Author Archives: Peter Scott

Tradeskin

14th January 2015

1638

You can only get to Lambeth by ferry.
There have I ventured five several times
to view the rarities at John Tradescant’s Ark,
where I did spend the whole day in perusing,
and that superficially, such as he had gathered,
and was near persuaded that a man
might in one day behold there more things
than if he spent all his life in travel,
as beasts, fowl, fishes, precious stones,
serpents, worms, coins, shells and feathers
of sundry nations, forms and colours;
diverse curiosities in carving and painting;
and a garden with diverse outlandish plants.

I had the pleasure to meet Master Tradescant
(sometimes written Tradeskens, Tredeskyns,
Tradeskin, or in numerous other forms),
lately the Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens,
Vines and Silkworms at the Oatlands palace.
He is a boyish old man (senex puerilis)
in finery worn ragged, like to a digger’s clothes.
I have heard men swear he is a Dutchman.
He told such tales I did scarce believe
of a voyage of embassy in 1618
that sailed from Gravesend to Archangel,
known as Muscovy; of an expedition
to Barbary against Algerian pirates,
where he did spend much time ashore
and saw the Gladiolus Corn Flag
spread over many acres of ground;
and of the times his son, the younger John,
was passing in the colony for his Majesty
to gather all rarities of flower, plant and shell.
He has not seen his son since April last,
he told me, and then bade me leave,
and vanished to an adjoining wilderness.

His garden is of an exact oval figure
planted with cypress, cut flat and set as even
as a wall could have formed it. The tulips,
anemones, ranunculi and crocuses
are held for the rarest in the world,
drawing all the virtuosi
and persons of most illustrious quality.
The Christian world is also indebted
unto that painful industrious searcher
and lover of all nature's variety
for the late knowledge of the spiderwort,
the soon-fading spiderwort,
Tradescant’s spiderwort,
the which he first received of a friend
who thought it was the silkgrass of Virginia.

In his courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale
and a very ingenious little boat of bark,
and in the Ark there are a salamander,
a chameleon, a pelican, a remora,
a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge,
a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree,
a flying squirrel, a squirrel like a fish,
all kinds of bright coloured birds from India,
a number of things changed into stone
(viz. a piece of human flesh on the bone,
gourds, a piece of wood, an ape's head,
a cheese, et cetera), a picture wrought in feathers,
the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy,
a very natural wax hand under glass,
all kinds of precious shells, stones and coins,
a piece of wood from the cross of Christ,
pictures from the church of St Sophia
in Constantinople copied by a Jew,
two cups of ‘rinocerode’ (but is this the horn
of the quadruped or the beak of the hornbill?),
a cup of an Indian alcedo, which is a kind
of unicorn, many Turkish shoes,
a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof
with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon,
a human bone weighing forty-two pounds,
Indian arrows, an elephant's head, a tiger's,
encephalitic and Siamese foetuses
pickled in vinegar, a fine hawking glove
believed to have been made for Henry VIII
and a hawk’s hood of gold foil and chain-work,
an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision,
some very light African wood,
the mantle of Chief Powhatan of Virginia
of tanned hides from the white-tailed deer
and bead-work from the shells of marginella,
a girdle like the Turks in Jerusalem wear,
the passion of Christ carved daintily on a plum stone,
eighty faces carved on a cherry stone,
pictures to be seen by a cylinder
which otherwise appear like confused blots,
a large magnet stone, St Francis in wax under glass,
a stone found in the Indies in the water
whereon were graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph,
a beautiful gift from the Duke of Buckingham
of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather
by which the four elements are signified,
Isidor's manuscript of De Natura Hominis,
a scourge with which Charles V scourged himself
and a hat band of snake bones.
                                                    I do believe
that of all places in England, Tradescant’s Ark
is best for the improvement of children
for the variety of objects which may be seen
by taking the ferry from Westminster to Lambeth.
I gather from his manservant Master Bayler
that Master Tradescant made his will this year,
being sickly in body but perfect in his mind,
with all his properties being left to his son,
the younger John, on the proviso
that if he shall desire to part with the cabinet
of rarities, he offer it first to the King.
Pray God the collection be not broken up
as the man’s body shall be broken up
as dust for worms: we would never see such wonders
of nature and artifice in one place again.

Old days

My mum used to run the Darby and Joan in the village where I grew up. It was a social club for local pensioners. Once a fortnight, she would drive round the village to pick up the members, and take them down to the village hall, where they would drink tea, eat cake, and chat. Most of the members were women who had outlived their husbands. For many of them, it was the only time they left their homes. 

Knowing most of the elderly people in the village means that my mum has been to a lot of funerals, and she talks eloquently about the concept of a good funeral. Death is inevitable, but it isn’t always sad. The elderly can reach a point when they are ready to go – they have lived through happiness and sadness, and have passed on to their children and grandchildren whatever they have to pass on. My mum knows this, and I know this: I work as a geriatrician in West Dorset.

As long as death is inevitable, we are invited to either find our peace with it, or suffer the loneliness and anger of having to die. I envy those who find acceptance, and I value the concept of a good death. I have seen it happen many times, and it can be a tender, gentle experience for those involved.

For all its inevitability, death is nonetheless an enforced ending. Given the choice, we might choose to live on, or we might not. But there is hardly ever choice. Death is the end of hope and possibility, as much as it is of life. The meaning of the end is determined by perspective – not just the perspective of the people who are left behind, but the quasi-abstract perspective of the person who has gone. Many of the women my mum knew, and many of my patients, recognise that the moments of note in their lives have passed. They often tell me they have nothing left to look forward to. It’s hard to argue with them.

Each year, they cross the names from their address books of friends and relatives who have died. They watch the numbers dwindle, and eventually one of them is left. They have no one else to ring, to visit, or be visited by. Where else is there for these people to go, except to their graves?

Loneliness is a modern epidemic. By its nature, we don’t see it. Our elders sit indoors, feeling isolated, but not knowing what to do about it. There are many uncomfortable statistics on this theme, but consider that almost 4 million elderly people in the UK say that the TV is their main source of company. Imagine being able to watch the world going on all around you, but without being able to interact with it. Loneliness is a huge risk factor for poor health. It is associated with dementia, suicide, heart disease and death.

And this is where I hit a wall. A lonely old man dies, and we reassure ourselves that that’s alright – he has lived a long life, and had nothing else to live for. But why was his life so empty, and why is it OK that he lived in isolation from family and community? It hasn’t always been like this.

There is a difference between dying as a fully integrated and valued member of a community, and dying outside of society. But we forget this distinction. Being old and frail can predominate the value-judgement we make when someone dies: age and frailty can prevent deeper consideration of the circumstances, as if advanced years and physical infirmity were an explanation, or even a justification, for loneliness.

It is hackneyed to suggest we are just marching towards the end of our lives, because it discounts any intrinsic value to what we might achieve before we die. However, we are in danger of embedding the reality of the cliché in the way we behave as individuals and communities. We fix an unnecessary linearity to the flow of life, from being born into our families, to being ejected out the other side when we are old and frail. There are, of course, contours on the way, but our exit from the embrace of organised society can look as inescapable as our deaths.

Those ladies and gentlemen that my mother helped, those patients of mine who sat at home waiting for the next visit from the carer, were daughters or sons. Most were wives or husbands, and many were mothers or fathers. But now they are members of communities who do not see them, and have no role for them. Or rather, they have ceased to be members of those communities.

Death is the end of hope, but hope can end a long time before it. We live in a world where much of our value is determined by our utility – we either have potential as a child, or we have current worth as a working, economically-active adult. This is a value judgement of our time, and it stems from numerous assumptions. My patients warn me not to get old. Some of this is down to the strain of living with physical infirmity, but it is also founded upon the tacit appreciation that the elderly have neither function nor purpose.

The debate about assisted suicide stems from the tragic cases of younger men and women who have been laid low by progressive or sudden neurological illnesses, but in practice would apply in the majority of cases to the elderly. We label it as freedom of choice, but we will offer it to men and women who are allowed to feel like they have become a burden on society. In Oregon, where assisted suicide is allowed, about two thirds of patients who choose it do so because they feel they have become a burden to their families. In such circumstances, is assisted suicide the free choice of the fully empowered, or is it the corralled choice of people with nowhere else to go?

To be allowed to believe that you are merely a strain on the people around you is to be allowed to forget that you are also a parent, husband, lover or friend. It is a state of belief that narrows the choices that you can make. It flows from the values of modern society, however quietly expressed: a gentle and subtle form of coercion. The language of value today is couched too often in terms of productivity and consumption; indeed, the word value almost seems to have shed its non-financial meaning. We talk about rising care costs, and the epidemic of ageing. This is our frame of reference, and it is our shared fallacy. It is also an accident of our time – the unintended consequence of 20th century changes to the way we live. As we zoom around the world chasing our dreams, following our opportunities, we do not abandon our seniors purposefully. Instead, we launch ourselves into the world off their shoulders, and by the time we realise they need us again, we are miles away, anchored in another place by the responsibilities of our own lives.

The starting point for care of the elderly, and indeed, for the roles of elderly people, used to be the family unit. But as that has disappeared, or at least diminished as an institution, we have replaced it with nothing. So old people drift in and out of our communities, hoping someone well-meaning will take up the slack.

I am often asked about what I am doing as a geriatrician to provide better care for my patients, and there are certainly issues that we need to address. However, the field of my influence extends only so far. The state of care services for the elderly can be seen as reflecting a more general attitude. Two areas of healthcare most in need of improvement are geriatrics and mental health – two patient groups who are unable to advocate well for themselves, and who lack powerful representation. I can help make geriatric services better, but there is more to it that that. Much of what is required needs to happen in society in general and communities in particular.

The poor health that I manage is often directly influenced by the loneliness my patients experience. Fifty percent of my patients have depression, and while I can prescribe the right medication, I cannot give them purpose. That must come from somewhere else.

There is, however, room for optimism. This needn’t be complicated – small changes can make a huge difference. Talk to someone in the grip of advanced dementia about the things they hold most dear, and watch them come alive. Last Christmas, I took my 18-month-old daughter to one of my wards, and for weeks afterwards, patients who couldn’t remember my name were asking after her. Watch also the way that little children interact with the elderly: it is inquisitive and natural. It is also special, because at some point we lose the comfort we have as toddlers and have to relearn it. Watching a child listen to the recollections of a granny or grandpa is a beautiful, symmetrical thing.

It should be easy to spend 10 minutes chatting to someone elderly, or to let them tell your child a story. What makes it difficult is that the elderly exist separately from the lives we lead. There is too little overlap for interaction to be routine. What would it take for the elderly to be reintegrated into normal life? Elderly day centres built next to schools, nurseries to be located in care homes? Tax incentives for the elderly to downsize their homes, and move nearer their families, or into the hearts of their communities? There are lots of options that do not simply involve the health and social care services doing a better job.

It is easier to understand how important it is when you realise what we are currently missing. It is not just that we can judge a society by how we look after our most vulnerable, but something more fundamental: there is a narrative to human history, and the elderly form a significant part of how we make sense of the world. The elderly are our past, just as children are our future: both matter. 

I want the elderly to be better looked after because I see their suffering every day. If it is important to nurture our children because of their potential and vulnerability, why not also our elders because of their gifts to us and vulnerability?

You may not think that the world we have inherited from the elderly is much to celebrate, but you should at least acknowledge that you might be wrong about that. In any event, you could always ask them about it.  

Party

Every few months there's a news story about a teenage party that gets out of hand. Parents go away, child invites friends on Facebook, party goes viral, house gets trashed. I cringe at the headlines, thankful that I turned 16 at a time when social networking was conducted via MSN Messenger and Nokia 3210s.

It was a joint party, mine and Kirsty's. She had been the first friend I made at my new school after my parents emigrated from Hackney to a quiet market town in Essex, a more unusual move in 1994 than it is today. Our friendship was based on two extraordinary coincidences: not only did we have the same waxed jacket from Marks and Spencer, although hers was green and mine was navy, we also shared a birthday. As did her dad. Kirsty spent her ninth birthday with a babysitter so her parents could go to a Chris de Burgh concert.

Kirsty and I had in common a love of books and a strong anti-authoritarian streak. I credited myself with helping her reject God: her parents were serious Baptists. We were very close for about a year, then Kirsty started spending more time with the group who acted out Famous Five at breaktime, and I started hanging around with Alice, who once regaled Year Four with details of her dad's vasectomy.

Alice came from a rich family and lived in a village. All the rich people lived in villages. She had a pony, six bedrooms, three acres and a Renault Espace. I was deeply impressed by the trappings of wealth. In Hackney, my friends had lived in towerblocks and worn hand-me-down shoes. My richest Essex friend, Millie, had six bedrooms, two acres and a Toyota Previa. Charlotte had five bedrooms, one acre and a company BMW with blinds on the windows. Kirsty had three bedrooms and lived on a modern estate near the leisure centre.

By year six, Kirsty and I hated each other. I called her 'four eyes'; she called me 'pizza-face' because of my freckles. We moved onto the same secondary school, where we avoided each other until Year 10 when we got put in the top sets together. By that time I had been friendless for approximately two years, Alice having abandoned me for the much cooler Becky who, like all the popular girls, shaved her forearms. One lunchtime I was trailing behind them, their arms linked together, when Alice turned round and hissed, 'Leech.'

So I was grateful for my renewed friendship with Kirsty, who was as funny and clever as she'd been seven years before, but without the pudding bowl haircut. We added a couple more girls to our little gang and soon I no longer dreaded school.

The week we decided to have a party was, I realise now, the week of 9/11, or September-the-eleventh as we called it in those days. The events had minimal impact on day-to-day life in north-west Essex.

We planned to invite 40 people. That was the number that had come to my first party, held the year before, for our German exchange students. It had been relatively successful, apart from my exchange partner Luba (a sociopathic 17-year-old who wasn’t in fact German, but Russian) having a septic belly button piercing, and Lars, the German boy I fancied, getting off with slutty Lauren from my Child Development class.

Despite only achieving an E grade in GCSE Child Development ('What happened?', asked the history don at my university interview, 'Did you drop the baby?'), I learnt a great deal in those lessons. This was because I sat on a table with Lauren and her friends, who spent the whole hour talking filth. While I took notes on how to wean a baby, my classmates debated the merits of bloodsports (having sex on one's period) and why some men's cum tastes different from others. These were the kind of girls who went 'dahn the common' on a Friday night, and went out with older boys with pimped-out cars pumping out D12's ‘Purple Hills’ at the traffic lights on the high street.

A few days before our 16th birthday party, one of those boys crashed his car and died. His girlfriend, who was in my year, came to the party and was crying in the corner when my dad went up to her and asked what was wrong. 'Jamie's gone!' she said, or something like that, and my dad put his hand on her shoulder and said 'Don't worry, there are plenty more fish in the sea,' which made her cry even harder.

That anecdote, and most of the others from that night, was relayed to me after our party, because by 10 o'clock I was in bed in my Moroccan-themed bedroom, vomiting into a wastepaper basket. My untrained liver couldn't handle three Bacardi Breezers, a vodka lemonade and half a bottle of wine in such quick succession.

I missed the moment when the girl fell down the stairs and broke her ankle; when someone got angry and started smashing all the terracotta flowerpots; when my friend Ellie got fingered by James R on the playroom sofa in full view of everyone; when someone ripped the hair off my little sister's rocking horse; when Ricky B in my year got a blowjob from a Year Eight girl in the herbaceous border; when a group of boys set fire to the bins – the incident that caused my dad to send everyone home.

I remember my outfit: a tiny pink knitted vest that exposed my midriff, Levis customised with sequins, lavender sequinned stilettos from Dune. Plenty of kohl with Lancôme Juicy Tube on my lips. I remember stumbling into the kitchen to apologise to my parents, because the 40 people had turned into 90 and there were more on the way, and finding them stony-faced watching Have I Got News for You on high volume.

I remember upping my pull count, begun earlier that year on the return leg of my German exchange, to five. Number four was a very blond and very shy boy, Ian, who I didn't fancy in the slightest, but who I would end up going to our prom with because neither of us could find anyone else. The fifth – in between vomits – was Bradley, also blond, with goofy teeth. I didn't fancy him either, but I liked him. We always used to get sat together because our names were next to each other in the register. Bradley wanted to be an actor. In Year Seven he told me he'd shown his dad our class photo and asked him who the fittest girl was. 'He said you, which I wasn't expecting, but I suppose you are quite pretty.' Thanks, I said. 'Except when you concentrate,' he added, 'then you look like a fish.' From that day on, whenever I caught myself concentrating on something in public, I would snap out of it and rearrange my facial features.

While I privately thought myself rather good looking, I had accepted as early as one becomes aware of that stuff that I was not the kind of girl boys fancied. I was too pale, too mousy, too freakishly flat-chested. In an English lesson when we were 12, the boys had decided to hold a Fit Oscars, giving their female classmates awards for various assets: best tits, best legs, best bum and so on. I got best personality.

Somehow, this didn't dent my confidence as much as it should have. I spent my teenage years harbouring a secret, in retrospect deluded, ambition to be a model. I pored over Vogue and spent hours trawling model agency websites and taking photographs of myself. I prayed I would grow to 5'7", the minimum height for models, and used to measure myself every few days, charting my progress – from 5'3” to 5'5 ½” – in pencil on my bedroom wall. My dream was to be spotted, and with this in mind (though I didn't admit it to her) I convinced Kirsty not long after our party to accompany me to Clothes Show Live at the NEC, which I'd heard was rife with model agents. For some reason none of them noticed me, even though I was wearing my highest heels, tons of kohl and dark red lipstick. Because Kirsty was, unknown to her, associated with my private humiliation, I started to resent her slightly. This was exacerbated by the fact she was three inches taller than me.

I was about to move to a smart sixth form college out of town and knew our friendship wouldn't be the same. My last happy memory of us is sharing vodka from an Evian bottle in our final maths lesson as people signed our leavers' shirts. We stayed in touch on and off till we were in our second year of university, but by then we were both in different places: Kirsty had become a born-again, rabidly evangelical Christian, while I was making up for my relatively sedate teenage years by drinking lots of vodka Red Bull and pretending to enjoy going out three nights in a row. She didn't reply to my last Facebook message in 2006.

I found that leaver's shirt at the back of my cupboard while I was clearing out some stuff a few weeks ago. As well as some bland messages of encouragement, a few in-jokes from better friends, there are several references to the party ('Will never forget your amaaazing party, what a night! Em xoxo'; ‘Good luck Anna, hope you have another party soon! Kyle x'). It was, I'm told, a pretty spectacular night, my house and garden the backdrop for the formative sexual experiences of many of my schoolfriends. 

We haven't really talked about it since, but I can't remember my parents being particularly angry about it at the time. Not as angry as they should've been, seeing as we had to get the carpet replaced. 'There's a rumour going round,' someone told me in a science lesson shortly afterwards, 'that your parents let you have that party because they wanted you to be popular.' That's rubbish, I said, but it did make me wonder.

When I go back home, because it will be home until I have my own family, I notice the scratches in the floorboards and the bald rocking horse and feel the same guilt and embarrassment that I felt when I was putting bottles into binbags the day after the party. I still can't look at the playhouse at the back of the garden without remembering Sarah from Food Tech telling me she gave two boys handjobs there, among the discarded teddy bears.

I am no longer in touch with any of the 120 or so people who came that night, although I'm Facebook friends with quite a few of them. I recognise the names, but not the people. They have houses, cars, children. A lot of them still live in or around the town. Bradley I last saw in a university vacation when I got my hair cut. It was four years since I'd last seen him and he'd changed a lot, but I knew it was him as soon as he greeted me in the salon. For some reason, I chose to say nothing. Did I hope he wouldn't recognise me? After all, I was a completely different person. More confident, better looking, certainly cooler. We had an awkward chat about cut and colour and when he returned with the dye he said, 'It is Anna Baddeley, isn't it?' And I felt stupid for not saying anything. 

Subscribing

I subscribe to a certain literary journal, which I’ll call the London Review of Books. Subscribe to it, but almost never read it. Who has time to do that, academics and book publishers apart?

Every year, I fail to cancel my direct debit, either through lazy inattention or because of a vague resolution to read it more, kidding myself that somehow I’ll find a newly crafted pocket of time in which to be exposed to the thoughts of Andrew O’Hagan or Ross McKibbin. I used to think I kept the subscription running so that I could give friends gift subscriptions, but since those started to cost money I’ve stopped giving them. And I expect most of the lucky recipients are probably stuck on the same unreading trudge as me by now, shamed by unopened polybag after unopened fortnightly polybag. These horrible little bags add to the dissatisfaction of the whole subscriber experience for two reasons: they make it clear to visitors that you are not reading your LRBs; and worse, they make the magazines difficult to stack into high piles, which is of course the main point of having them if you want to impress people, which you probably do or probably did if you’re the kind of person that subscribes to the LRB.

I’ve been a subscriber to one thing or another more or less constantly since I took The Beano as a child. At times, I’ve subscribed to more than one thing at once, which even as a student with nothing much to do proved overly ambitious.

It’s always been the same. I’m sure I read all of The Beano when I first got it, including the crap bits like Ivy the Terrible and Lord Snooty. Then, after a while, I skipped to Roger the Dodger, perhaps reading Dennis the Menace and Billy Whizz as well. Eventually, I only really bothered with the occasional stick of bubble gum taped to the front of the comic .

I subscribed to the New Musical Express for much longer, and indeed read it for longer too. I still hang on to issues that I think might be valuable one day (Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards, Jeff Buckley, etc.), but whenever I check on eBay, they’re not worth very much. It was inevitable that I’d stop reading it. The writers I liked grew up and left for the nationals, while I started listening to music that wasn’t made by miserable young men – or at least, wasn’t contingent on the miserableness of the young men who made it.

For some of that time, I also bought Shoot or sometimes Match, learning extraordinary things about odd footballers. I never subscribed to either, but I did once see a photo gallery containing the lead up to, execution and aftermath of Des Walker’s only goal in favour of his own team in professional football. It was against Luton Town for Nottingham Forest, and it was beautiful.

For a while, around the turn of the millennium, I went subscription mad, taking Private Eye, The Economist and the New Yorker at roughly the same time, if not all at once. In hindsight, none of those were especially smart decisions. The New Yorker was great, easily the best magazine that I’ve ever read, but simply overwhelming. Too many issues, too much writing, too much of it good, too intimidating. The Economist I bought because it sounded like the sort of thing I should be reading. It was and is, if we think that we ‘should’ try to improve ourselves through the taking in of mere information. In a sense, it is useful to know about the political situation in Kazakhstan and its potential effect on Western energy security (not good by democratic standards and unlikely to be significant, if memory serves), but in several other senses, it’s not useful at all.

Private Eye was much easier to feel good about reading, and not only because it is an easy read. It’s small in outlook, happily parochial, excellent when serious and solid when not. I suspect it’s also the only one of the three you can keep in your toilet without looking like a prick, or at least, it’s the one you can keep in your toilet which will make you look like less of a prick than either of the others. Keeping magazines in your toilet is, after all, a pretty prickish thing to do. Besides, it’s hard to imagine anyone could spend enough time at their morning evacuations to get through a long New Yorker feature.

Of course if reading’s what you want – and I do, sometimes – then you can get that online, subscribed to or otherwise. Even better, if you read something online about Des Walker’s only goal for the right team in his entire professional football career, and how beautiful it was, you can watch it yourself at the click of a button, rather than taking the word of a grown-up, former football-obsessed Nottingham Forest fan.

But reading’s no reason to be a subscriber, online or especially in print, unless you have a professional need to read the thing in question. Neither is cost – in time, unread copies of subscribed-to magazines will inevitably outweigh the money purportedly saved through buying a subscription. The same holds true for newspapers, though newspaper subscriptions are more defensible, because newspapers are more routine. Once you're in, you're in.  

No, the only real reason to subscribe to a magazine, actually to give money in anticipation of as-yet-unwritten issues, is to be part of a club. And the only way to demonstrate membership of that club is to tell people about your subscription: to stack piles of magazines in your toilet and hope people notice or to give free subscriptions to your friends or write pieces about the things you subscribe to. It’s a good club to belong to: one whose members can think of themselves as people of leisure – they're people with time to consider things like the world, people with the luxury of interests. Serious people, in short (or people who don’t have children, to put it another way). To subscribe is to be a person of discernment, a member of an imagined community of precisely shared sensibilities, and further, a person who receives good things in the post. That’s a very nice thing to be.

With the Sikhs

‘Waheguru ji ka Khalsa, waheguru ji ki fateh!’ It’s a comforting exhortation. The sung greeting, chanted by officiants and congregations in Sikh temples around the world, celebrates the divine and the bonds of historic brotherhood that bind this global community of faith. I’ve heard it a thousand times, initially as a curiosity but, with repetition, it’s sometimes been more reassuring too. During academic sojourns around various sites of the Sikh diaspora – in Delhi, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Singapore, Penang, Shepherd’s Bush – the timbre, the beauty, the explicit sense of community represented in the music has simultaneously soothed and excited. It’s been a cipher for stimulating things to come: old friendships, new acquaintances, fresh bowls of daal (my particular weakness), didactic hagiography, warm hospitality that verges on the punishing due to the sheer volume of chai and whisky involved.

Above all, the verse has been shorthand for fascination – not that of some orientalising grubber (at least I hope not), rather something shimmering through a portal from a vibrant world, far-removed from home. The emotional resonance of that Sikh song is, however, in motion again. From being something of a constant during my mobile studies – something fixed and known in strange surroundings – it’s started to become more personally unsettling of late. I’ve long suspected my travels as a historian around the Sikh diaspora are, in part, more introverted journeys.   

I’ve never felt more privileged to hear those words than in the home of my friends in Faridabad, an austere industrial satellite town of New Delhi. The kindly patriarch of the family, Iqbal, takes my wife and me to the inner sanctum of his capacious house, the repository of the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. A decade earlier that generous family took me to Amritsar to witness the sung recitation of the book in the amazing Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, from which I have just returned nostalgic. The wonder of the temple complex, dripping with its histories of Sikh valour and comradeship, seems removed from this unremarkable room 300 miles away in Haryana, and seemingly a million miles from the quiet Lincolnshire market town where I grew up, nevermind the Mayo fields of my father’s family.

The music seems, however, to be forging surprising mental connections across this space and time. Amid the set mantras of the text, Iqbal prays for me, for my wife, for the Sikh Gurus and for his family in England, the very people who first introduced me to Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, founders both of the Sikh faith, in the 16th and 18th centuries respectively. I’m moved as I think of his family’s forced migration during Partition in the 1940s – from Lahore, in what would soon be Pakistan, to Indian Punjab, and later, with so many displaced Sikhs, to the economic frontiers of Delhi. I reflect on the peripatetic lives of those friends remembered so gracefully here in Faridabad. From Jullundur to Moshi to Croydon via Tehran, theirs are the diasporic lives I study, the stories I gather as a professional historian. But the distinction between profession and person begins to dissolve here. The commonalities between his family’s diasporan experience and my own is drawn out in my mind by Iqbal’s worship. I am unwillingly transported to Swinford, Kilburn and Glasgow, sites of my parents’ own wandering lives as migrants or refugees of various kinds. It’s a hackneyed, banal, egocentric development – maybe inevitable as the grey hairs proliferate and frequency of family funerals increases – but my experiences with the Sikh diaspora help me think about a more personal identity, real and/or imagined.

The parallels between Iqbal’s family saga and my own are in some ways striking. Yet I’m reluctant to engage in a comparative exercise. Such endeavours can become trite and trivialising. Academic debates about the nature of ‘indigenous knowledge’ versus ‘colonial agency’ in the creation of modern Sikhism spring to mind in this cross-cultural milieu. As new print cultures and colonial censuses in the late 19th century started to codify North Indian peoples and ossify the discursive boundaries between Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam, British scholar-administrators misguidedly attempted to explain the departure of the Sikh faith from Hinduism as cognate to Protestant disavowal of Roman Catholic idolatry during the Reformation and beyond.

Such points of recognition were, famously, used to extend Sikh patronage in the Indian Army, proximity that conditioned the solidification of modern Sikh identity in India and the world. However, such assertions misunderstood the complex enchanted worlds of Punjabi villages and the peculiarities of Sikhism as changing belief structure. They misplaced local intellectual and spiritual agency. It’s a critique Iqbal’s flagged himself  as we’ve discussed imperial history and the lives of the Gurus over the years. My schooling and my conversations with Iqbal fuel a more totalising caution that holds me back from my reveries. I am eager to avoid tired generalisation. But the waves of music soon erode this timidity and a flood of comparison inundates me for better or worse.

The maintenance of Sikh identity and separateness has, like that of so many highly diasporic peoples, often been underpinned by narratives of oppression and gallant resistance in a ‘homeland’. From the formative centuries under the 10 Sikh Gurus through to the tumultuous challenges of post-colonial Indian pluralism, the image of the shahid (martyr) has been a vital trope to the coalescence of Sikh self-identification. The execution of the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1675 is one such mythic cornerstone in the creation of Sikhism as a community of feeling. The heroic resistance of his warrior son Guru Gobind Singh, (himself killed by Mughal allies) in the early 18th century is even more powerful. A gathering in 1699 at which Guru Gobind Singh formed the Khalsa (sovereign brotherhood) in the context of this oppression is perhaps the key moment in Sikh history.

In 1984 the mythic force of these events was renewed when Sikh separatists, angry at marginalisation within the Indian state, occupied the Golden Temple, provoking Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to attack the complex. Hundreds were killed in the shelling. Gandhi’s subsequent assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards and the resultant anti-Sikh pogroms that ensued over North India cut a wound in the body of the nation that has never fully healed. Crucially, anti-Sikh violence in India buttressed militant Sikh ethnonationalism as well as more guarded forms of bitterness elsewhere, especially in North American and British Sikh communities.

It is not hard to draw broad parallels to the Irish question that enveloped my own family’s lives, though the two circumstances aren’t exactly equivalent. Cromwell and the Anglo-Irish lords, the modern republican struggle (itself with numerous sympathisers in the US) and quotidian sectarian violence, these were the tales whispered after family meals by paternal Irish relations. Perhaps more notable history lessons came from my stoical and mild Glaswegian mother, a suffering Catholic in a Protestant-majority neighbourhood. Her ancestors had populated the boats crossing the Irish Sea into Scotland during the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Sitting with Iqbal, recounting his story and thinking to my own father’s kin, I start to go beyond these narrow conceptualisations of diaspora. (‘Diaspora with a capital D’, if you like.) The diasporic lot of the Singhs and the McCanns was not really about this sort of loss, although no doubt there was suffering and sacrifice. (In old age my father rarely spoke of his London years except to confirm that the ‘No blacks, No dogs, No Irish’ signs were quite real.) The minutiae of Iqbal’s and my father’s experiences stand up to some comparative examination at this introspective moment in Iqbal’s house. Following their forced passage into the newly defined state of India in 1947, the Singhs moved again, this time voluntarily, to the outskirts of Delhi and in 1967 established a factory that manufactured small parts for light machinery. It took off. There are now three factories in Faridabad with hundreds of employees making components for global conglomerates instead of the small tractor parts they used to produce for the local market.

So, while Iqbal’s subsequent economic success outstripped that of my father, it was at almost exactly the same time as his economic migrancy that my dad and all five of his siblings, along with thousands of rural Irish, headed overseas to work on the building sites of London and the former industrial north. In northwest London, theirs was a life of Irish social clubs and pints by the dozen, wage remittance and the social introversion common in so many economic migrant groups. There was vague, largely unspoken sympathy for Irish republicanism and certainly, songs sung late into the night about the romance of the old country.

But like Iqbal, who was committed to a united India despite his outrage at recent Sikh injustices, most of my father’s siblings committed to a new homeland in England in imaginative ways. My aunt, the only sister, went into service with an aristocratic household in East Anglia. During our annual Christmas holidays to her cook’s cottage, the exuberance of childhood stood compulsorily on hold for the long minutes of the Queen’s speech as we looked on at well-thumbed coffee table editions of the Daily Mail. Two paternal uncles drilled into us the progression of the Plantagenet and Stuart houses. Their minds were trained to the Irish land, but they also became oddly estranged from it somehow, distant from its rhythms, less interested in its politics and removed from those brothers who did return to Ireland. The gulf widened down a generation.  Like Iqbal’s nephews and nieces, my friends, we ‘English relations’ grew yet more distant from our natal Irishness or Sikhness and its culture. I shed my Catholicism at university, one of the first family members to leave the former and go to the latter. I support England in the Six Nations. Trips ‘home’ became more infrequent, even if I may have boasted some sort of heritage when drunk in an English pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

This is a common enough tale. But my youthful ambivalence about those diasporic ties and their part in my own development is exposed here in India. There is capital, and nourishment, to be gained from looking across and back. The comparisons unleashed by Iqbal’s singing (however apt) force me to reflect on the nature of my own diasporan condition and diasporas at large. Diasporas are about the bonds of exile, loss and cultural fluidity, yes, but they are also about distance and fission both at the level of culture and in more intimate, personal ways. Diasporas can be, indeed perhaps must become, sets of imaginative archipelagos – political, economic, social, generational – where different strands separate as well as intertwine over time. They disaggregate along familial and ideological lines, but opportunities for rapprochement remain. They’re in flux.

I live on one of the outlying islands of my diasporic archipelago, aloof from the mainland. But I’m somehow tenuously attached. Age and travel has been a trigger to think about hopping back to the centre, at least briefly, to build bridges across generation and space. There is something of use there, however conceptually ill-defined at present. My South Asian-origin friends, detached by decades from their own stories, feel the same I think. The scholar in me doesn’t want to become a plastic paddy, sat enthusiastic in some mofussil Irish pub yearning for the craic and narrative morsels of agricultural progenitors. 

But no doubt my time with Iqbal has forced some personal reassessment, if only briefly. For what use, I don’t know yet. Maybe the diasporic continuum of my work and heritage will clog up into some intellectual paralysis. Maybe it’s a natural part of growing older to yearn for the past, as risible as that may appear in the detached chic and itinerancy of Islington. I decide there’s not much point tying myself up in knots now. Diasporas breed both transnational conviviality and fragmentation. I’ll have to amble round the routes and roots of that diasporic archipelago at my leisure to work it out. It’s only a thought. For now, I’m assuaged and also disorientated, for the better probably, by Iqbal’s sonorous last ‘waheguru ji ka Khalsa, waheguru ji ki fateh’ in that small room in Haryana.

THE BRUEG[h]EL CENSUS

I am in Brussels, numbering the Bruegels.

It is a project. I have drawn up a spreadsheet of all 42 painted Bruegel panels, and a further 10 penumbral Bruegel works – possible misattributions, copies of lost originals – which together constitute what I have come to think of as the Bruegel Object. I plan to see them – it – all.

So I am in Brussels where, according to my spreadsheet, 15.874% of the Bruegel Object is located.

I enter the corner room of the Musée des Beaux Arts where they put their Bruegels, and make a rapid audit. The right side of the room, more or less, is Pieter Bruegel the Elder; the left side is Pieter Brueghel the Younger, or others. I am here for the Elder Bruegel. Elder Bruegel is the great Bruegel. I ignore everything else, and settle to the business of scrutinising Bruegel.

However, there is a distracting oddity. On the west wall of the room hangs the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem, a large panel painted in 1566. But on the south wall, roughly 8.5 metres away and hanging at an angle of 90 degrees to it, is another, near-identical Census at Bethlehem, painted by his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger in about 1610. It is one of at least 13 copies the Younger made of the original, all of them faithful and well executed, but this the best among them.

I start by trying to ignore it: it is good, but it is hack work, a cynical workshop production, a pointless replica. I am here to focus. But it happens that there is a spot, situated at the apex of a triangle, the base of which is formed by the two paintings (considered as points, not as planes), where you can take them both in; if you had bovine eyes the whole corner would become a giant and blurry and (to your cow mind) bewildering stereoscope.

I do not have bovine eyes or a cow mind. If I want to play spot the difference – I do want to play spot the difference, in spite of myself – I have to swivel my head. And in reality, there is not one triangle at the apex of which you stand; rather, you stand in front of the Elder and glance at the Younger, far away; or you stand in front of the Younger, and look over your shoulder obliquely at the Elder. There are two triangles (at least); you move in a zone between their vertices.

And in this god-like, cow-like zone, what do you see?

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In both cases, a snow-bound village scene dominated by children playing and scuffling in the snow, and their elders scratching out a living with their fardels and pigsblood and snowed-under carts, their various small and wintry concerns. Around the inn in the left foreground a small crowd gathers, submitting their names to the census; others trail in across the frozen river, and across the frozen pond. Mary and Joseph are unobtrusively there, Mary, riding on an ass, nine-tenths concealed in her blue robe, Joseph likewise hidden behind a large hat, but waggling a two-handed saw over his shoulder.

They are both as yet unnumbered.

*

For Pieter Bruegel the Elder, there was only ever one Census. It was a singular object. Unlike his son, he did not run an extensive workshop, did not bang out copies. He made few paintings, each one for the most part autograph.

When he died in 1569 at the age of about 44, his eldest son was five years old. In terms of art history, there is no genealogical connection between the two, merely a tectonic overlap. Pieter the Younger inherited a series of world-famous images (if by world you understand Northern and Hapsburg Europe), probably in sketch and cartoon form. His entire career down to his death in 1636 was grounded on these images, whether he was making direct copies or spinning genre pieces from them.

He most likely saw little of his father’s original work, much of it already carted away to the great imperial collections – hence no doubt the small differences which creep in, the errors in replication, the drift.

As with his name. Pieter the Elder had started out plain Pieter Brueghel of Breda, signing his name with a calligraphic flourish on the drawings he did as a young man. When he started painting in oils towards the end of the 1550s, he dropped the H and began signing his name Bruegel in chiselled capitals, usually with the date. Brueghel was a bit burgher, perhaps, a bit stomping peasant; Bruegel is cleaner, more Roman, befitting a Stoic observer of stomping peasants. 

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His son for some reason restored the H to his name. Father and son taken together make a blurry Brueg[h]el object.

*

So I stand at the invisible apex of my triangles, ticking off Brueg[h]els and playing spot the difference. It is a midweek morning in early January, raining outside the museum and largely empty inside. This is where my project has brought me, dead-reckoning in a room of old paintings.

I am 42. Not far off the age now at which the Elder died. Forty-two is the number of Bruegels on the spreadsheet. My own father as it happens died a year or two ago, aged 84. When I was born he was 44. I was the second son. There are two years between my brother and me. I have recently become a father myself, to two sons, between whom there are two years. Pieter Bruegel had two sons, the Younger, and Jan the Elder, between whom there was a fraction more than two years (the fraction in question admittedly being a half, so three years in fact).

And so on. You do not really explain an intersection by following up or down any of its convergent (or for that matter divergent) paths. It is sufficient that the mild panic of my mid-life is characterised by multiple convergent (divergent?) vectors: my dead father, my brother, my small sons, myself, and the Brueg[h]els. Many similar triangles.

*

The census is an unusual subject. Bruegel has painted one of the culminating moments of bureaucratic life. Bureaucracy is the science of docketing the routine comings and goings of existence – births and deaths, taxes paid and taxes owing; it is a rolling programme of work, one without end.

A census, however, is a one-off. It is a flourish of the bureaucrat’s art. You do not merely keep the ball of a census rolling: it wants planning and execution. It is, properly speaking, a project, a projection of bureaucracy. And it has an end: a Domesday book of taxable, pressable souls.

From a distance – to the administrator or historian – a census is an exercise in control and power, not always pleasant, but always impressive in its way, like a datastream ziggurat or Hoover Dam. Seen close to, however, it pixelates into a sequence of inexact iterations. The bureaucratic ground troops do not mechanically fill in blanks; they have to keep a weather eye cocked on the confusion of crowds; they have to sort quickly, roughly (there are only so many categories) but accurately. They have to fix a point in time where there are no points in time.

So Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem is a world in transformation. The census is drawn through the village, through that mess of humanity at the inn-door, like the carding of wool – the stream of individuals passes back and forth over the frozen river, coming in nebulous and free to have their names written down in a book, their existence validated in ink; going out docketed and numbered, but also informed, no longer unlicked stray lumps of humanity but named individuals with a location and an occupation and a marital status, enjoying a spark of existence beyond their own clay.

*

When my father was dying in hospital, my brother was searching the census records of our paternal family.

My father was on the whole reticent with history. He had been born in 1925 in Camden, had grown up there and on Portpool Lane off Gray’s Inn Road, and in Lee Green. There were some disconnected anecdotes – a story about a broken radio, about a Jewish funeral, about an aunt who sprinkled sugar on his buttered bread – but not much else.

My brother uncovered various details and relayed them to my father in hospital: details of addresses (around Long Acre, Seven Dials) occupations (toffee maker, motor mechanic, seamstress), dates of births and deaths.

In truth all this was probably less use to him than the anecdotes, and in any case it was difficult to gauge his response – he was a polite man, but his circuit of interest seemed to have contracted to the point where all that concerned him were the minutiae of the routines that were eking out his life.

But for my brother and I, it assuaged the sense that here was a disconnected dot, about whom we knew not very much, going into the darkness. He was linked. So were we. There was a chain. It was written in the census.

*

People may be numberless, but the numbers have a shape and you can be located within them by a measurement of variance and discrepancy. So, spot the difference.

The Younger’s panel is fractionally larger (123 x 168.5 cm against 115.3 x 164.5 cm).

No two figures are dressed alike, fabrics change colour, there are odd reversals. 

Ferris3

There are microscopic differences between faces, individual postures.

The Younger had his own way with trees, bushy rather than twiggy.

And then, more slowly, it dawns on me that the Younger favours tracks. From the bottom right, where Mary has entered on her donkey or ass, to the top left across the frozen river; and again, from the wheels of the foreground’s frozen carts, there are criss-cross tracks, paths, desire lines, animating the space. This is a frozen world, but there is evidence of networks, organised around an axis.

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The Elder’s foreground carts, by contrast, are going nowhere. There are no paths, just yellowish ice wallows. He has painted a village of spindly cartwheels, a spindly ladder against a spindly barn, spindly trees; and he has painted a world of endlessly repeated circles – the wreath, the barrels, and especially the cartwheels, 33 of them, including one a fraction below dead centre, ghostly and snow-covered, hitched to no wagon and orthogonal to the viewer, as though it were a circuit diagram of village life, or a generative code for the cyclical passion of Christ.

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And then finally I see it – so obtuse of me – what sets the two paintings apart: the Younger has raised the branches of the largest foreground tree a fraction of an inch to reveal what in the Elder there is none of – a vanishing point, or what the Italians call a punto di fuga, a fugitive point, a point of escape. The Younger’s brown frozen river winds out of the canvas, we can follow it through the canvas and away. By contrast, his father’s is entangled in the branches, perhaps coiling around the back of the village, a labyrinthine waterway.

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The only thing vanishing is that peculiar sun. Or is it rising? It hardly matters. The world is ebbing to its conclusion.

The Younger – wittingly? unwittingly? – has made this dead cosmic circuitry bearable, transient; along those paths and on that frozen river our eye is made to criss-cross, not circle, and finally escape the painting. And he has done all this in direct contravention of the central thought process of the original – that these circles go nowhere for a reason. They mean something.

*

Pieter Bruegel the Younger may not have been a painter at all. He was unarguably an eminent man in the Antwerp art world – there is a portrait etching of him by Anthony van Dyck, in which, as it happens, he projects the sort of patient melancholy common to men with drooping noses and straggling moustaches. But he may only have been the inheritor of the cartoons, and the general manager of a workshop that employed anonymous hands to complete the copies. It is possible that he had no artistic personality at all, nothing but a signature and a locked chest of cartoons, which he carefully opened and closed as required, a bureaucrat among artists, ghosting through the system, the painted artefacts. The notion that somewhere in that swirl of hands and methods and corporate production was the memory of a five-year-old boy transfixed by the death of his father is nothing more than an absurd projection of my own.

But that, to repeat, is why I am here. I did not travel to Brussels to discover a truth, but somehow to impose one of my own. To make something of all this. This is one way in which we react to the accumulation of life. We make spreadsheets, trace genealogies, embark on projects, write essays. We pore over the data in search of patterns. All this must and will be made to mean something.

*

So I stand in the corner room of the Musée des Beaux Arts, deriving my geometry from the observation of small differences. Discriminating.

And there is in fact one final difference – a figure, present in the Elder’s panel but absent in all of the Younger’s copies, suggesting a late emendation on the father’s part, a final gratuitous flourish of his art: it is the youth pulling on his skates, below the tiny child who cannot yet summon the courage to go out on the ice.

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Life is treacherous, says the figure, but we have resources. We have skates. We can make of this treacherous ice our element. Sooner or later, we all pull on our skates and go out on the ice – as the father might have remarked to the son, had he had time.

This whole village, in fact, suddenly seems to be poised by the ice, spilling uncertainly but inevitably over various edges. Just to the right of the large tree by the water a father stands, hands in pockets, and watches his two small children testing the curious element. The children are about the same age as little Pieter and Jan would have been when their not-so-elder father painted the Census. 

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The skater’s absence from all copies (bar one – a recently discovered panel has the skater, suggesting a late, rectifying glimpse of the original, or an emendation by a later hand) implies that it was the father who was diverging, making changes on the hoof – inserting figures at the last minute, blotting out the vanishing point in a moment of inspiration – and the son who adhered more faithfully to the earlier version, the cartoon. There is, after all, a sensibility in copying well, an alertness to detail – one of the Younger’s guiding virtues, you could say, was fidelity. Copying is meditative and respectful work, itself a way of thinking.

If he was occasionally caught out by the odd detail it hardly matters; at some point the fractional differences collapse into the far greater mass of similarities. The census is not a record of our quiddity, in the end, but of our solidarity. Thus there is not a source of pictorial DNA – the Elder – and a series of ever-degrading replications; rather there are versions of versions all orbiting a hypothetical centre of mass (the cartoon), just as the small children of the village eccentrically orbit the centres of mass set up between them and their parents, and their parents in turn orbit the invisible barycentre which lies between them and their ancestors, and which we commonly call the community. And so on. Each of us, present or absent, exerts our own small constant gravitational tug, variable in time, hard to calculate, to take account of; but there, nevertheless, in the mass of data points, and the geometry that comprehends it.

Perseids

PERSEID METEORS TONIGHT – COMING FROM JUST BELOW THE W OF CASSIOPEIA IN THE NORTH EAST

My father’s text message reaches me late on 12 August as I catch a train to Clapham. I glance out of the window conspiratorially, but London isn’t cooperating: the heavens are busy enough already. Planes crawl overhead to Heathrow and nose north from Gatwick, a helicopter is wavering indecisively over Chelsea, and a few clouds are trying to sneak in from the east, nudging each other over the horizon where the city glow gives them away. The commuters pay no attention, but hurry home under the street lamps, distracted by the pale square lights of their mobile phones. The fact that the earth has plunged headlong into a belt of space debris, shouldering its way forward in a shock of extraterrestrial sparks, doesn’t seem to bother anyone unduly. The city has drawn its fumy blanket overhead and turned on its torches for the night. It won’t notice a little shower.

Every 133 years, the Swift-Tuttle comet passes too close to the sun for comfort, and sheds a long veil of dust across the path of Earth. We hit it every August. Thousands of its celestial cast-offs pierce our atmosphere and tunnel towards land at 37 miles per second: the air compresses in front of them and heats up, soaring to temperatures of 3000ºF. Most of the dust motes vaporise about 60 miles above our heads, but even the smallest do so in blazes of such intensity, with such panache, that they can momentarily put the stars to shame. There are other meteor showers, but the Perseids are generally thought to be the most spectacular. They’re so named because they seem to spring from Perseus, whose constellation hovers over the northern hemisphere in winged sandals, but because they coincide with the anniversary of his martyrdom, Christians sometimes call them St Lawrence’s Tears. On a busy night, 60 to 100 of them can rain down every hour.

This time last year I was lying on my back on the decking outside a lodge in the French Alps, my feet pointed towards Cassiopeia’s vast zigzag. My mother and father were tipped back in low chairs nearby; my sister, if I remember correctly, had commandeered the table. The Milky Way was stretched out over the valley, so thick with faraway stars it resembled a cloud reflecting the last of the snow. We were a few days off the shower’s peak, but we picked out a dozen shooting stars nonetheless while we worked through the last of the red wine. Meteor-watching is something of a family tradition; when I was younger, our yearly holidays to the French countryside would fall conveniently in mid August, and every night after dinner we’d take ourselves outside and pitch our sun-loungers in the dark. If the shooting stars were shy we’d scout for satellites instead, tracing their spy-paths across constellations of Greek gods and heroes while we planned the next day’s activities.

We didn’t limit ourselves to meteors. On 11 August 1999 we ditched France and headed to the Scilly Isles for the solar eclipse. It was overcast, but crowds gathered anyway optimistically at the top of the low hills as though a hundred extra metres would improve the view. Eventually the clouds thinned just enough, and we watched the strange and beautiful finale through a grey screen. A few years later in Scotland we piled into the car in the early hours to hunt a lunar eclipse, and accidentally hit a sleepy bird on the way. As the shadow fell over its features, the moon turned a fitting shade of red in cosmic rebuke. In 2003 we visited the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Its antiquated telescope wasn’t calibrated properly, and the binary stars and globular clusters slid slowly and teasingly out of frame. I remember being taken aback when our guide explained it wasn’t the telescope but the earth that was rolling to the left like that.

But it’s the meteors that I remember best, and in many ways they were always a different game entirely. You can’t really miss an eclipse when it happens, but shooting stars – even when you’re ready for them – can be remarkably difficult to catch. Whole performances take place in the blink of an eye, or are wiped out by one; every year a few fugitive meteors would bolt to earth in my blind spot only to be called out from the neighbouring sun lounger. There’s a delightful anarchy to them. Astronomers can predict the day and the time, and point you in the right direction, but the diminutive bits of dust themselves are always in disarray. You have to watch carefully if you’re to catch them in the act, and for me the watching – on a summer evening, outside, with a sky full of space overhead – could often be its own reward.

Then, every once in a while, you get a dazzling display. One summer a spectacular meteor carved its way over the garden end to end, searing a bright blue gash into the sky and illuminating the house like lightning. Another year my brother and I were tracking a satellite when it seemed to explode in a modest but eerie pulse of light. We spotted it trundling on unharmed, but a few minutes later a fragment of whatever it was that we had unwittingly seen hit the atmosphere fell like a flare in the distance. These are another class of shooting star, creeping up the scale from the common dust streaks towards the magnificent flaming heavyweights that burn their way into the historical record. The brightest are written into works of art as omens, harbingers of political turmoil and manmade calamity – but they are also reminders of the celestial menace behind the Perseids’ pretty displays. Meteoroid, meteor, meteorite; we give the rocks new titles as they complete their searing rite of passage down to earth, and for centuries we’ve scanned the skies for anything that would really conquer us in the event of a collision.

I’ve seen maybe two noteworthy meteors in London. The first fell headlong into Richmond Park one evening as I was walking home from school, the second – more style than substance – flew in a jubilant little streak over St Paul’s cathedral one warm evening during the 2012 Olympics. But there will be slim pickings tonight. The clouds are growing in confidence, shunting south and west, and only a handful of white stars have managed to needle their way through the polluted orange light. I’ve got food to cook, notes to write, and it’s a work night; there isn’t time to go hunting bits of dust. Maybe next year. I step out on the balcony while the pasta boils, but the skies are sullen. It’s odd to think they’re up there anyway, carving the cold air on the edge of space with this busy, oblivious city lit up like a constellation below.

I opt for an early night. But as I close the curtains a tiny mote of light whips over the dark tree outside. Five minutes later another one, in perfect mimicry of the first. I watch for another 40 minutes, holding out for the hat-trick, but get nothing but the predictable flypast of Heathrow’s planes. Perseus, you astronomical tease.

Dr Fox

after Afanas’ev

‘Something priceless must
have left the world, old man.
Why else would you cry like this,
sitting in the road rather than
pressing on and kicking up red dust

like others making
a journey? What is it?’
The fox took care to make his
tone kind. ‘I’ll sit here for a bit.
What’s in this bag? Is the weight taking

it out of you?’ ‘No.
O, don’t ask.’ The man stared
at his feet, vacant, aghast,
so the fox snuck a glance. Prepared
for dull luggage, his eyes widened so

much at what he saw
he looked away and coughed.
This was some windfall breakfast.
A bag full of pulped up meat, soft
flesh on the bone, pieces of a poor,

smashed person. The fox
turned back, mouth moist, gory
meal in mind. ‘What is my route
to this feast? I need the story
of his sadness first, of how the rocks,

so still, came to dash
apart a soul so dear
to him but, in this, pick fruit
from catastrophe for me.’ Tear
after tear hit the dirt, a sore rash

had flared in their tracks
on the man’s cheeks. ‘Come, old
friend, tell me. A burden shared
is halved or sometimes, so I’m told,
demolished altogether. Relax

and let me in,’ said
the fox, tougher in tone
but also as if he cared.
The man leant down and took a stone
from the tear-wet path. ‘My wife is dead,

but my sorrow’s start
was small, no bigger than
this pebble: a cabbage sprout.
Look over there, quite far off. Can
you see the prodigious plant, green dart,

rooted in that plot
but shot to the sky’s edge?
How it streaks up, almost out
of sight? That piece of mutant veg
flew up in a day, opened the spot

you just catch if you
strain your eyes, that black star,
that hole made in heaven’s heights.’
Fox traced the line of the green scar.
It arced across half the entire blue

expanse above them,
vanished into the mark
described. The man moaned. ‘By rights
I should be all set. Through that dark
puncture are riches: I climbed the stem

and looked through the gap.
I could never have dreamt
of the vast, unexplained wealth
I saw.’ ‘Gold?’ Trying to preempt
him, the fox misfired. A sudden snap

of sorrow: ‘It cost
me the love of my life.’
The fox, regrouping with stealth,
was understanding. ‘Your poor wife –
you must have tried to take her up, lost

your grip at the top.’
The fox laid his red paw
consolingly on the man’s
knee, but under his coat the claw
curled. ‘Tell me the whole story, don’t stop,

let out your deep grief
speaking. What did you see,
from beyond this plant that spans
the sky, to make your wife ready
to risk ascent to the highest leaf?’

Sob-hollowed and spent
the man grew calm and, plied
with soft incitement, resumed.
‘It would be clearer if I tried
to explain things from before they bent

sickeningly bad.
Out shopping yesterday
I bought a sprout. I presumed
it would grow in the normal way,
though the trader was strange, spoke with mad,

flat vowels like folk
from elsewhere, had suspect
eyes and was too keen to sell.
I planted it in the correct
fashion, plenty of water to soak

into its small roots,
bedded under the warm
ash in the firm hearth earth, well
protected from the threat of storm,
and safe, in good time, to put out fruits.

Then I went to bed
with my treasured wife.’ Here,
the fox cut in – ‘so it must
have spun itself up, ear by ear,
leaf by leaf, darkly. I see the head

jammed tight and straining
against the ceiling, stalk
a guitar string strung till just
about to whipcrack like a fork
of wire, vascular lightning, gaining

force in its freeing.’
‘Maybe that’s right; a whiff
of leaf stirred me - all I know
is I yelled and my wife woke, stiff
into a meringue of sheets, seeing

the intruding leaves
and hearing me shouting
if the plant didn’t get through
it’d ruin the house. Outing
it, though, meant climbing onto the eaves

and tearing off tiles
from the roof. I cleared six
and stuck my arm in, a blind
periscope after the apex
of the growth. “More to the left, you’re miles

away” my wife bawled,
guiding the search. I caught
it, pulled it across to find
the hole I’d made and, briefly, thought
I’d saved the day. But, freed, the sprout stalled

for a still second,
seemed to pause, and then smashed
into the sky with force stored
up overnight. Of course, I crashed
groundwards hard – I wagered death beckoned,

it was a big fall
from the height I was at
and the momentum that floored
me had explosive malice. Flat
on the earth, I was ready to call

my wife a goner –
in moments the growth had
obliterated the house,
levelled the walls like they were bad
props – but she’d escaped, debris on her

clothes, face, in her hair.
We watched the cabbage ride
skyward, me and my spared spouse
fast in each others’ arms, mouths wide,
heads bent right back, almost unaware

that our home had been
destroyed. We saw the high
birds punched out of broad flight like
botched staples, taken fully by
surprise. The sky became a blue screen

unstitching along
some hidden seam that proved
it green underneath. The spike
of the sprout’s tip drove on up, moved
with pure, motiveless purpose, a wrong

vitality, past
the staid clouds and closer
and closer to the bright sun,
a claggy yolk, yellow loser
in the face of mounting speed. At last,

us both prompt to burst
with held breath, the streak stopped,
sounding the stud noise of one
huge, distant, cosmic, semi-popped
balloon and a world-historic first –

that hole in the sky.
The silence settled. “Can
that really be a hole in
the sky?” My wife wondered with an
uneasy half-laugh, shutting one eye

to bring it into
focus. “I think it is,”
I replied, adrenaline
flushing me eager with a fizz
of resolve to climb up and look through.

“I’ll investigate,”
I announced. “For God’s sake,
be careful,” said my wife. There
was nothing she could do to make
me stay. Had I only known her fate

the way things went,
I’d have left the stark, black
star to preside in peace where
it hung. Instead, despite my lack
of fitness, I began the ascent.

The stalk’s fibrous sides
were easy to grip, its
leaves made good pit stops and I’ll
never forget, though all my wits
were to scatter, the strength I felt – tides

of drive seemed to roll
through me, moved by the draw
of that new, celestial
entrance: lunar, not stellar, law
governing, even taking control.

It was a long climb
and I kept passing scraps
of old house, pots, a little
icon showing the Virgin, wraps
of linen looping the leaf stalks. Time

passed. The air grew thin.
I thought of Jack, human
ant, chased for his white, brittle
bones by a giant. Stranger than
fiction, here I was being pulled in

to a tale. Fields turned
into brief squares, roads slight
gossamer. I didn’t see,
I was fixed on where the daylight
died above me. My whole body burned.

The hole seemed to surge
towards my rising face.
I leapt. The shadow met me,
stained my features like a surface
of water – I had a strange, strong urge

to laugh, balanced, rapt
at the cabbage’s tip,
leaning with one hand aching
up and out, my head at the lip
of the known universe.’ The fox clapped

his jaws together.
‘What’s hidden in that place?’
he gasped, not even faking
curiosity. ‘Boundless space,
and, suspended throughout the ether,

thousands of millwheels
extending beyond sight,
turning and, as they rotate,
regularly throwing out bright
loaves. I caught one. You know when bread feels

just right, light, but has
brittleness in the crust
that can prick you?’ ‘How I hate
bread,’ thought the fox, but grinned and thrust
out his tongue like he loved it too: ‘as

I live and breathe – wow,’
he said out loud. ‘There’s more,’
said the man. ‘My pupils pooled,
drawing the darkness off the store –
pans of milk, fresh from some flawless cow,

to moisten the bread:
the perfect complement.
I perched there staring and drooled,
overwhelmed by this heaven-sent
pension, ticket to an ever-fed

dotage, a vaultless
wonder-warehouse buttressed
by the sweep of the cabbage.
Remembering the loaf, I pressed
its crust, split in and partook. Faultless.’

Disappointed by
the lack of meat and cash
in this miracle storage
cave, factory, or divine cache,
the fox returned his sly and hungry

mind to the slick, fresh
joints in the tragic sack,
which meant hearing the next part
of the story. ‘When you got back
to your wife and earth – what then?’ the flesh

not missing from on
high but there, tasty, close
at hand, prompted him to start.
Like a terrible repeat dose
of the fact that his wife was all gone,

the question reduced
the man to sobs again
and he squashed his head hard south
into his hands as though the pain
required his palms be introduced

through his eye sockets
and his brain seized. Vowels
of grief forced open his mouth,
veering uselessly to howls,
not words. The fox searched in his pockets

for a handkerchief –
at least deal with the snot,
he thought – and rolled out the next
phase of his plan: ‘don’t curse your lot,
it may be that I can bring relief.’

The man wiped the glaze
off his upper lip, trance
of sorrow broken, perplexed
by the fox’s coy assurance.
‘It depends on how your story plays

out,’ the fox explained,
‘so tell me the rest, brave
the memory.’ Very faint,
the words: ‘I’d give my life to save
hers.’ In his head, the fox mocked this strained

claim. ‘I know you would,’
he lied, like an advert.
The man took up his complaint:
‘From the top, I saw my wife skirt
the base, staring up, anxious for good

news. I took one last
look at the firmament
of bread and milk, then I stowed
the loaf I held safe for descent
and began the downward climb as fast

as I could, thinking
about how she’d react
when I reached the ground and showed
her what I’d found. I made contact
with the red earth, cried out, ran blinking

into her arms. “What
did you find there?” she asked,
as though fresh from an ill dream
of her own. I took a pause, basked
in her wonder. “Wonders you would not

believe,” I beamed. “Fat
loaves flung cooling from wheels
and pans of rich, divine cream,
infinitely set out for meals,
as if heaven were nothing but that.”

Her sweet expression,
her wide open mouth: the
weak memory’s fading, pale
fake’s all I’ve left, along with a
corpse in a heap, what the aggression

of bare gravity
and rock made of her. Straight
away she wanted to scale
the heights too, attain the strange gate,
witness the stock in the cavity.

She picked up a bag
from amongst the scattered
remnants of our house and jumped
in, foetal, scrunching the tattered
brim round her head. “Haul me up like swag!”

she shouted, muffled
by hessian but full
of adventure. My heart pumped
hard: I felt too tired to pull
myself up the stalk, strangely ruffled

by this weird order
from my packaged wife, scared
that an extra load would be
beyond too heavy if I dared
try a second climb to the border

between plenitude
and the world. But to lose
face in the moment of glee
and triumph would have been a bruise
unbearable. It seems all too crude

now, apprehending
my selfish compulsion,
self-evident as rubble,
but it served then for propulsion:
I raised her, turned back to the bending

plant and remounted.
One hand is worse than two,
half much better than double
the weight in baggage for those who
climb. I couldn’t even have counted

on superior
skill and iron fitness
as you know, but the inlet
let me down too, no dark largesse
gifting magnetism any more

like the first time tried,
gift maybe overcome
by physical limit, sweat,
the loosening grip of my numb
fingers in green fibre of the side

and bone-white where my
wife depended on them.
The hole just hung, impassive.
My lungs crackled, threw up some phlegm
from the rack of breathing. I nearly

choked on a shatter
of coughs the clot provoked,
slipped sharply, felt my hand give,
my wife slip an inch, silent, cloaked
in sack. She called out: “What’s the matter?”

still calm, but fearful.
“Nothing,” I came back but
looked down talking and the height
hit me, land a nausea, cut
with unflat furrows, hedgerows. Tearful

with panic and shock,
unriveted by strange
attraction, I swung back, right
over open nothing; the change
in how I balanced made the sack rock

wider out still and
it was harder to keep
pinned in with my nails paring
flesh from the plant’s stalk and the sweep
of the bag out searing the bag-hand,

forcing my gaze up.
I let her go because
I saw the black blot staring,
noiseless, for the devil it was
in the good sky, damn the loaf and cup

of milk, the both damned,
evil like a desert
fraudulence. I let her go,
she dropped, I couldn’t reassert
the will to grip in time. When she slammed

into the ground, fleck
from where I was, I still
took a few seconds to know
that a fall from such a height will
kill. I came down. You found me, a wreck.’

Strategically,
fox let there be silence,
a moment’s seeming tribute,
then brought his false balm to the tense
aporia of conclusion. ‘I

am a doctor, known
far and wide for my skill.’
As he began to compute
this, the man’s eyes started to fill
with hope. ‘In my career, I have shown

that every scourge
that gruesomely afflicts
animal bodies is game
for curing, from the derelict’s
creeping sores, to fevers of the verge

of dying, to death’s
trusted confidence trick
itself. There’s no ill you’d name
that I couldn’t mend. Let me pick
up your wife, re-fuse her bones with breath’s

unifying rush
and return you to joy
where you saw only mourning,
the long horizon. I’ll destroy
her destruction and pull back life’s blush.’

At this, the man grabbed
the fox’s coat with low
sounds of excitement, fawning
in his face: ‘Do this, and I’ll owe
you everything, anything,’ he blabbed,

‘work, love, faith, money.’
‘This, in particular,
is an easy death to fix –
that’s why I asked details of her
demise. Bring me some oats and honey.

Then, I need to treat
her in private, behind
the plant. Everything clicks
into place in peace and shade.’ ‘Kind
fox,’ said the man. ‘The gift of this feat

will transform the rest
of my life. Let me get
oats.’ He went over the fence
to call on his neighbour, his wet
cheeks drying and his mind full of best

possible worlds, hope
restored. Doctor fox stood
by the coming succulence,
staring at it; the ordered food
was brought, wrapped in cloth and tied with rope.

He posed as solemn
as possible as he
took the bundle and then picked
up the heavier and bloody
sack, moving off towards the column

the plant made, doubled
under the bulk. He looked
tiny beneath the load, licked
his lips discreetly, the uncooked
feast soon due; the man was untroubled,

keen with awakened
faith. Then fox, nose, trunk, tail,
entered the shadow that lay
over the fields like a cold nail,
leaving the day to the wind-governed

trend of smoke rising
from placid chimneystacks
in the vague, abiding way
of the countryside, where an axe
will always split, at unsurprising

intervals, kindling
in some distant, wood-stocked
yard. After a fair while passed,
the man began to think: ‘he’s clocked
up too long there.’ His patience dwindling,

against instruction,
he went to determine
if his wife was yet recast
in corrected, unbroken skin
as per the promised resurrection.

 

Spinning Yarns

Over the course of the past few years, I’ve become aware of threads, bright fibres, at the edges of my vision. Somewhere, someone has been weaving their way around the habitual bits and pieces of my everyday; I have found lamp-posts caught-up in patchwork, whole avenues enscarfed, the cords hung with dew like flocculent Technicolor spider-webs. Knitted fragments appear where I least expect to find them. Loose strands spread, reaching out into a subtly unravelling grid, soft weavings speckling London’s greyness, brightening an overcast winter’s day in a Shropshire town. It seems wrong to call them fragments, for the more of them you see, the more you realise that they are woollen remarks in a larger conversation that is taking place out there, in plain sight. Somewhere, unknown members of an industrious community – of guerrilla knitters or yarnbombers – take the time to knit themselves into a colourful discussion, lending their hand-made voices to a collective statement, made tangible in alpaca and acrylic, lambswool and linen yarn. From London to Mexico City, Bali to Philadelphia, individuals invested in a collective, feminist reclamation of knitting, and of the everyday landscapes of our built environments, have been conversing in colours, in cosies. Moss stitch and stocking stitch, carefully ravelled, speak to the observer’s eye of of creative energy which, as a London yarnbombing group writes, doesn’t necessarily need direction or concrete meaning, but should inspire the viewer to similar imaginative innovation. When we take a step back, these patches form responses to each other, not unlike the way that written graffiti might prompt an exchange between strangers on a wall; what our response should be, though, remains unclear.

What sets the woollier discourse apart from its stencilled cousin is the conscious and laborious act of crafting a way into a community that imbues the knitted ‘word’ with a different kind of meaning from the seeming spontaneity and self-conscious aesthetics of the painted word. The knitted one stitches its individual creator into a wide tapestry of discussion about the nature of creativity, the imaginative reclamation of municipal spaces, and the kinds of value – and types of people – we associate with this particular craft. The liberating thing about the guerrilla knitting movement is that its play with anonymity gives us room to imagine male and female knitters at the same time as imbuing each knit and purl – moments traditionally associated with older generations of women, the necessities of mundane housework – with power and vitality. Interrupting the public gaze, and challenging the unsuspecting eye with incongruous patches of domestic stuff, yarnbombers use knitting to suggest the kind of things – about domesticity and value, creativity and gender, individuality and power – that we spend so long finding the right words to confront.

Curiously, though, I’ve come to realise that these soft fragments that impress cosiness onto stone and metal leave me uncomfortable. I think the problem lies in the military pose that the terms ‘guerrilla knitting’, or ‘yarnbombing’, strike, and the fuzzy purpose that accompanies this combative project, flippant or no. It’s hard to decide how far the military name and stealth tactics of the movement are meant to invest its material expressions with the weighty significance of protest and dissent, and how far it’s all just a bit tongue-in-cheek. While blankets for tanks in Holland, or wraps for the stone weaponry of Bali’s political sculptures interrupt violent male narratives in striking ways, the nature of many knitted displays leave troubling loose ends. Although they work to free this craft from a restricted history of gender specificity and domestic labour, an element of frivolity or luxury in the finished product seems to be a requirement. Perhaps I’m missing the point, but making jumpers for lamp-posts seems to prioritise superfluity, to obscure the merits of practical meaning in favour of quirkily achieved provocative thought. Moreover, its approach to knitting as an art form might elevate the knitted object beyond its gendered, domestic associations, but its kitsch levity also undermines a history of knitting-as-necessity in times of conflict, moments in which women went about shaping their identities through the items they made and the needles they used on a daily basis.

The problem is the way these modern knitted things seem to have been produced to say something compelling, at the same time as their makers profess to say nothing, in particular, at all. The difficulty lies in how yarnbombers work against the stark, practical language of hand-woven objects that they simultaneously evoke. Far from the deadly handiwork of the French Revolution’s tricoteuse, the political charge of suffragette embroidery, the abolitionist solidarity of the communally crafted quilt, the yarnbombers’ modern approach to knitting as a so-called protest art, smoothes the creases from the craft’s dark history of fraught identity politics. In smothering us with the luxuries of leisure, idiosyncrasy, freedom of expression, colour, their approach permits us to take these things for granted. It indulges us, making us lazy readers of bright surfaces, safe in the knowledge that just looking at and considering these works is somehow enough. This soft protest, this cosy and unhurried rebellion, seems to misunderstand the urgency, the drive, the subversion that lies at the heart of so much crafted dissent.

* 

                                    ‘Young men, my suitors, now my lord is dead,

                                    let me finish my weaving before I marry,

                                    or else my thread will have been spun in vain. […]’

                                    We had men’s hearts; she touched them; we agreed.

                                    So every day she wove on the great loom –

                                    but every night by torchlight she unwove it,

                                    and so for three years she deceived the Akhaians.

                                    But when the seasons brought the fourth around,

                                    one of her maids, who knew the secret, told us;

                                    we found her unravelling the splendid shroud.

                                    She had to finish then, although she hated it.

                                         The Odyssey, Book II, trans. Robert Fitzgerald                           

*

Knitting’s history of protest is thick, its militant voices subversively knotty, its interlaced vocabulary of function and symbol both disarmingly eloquent yet rebelliously, personally complex. Appreciating its acts of resistance involves attending to each stitch for the effort that went into it and the forces that drove it. Some of the most compelling – and troubling – items of dissent draw attention to the very labour of protest of which they are created, manipulating effort into message. These peculiar weavings are worth reading carefully, for, considering the manipulation it entails on a basic level, the craft of protest can also be misused.

In the last months of the American Civil War, Mrs Hugh Holmes Lee begun work on another pair of socks for her bare-footed Confederate boys. The war had brought on four long years of extra knitting for the soldiers, lint-picking, and bandage making, which had stripped her work basket bare. This time, though, making do was nothing to be ashamed of; this time, her makeshift wouldn’t remind her of the shreds her cossetted southern life had been reduced to by this cruel war. Smiling to herself, Mrs Hugh Holmes Lee carefully added to her neat rows, suspended on three needles: the off-white thread of unravelled Yankee tents ran rough through her fingers.

[caption id="attachment_3455" align="aligncenter" width="1422"]Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia[/caption]

Mrs Lee’s sock, half-knitted, its needles still mournfully attached and holding the composition together, now resides in the archives of the late Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. Originally conceived by the women of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society as a monument to the men who died for the Confederacy and the women and children who devoted themselves to the South’s cause during the Civil War, the museum housed an astonishing array of military and domestic items donated by individuals through the 1890s to the present day. To the modern eye the place was like a cabinet of curios, eloquent in their brooding morbidity – delicately woven hair necklaces told of efforts to exert intricate control over the uncertainties of the wartime present; samples of ersatz homespun made by slaves and their owners, now placed in museum cases, seemed to take great pride in their own ingenuity as objects of survival; woven palmetto fans sighed over the memories of stagnant heat, the luxury of remaining composed and ladylike as battle raged through backyards and parlours. As their presence in the museum suggests, these were things that, despite the impoverishment or anxieties they made manifest, were nevertheless regarded with a sense of pride by the women who made them, who kept them, thought on them, displayed and looked on as these parts of themselves, rehomed under glass, spoke with them again, though now as if from a distance.

Mrs Lee had been stopped mid-sock when Union General William Sherman’s men threw her out of her home. Dispossession had stopped even the most rebellious of crafting hands, and the story that accompanied the object to the museum when it was donated by relatives noted she’d never taken the piece up again. It’s a difficult object to deal with, because its material act of rebellion against the invading Union army is not visually apparent in an immediate way; this is not a straight-talking thing. The mythology of this object’s matter relies on verbal narrative rather than visual representation, a supportive network of storytelling that asserts Mrs Lee’s anecdotal possession over a personal act of creative rebellion that seems to have failed. There’s more to it than this, though. Strangely enough, the museum holds two unfinished socks, which suggests that Mrs Lee’s wartime experience of personal collapse was far from unique. Taking into account the numerous wartime poems and stories that urged women to knit with militant mien – ‘Fair ladies, then, if nothing loth, / Bring forth your spinning wheels; / Knit not your brow – but knit to clothe / In bliss our blistered heels’ – Mrs Lee’s unfinished sock becomes a potent symbol of women’s frustrated, domestically limited attempts to make their mark upon a man’s war. Placed in the museum amidst the relics of male military action, the artefact and its potential are reasserted, leaving tangible traces of the voices that war so often drowns out.

The half-finished sock might appeal to a more general understanding of women’s place in war, but its position within the Museum of the Confederacy does suggest an overtly political side to this artefact’s narrative. Suspended in a politically charged museum, Mrs Lee’s half-finished sock doubly suggests defeat, as well as the unfinished nature of the Lost Cause, a cause which might be taken up by the viewer’s own enterprising hands and woven on into satisfying completion. One look at this object sets one’s fingers itching. In a way, this thing generates its own mythology without needing words to do so. Reminding us of Penelope’s unfinished burial shroud, it is a melancholy thing, the stuff both of life and of death, of an ongoing movement between feminine rebellion and submission, of narratives that begin but find themselves unable to end. For the women of the fallen Confederacy, the museum provided a way of marking one’s voice in the face of instability, dispossession, the fall of a national ideology and a personal way of life.

The worrying thing about these objects is their appeal: the worrying thing is the way they draw you to them, ‘all politics aside’. These individual oddities in which we can read stories of survival, desperate assertions of identity, attempt, as we read, to stitch us sympathetically into their melancholy bid for prosperity. The worrying thing about these objects is the things they hide, the violences they conceal, the culture of slavery, the history of brutal subjugation that this carefully crafted matter, and its surroundings, have the power to conceal. Or, to look at it another way, the things we fail to see when taken in by the striking visuals of ardent, desperate dissent. The museum also houses woven artefacts that face us with the uncomfortable thought that we almost certainly fail, on a daily basis, to interrogate the darker corners of our manmade things, to consider their origins, the substance that lies beyond the surface. As well as Mrs Lee’s sock, the Museum holds samples of colourful wartime homespun that a white southern woman had arranged and pasted carefully onto board, quite clearly claiming the work as her own. In actual fact the material had been produced by her slaves. While speaking superficially about hand-working a sense of identity from the worsted of poverty and decline, this terrible arrangement is undoubtedly an act of violence that alienates the African American producer from their handiwork and suppressed the voice of the maker threaded into those samples. Regarded as a possession, the slave was a producer whose own creative works could be appropriated as the crafted possessions of their mistress’s own hands.

[caption id="attachment_3454" align="aligncenter" width="1078"]Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia[/caption]

By disentangling the story of this proud collage, though, the sense of southern identity so brazenly presented can also be unpicked. Dependent upon her slaves for the materials that sustained her household, and with it her capacity for self-definition, the white woman who fashioned this board surely found herself coming undone after Emancipation in 1863, and in the years of desolation following the war. The strangeness of the arrangement lies in the fact that she made concrete her expression of a lost self, and her lost slaves, by setting evidence of these into decorative composition. In so doing, this woman asserted a kind of ersatz articulation of self: vital to her perception of her own existence, precariously hanging in the balance after the Confederate surrender, this object attempts to take the place of ‘resources’ long since exhausted. If these things, so tightly woven, arrange themselves to attract the eye, to fascinate, to elicit moments of affective communion from those whose eyes they attract, they are also objects riddled with holes, with telling traces of artifice that are worth pulling at. If the worrying thing about objects of protest is their carefully crafted appeal to our love of surfaces, our appreciation of a vibrant or imaginative whole, then sometimes it’s also worth noticing the close work of the individual knit and purl, making ourselves read between the rows.

 

 

An Afternoon in Vence

6th January 2015

When we arrived in Vence the Matisse chapel was closed. ‘No problem,’ I told my wife, ‘It’s open tomorrow morning.’ Except it wasn’t – I had misread the guidebook. Waiting until it reopened after lunch would mean cutting it fine to catch the train to Avignon. We decided to risk it. Ever since reading about the Chapel of the Rosary in Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography, I had been keen to see the place in person. The summer’s exhibition at Tate Modern had sharpened my appetite, and I had persuaded my wife it was worth starting our French holiday in Vence.

I’m a Muslim but I’m also spiritually greedy: if a place touches the transcendent I want to experience it. But since I grew up worshipping in light-filled carpeted mosques, churches always felt alien to me. At my school carol service I shuffled along the cold benches and shivered in the gloom. In Rome’s churches I’ve been spellbound by Bernini and Caravaggio; but I appreciated these works of art much as I would have in a gallery. My two visits to the Sistine Chapel have left me dissatisfied. When I took my wife there on our honeymoon the place was packed with bored tourists and tetchy guards. Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings have a muscular power that make you stare up in awe. Personally I find this type of Catholicism – like the hierarchies in my own religion – a pain in the neck.

Growing up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, northern France, Matisse hated the dingy churches and their inflated religiosity. In 1947, the year he began work on the Vence chapel, he wrote to a friend: ‘Sometimes when we are faced with certain Renaissance works, with their over-rich materials, sumptuous and provocative fabrics, we find ourselves ejecting the idea that such sentiment could have any part in Christianity.’ His chapel would be different. Though he was in his late 70s, Matisse was indefatigable in perfecting each detail. It was to be a place of gaiety and light, comfort and peace.

When we returned to the chapel, four or five other tourists were queuing patiently to enter. We hugged the wall to escape the afternoon sun. At 2.30pm the door was unlocked and we stepped through the doorway and under St Dominic and the Virgin, painted in swift, simple lines. At the bottom of some steps we left our heavy suitcases and walked inside. Once inside we found the famous light was not blinding: the yellow, blue and green stained-glass windows created a cool radiance. The chapel was smaller than I had expected; I counted 100 seats for the congregation. Its human scale was more appealing than the Sistine.

Our guide told us a little about the chapel’s history. In 1942 Matisse was recovering from stomach cancer in Nice. One of his nurses was a 20-year-old student called Monique Bourgeois whom he asked to model for him. If this had been Picasso the story would have ended only one way. But this was Matisse, and instead of becoming his sexual muse, Monique became his spiritual one. In 1944 she took her vows to become Sister Jacques-Marie. ‘Although she is a Dominican nun, she is still a marvellous person,’ wrote Matisse with a hint of surprise. After the war they were both living in Vence. Matisse wanted to show his gratitude to her and for his own survival. Inspired by her early sketches, he told Monique he would build the nuns a chapel, and that it would be his masterpiece.

‘He began with the profane and ended with the divine,’ our guide said; but it’s far from clear that Matisse renounced his atheism. ‘I did not need to be converted to design the chapel in Vence,’ he said. Unlike Picasso, whose temperament was by instinct iconoclastic, Matisse always strived to see truth and beauty in the people and objects he painted – whether in the ecstatic rhythms of the figures in Dance or the luminous fruit of Harmony in Red. Though he might not have subscribed to Catholic dogma, he knew what it meant to submit gratefully to a higher power. ‘Do I believe in God?’ he once asked himself. ‘Yes, when I’m working.’

Our guide invited us to turn round. The back wall is the only part of the chapel you could describe as ugly: a wilfully messy Stations of the Cross. Unlike Eric Gill’s solidly austere Stations in Westminster Cathedral, for example, Matisse’s vision of Christ’s last hours was painted in a few chaotic strokes. His charcoal sketches, on display next door to the chapel, are more conventionally pleasing. The sketch for Station Eight shows five holy women on the Way of the Cross dressed in exquisitely shaded cloth. The chapel version is barely recognisable: three vertical lines with perhaps the shape of a drooping head, sharply cut into by Christ’s cross from Station Two. It’s almost as though Matisse could not bear to depict the women who bore witness to such suffering.

I was reminded of Matisse’s wartime experiences. His daughter Marguerite fought with the Resistance and was captured by the Nazis. In 1945 she visited her father in Vence and described to him the torture she had endured. For two weeks he listened to the ‘atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me’. In Station Thirteen, Christ’s crumpled body is being lowered from the cross into his mother’s arms. Into that moment of agonising tenderness between child and parent, Matisse poured his own pain.

From the back wall the eye is directed leftwards to the boldly brushed Virgin Mary and rising Christ Child. Separating suffering from hope, as it were, was the confessional in the corner. The door seemed Moorish in style. Matisse visited Tangier in 1912–13 and some of his later paintings incorporate Islamic motifs: the latticework echoes the pattern on the woman’s robe in Zorah on the Terrace. Peeking through the ceramic panels I was struck by an extraordinary effect of the light. Though the walls are plain white a warm mauve suffuses the spaces for both confessor and priest. The mauve was unmistakably present but its source was mysterious. My wife asked our guide where it came from. She showed us the stained-glass window opposite and pointed out the yellow and blue panels that created a lilac haze on the white floor. It seemed unlikely but there it was – glowing on my shoes.

I stepped back to look at the whole window. It represented palm trees – the earliest Christian symbol of the cross – with blue and yellow leaves and a green background. The yellow leaves were so thickly daubed you could not see through them – representing, we were told, the opaque light of God – but through the other panels the garden outside was visible. There I saw a real palm tree behind its figurative doubles, with flapping leaves bringing an illusion of lively movement to the static glass. Matisse reproduced this technique in the iconic Tree of Life window at the front of the chapel. On the outside it is fringed with greenery that flickers into view behind the coloured glass. We walked round the altar and saw the stunning reflection the Tree of Life casts on the floor. So bright were the hues they seemed almost painted on. The black and white figure of St Dominic – the founder of Sister Jacques-Marie’s order – was flecked with blue and yellow light. At points it looked as though he was wearing one of the technicolour chasubles Matisse designed and which the priests still wear today.

Most of our group had left by now. For a moment the place fell silent and we lost ourselves in its serene beauty. My wife whispered that it felt more like a mosque than a church. I do wonder how much my response to the chapel was shaped by Matisse’s use of Islamic aesthetics. The flower and plant imagery recalled to me the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, which when I lived there served as a refuge from the Old City. (As yet untouched by war it remains a haven for Syrians.) Its small-scale elegance was reminiscent of the Alhambra, which Matisse knew and admired. The artist blanked out the faces of the human figures, as is the tradition in Islam, to allow for uncluttered meditation. Of course Matisse was no more a Muslim than he was a Catholic: but he mingles the aesthetics so skilfully he transcends both faiths. As he said, the chapel should be a place for anyone to find peace, ‘as Muslims leave the dust of the streets on the soles of the sandals lined up at the door of a mosque’.

We were so pressed for time that we inevitably missed some lovely smaller touches, which I have since noticed in a large-format book by the curator of the Matisse Museum in Nice, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Séligny. The oil lamp over the altar is a curlicued masterpiece. The candleholders resemble rose stems topped with burning flowers. Jesus’s outstretched arms as displayed in the confessional and the sacristy entrance look like petals opening towards the sun. The three-pronged railings in the garden – not open to visitors – enact a mini-Calvary with two bent prongs flanking a central straight one. There is much more I’m sure didn’t catch our eye. We only had an hour: it was getting late and our plans could not be changed. We grabbed our bags and rushed down to catch the bus. Secretly I hoped we’d miss it.