments contrived from scraps or obtained through theft and corruption, they played chansons and a few classics, and those who knew poems recited them. Semprun’s narrator gives the Cimetière Marin by heart.

Semprun’s recitation represents the moment when Valéry’s poem became one of those texts that I had, sooner or later, to read. There is a parallel scene to the Buchenwald gathering in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Levi was in Auschwitz, and, as a Jew, in an altogether different world than that of the French resistants in the Grand Voyage. No stolen instruments or hours without work to use them in; no recitations before fellow intellectuals. But one day, walking to collect his workgroup’s soup ration, Levi finds himself attempting to recite to his French companion a passage in the Inferno where Dante meets Ulysses. He attempts to translate it line by line for the young Frenchman, but has to skip holes in his memory to reach the key moment, when the sea, finally, closes itself unmarked over Ulysses’ head. The canto is one I come back to time and again. Ulysses among the false counsellors – not Homer’s Ulysses, but Dante’s, who refuses to remain at home when first he returns to Penelope and Telemachus. Bored, he sets out on another voyage. Determined to go beyond the limits of the known world he persuades his men to row through the Pillars of Hercules. God has other ideas: three times the boat is spun round and doused in the sea, and finally it sinks; Ulysses the last to go under, catching a distant glimpse of the peak of Purgatory before the waves press him down for good.

The two scenes, coming together in my mind, fused, in a certain sense into one scene: Levi unaccountably impelled to share his Dante with another man destined to be one of the drowned; Semprun clinging to the broken spars of an intellectual’s vanishing Europe. Both attempting not to let the sea close over their own heads, and thinking that, somehow, it might be held back by culture. The distance between the two camps – between a resistant’s experience of them and a Jew’s – cannot be effaced, of course; the two scenes are not one scene. But together they pulled Valéry’s poem into alignment with the horrors of war and the grandeur of the Commedia, and inserted it into my consciousness of these things for good. This, finally, was when the Cimetière Marin it took up its place in the mentally-constructed landscape of cultural monuments that I’ve acquired over the years.

This is the sort of landscape that I assume all broad-readers have: an ever-growing and shifting system of half-located buildings waiting to be explored, built from and linked by paths of association that are half real and half drawn from chance personal experience. A vague map where we place the things that we feel are important. There is a concrete reality to the importance of the Cimetière Marin, and there is a personal reality, as there is with any text. This landscape is a product of the two. That personal reality is less about love or enthusiasm, than about the way in which the things I know have pulled more things to themselves. The Cimetière’s presence in this mental landscape of mine has less to do with my feelings about the poem itself than my feelings about the way in which it has worked itself into my experience of life. It has to do with the manner in which, at some point, things so aligned that the Cimetière became part of the grand European sweep of high culture and base history at once shared and strange to me, and which seems to constitute at the same time an invitation and an exclusion. An invitation, that is, to enter and consider a world that can only ever remain beyond me and my abilities. A world that permeates historical and geographical fact but doesn’t quite coincide with it. 

In a way that is difficult – but I think important – to explain, the Cimetière became one of those texts that is always being spoken to by other texts, and which is always speaking back; and one of those texts that is always being spoken to by history, and which cannot help but in some way reply. It is part of the world of sheltered offices, lodgings and intellectual chatter that belonged so completely to Eliot and Borges, but it is also part of the invasions, resistances and camps that closed over the heads of Levi and Semprun before, somehow, they resurfaced on wreckage, heaving for air.

I’m aware of the fact that this may seem a circuitous way of restating the most commonplace of sentiments: the Cimetière means, or came to mean, something to me. I am also aware of the fact that this kind of meaning – the gradual accretion of secondary associations – is not the actual significance of the poem in the sense a modern academic would use. The significance I am talking about here is something larger; though it partakes of things that the close reader, biographer and cultural historian would hold central, it exceeds them all, individually and collectively. It is not about what I have done to the poem, but what has occurred to the poem through me, and to me through the poem, and to both through what is probably best called accident: the falling out of things over time, long and short term. The Cimetière Marin exemplifies this form of meaning – this form of coming-to-mean – for me. It draws its coming-to-mean across a wide and fraught portion of history, ties it to a portion of my life particularly full of learning and discoveries, and pools it in a text which even now, after two years of translation, I am still grappling to understand. But, in doing so, the Cimetière is, I think, only throwing these things into relief: it holds up to the light the processes by which all texts, if they stay with us, accumulate their meanings.  And if, in doing so, it has taught me something about this mental landscape of mine, and assured its presence there, it has not fixed its location: it has not become a thing understood, a place known and solid; I will continue to make my way through its multiplying rooms; the paths to and from it will shift and proliferate; its meanings will continue to accrue.

Lunchtime, Ukraine International Airlines

8th November 2011

We are high in the sky, not far from Chernobyl, as the three-eyed crow flies. I am staring out of the window, wondering how a landscape so unremittingly flat and dull could be known as steppe, when lunch arrives in a lurid yellow rectangular box. While I doubt that the presentation of food is high on the agenda of any airline’s economy class hospitality division, Ukraine International Airlines’ policy in this regard arouses immediate suspicion. One half of the top panel of the box has a viewing window cut into it, but this is of little use given that whatever it is intended to reveal is sulking in a steaming wrap of tinfoil. The contents of the other half, meanwhile, are sequestered in darkness. The airline has not presented the food badly; it has done its utmost to conceal it altogether. This is not promising. ‘Bon appétit!’ urges the box in gaudy blue lettering, while its confederate, the paper cup, chimes in with ‘Enjoy!’ I’ve a feeling that the three of us might not get on.

It is clear from attempting to remove the white-hot tinfoil that the main course has just been microwaved. Some use the verb ‘to nuke’ for this method of cooking, and never has it seemed more apposite than when dining in a fallout zone. But hang on a second – isn’t tinfoil supposed to make microwaves blow up? I must be wrong. Perhaps my meal has literally been nuked: fusion cuisine. The first course bears a superficial resemblance to omelette and chips with broccoli. The portion is minuscule; several half-lives ago, presumably, it was adequate. The omelette is a homogenous mass of, who can say, rubbery-plastic or plasticky-rubber? I commit it resentfully to my stomach. It is the closest thing I have ever eaten to strange matter, the hypothetical substance of oddly uniform density that some quack scientists predicted the world would turn into if the CERN experiments were allowed to go ahead. I glance out of the window. The world looks the same as before. Scant relief. (more…)

Rush Hour, Nairobi

24th February 2011

Nairobi is often described as the hub of East Africa, but if there’s a wheel attached to it, there’s no way it can be revolving. Not at the moment, at least. I am sitting in three lanes of traffic on a downhill dirt slope approaching the Parklands roundabout, a chaotic junction just to the north of the Central Business District, over which a Chinese-constructed flyover is slowly taking shape. To call it a roundabout in its current state would accord it a sense of movement and regulation that the scene of mayhem in front of me defiantly resists. A slipway to my left peters out into a mire of wet concrete, an unfinished overpass juts precariously into the sky, and, in the epicentre of it all, a monstrous engine judders back and forth in the red earth, oblivious to the jostling cars that swarm around it. “Bear with us – we are building for the future!” announces a flaking, hand-painted sign on a low wall which looks like it’s been there for years. It’s dwarfed by a billboard which urges the melee of motorists below to ‘insure their assets against political violence and terrorism’. The huge accompanying image of a burning car with a rejoicing rebel gunman beside it does little to calm my nerves.  It’s rush hour in Nairobi, and I’m still getting used to it.

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