promises, postponements

“waiting at the barrier, your perception can remodel itself so that you are convinced the person you are waiting for is the person right there, right at the back of the crowd, just coming, just coming. –But she doesn’t come. And you begin to give up. Every figure in the crowd looks like her. Her hair, her nose, her neck. And then, suddenly, so blatantly it is obscene, they turn into someone else, someone so ordinary, you are staggered.

When she does come, you falter, she fails. That’s her? She’s shrunk several inches since you last saw her, and what terrible ankles.    Gradually, your artfulness tries to tell you, you are not in love at all.” Mark Cousins

“My thoughts were now concentrated upon the entrance to the ballroom door where I had suddenly perceived the back of somebody’s head. So he had come, after all. The fact that I never thought he would (such a serious character) had in no way mitigated my disappointment that he had not; now here he was. I must explain that the image of Sauveterre, having reigned in my hopeless heart for several months had recently been ousted and replaced by something more serious, with more reality and promise.

The back of a head, seen at a ball, can have a most agitating effect upon a young girl, so different from the backs of other heads that it might be surrounded by a halo. There is the question, will he turn round, will he see her, and, if so, will he merely give a polite good evening or invite her to dance? Oh, how I wished I could have been whirling gaily round in the arms of some fascinator instead of sitting with my aunts and uncles, too obviously a wall0flower. Not that it mattered. There were a few moments of horrible suspense before the head turned round, but when it did he saw me, came straight over, said good evening more than politely and danced me away. He thought he would never get here, it was a question of borrowed, but mislaid, knee-breeches.” Nancy Mitford

Fate Playing

Because the message somehow met a goblin,

Because your precedents tripped your expectations,

Because your London was still a kaleidoscope

Of names and places any jolt could scramble,

You waited mistaken. The bus from the North

Came in and emptied and I was not on it.

No matter how much you insisted

And begged the driver, probably with tears,

To produce me or to remember seeing me

Just miss getting on. I was not on it.

Eight in the evening and I was lost and at large

Somewhere in England. You restrained

Your confident inspiration

And did not dash out into the traffic

Milling around Victoria, utterly certain

Of bumping into me where I would have to be walking.

I was not walking anywhere. I was sitting

Unperturbed, in my seat on the train

Rocking towards Kings Cross. Somebody,

Calmer than you, had a suggestion. So,

When I got off the train, expecting to find you

Somewhere down at the root of the platform,

I saw that surge and agitation, a figure

Breasting the flow of released passengers,

Then your molten face, your molten eyes

And your exclamations, your flinging arms

Your scattering tears

As if I had come back from the dead

Against every possibility, against

Every negative but your own prayer

To your own gods. There I knew what it was

To be a miracle. And behind you

Your jolly taxi-driver, laughing, like a small god,

To see as American girl being so American,

And to see your frenzied chariot-ride –

Sobbing and goading him, and pleading with him

To make happen what you needed to happen –

Succeed so completely thanks to him.

Well, it was a wonder

That my train was not earlier, even much earlier,

That it pulled in, late, the very moment

You irrupted onto the platform. It was

Natural and miraculous and an omen

Confirming everything

You wanted confirmed. So your huge despair,

Your cross-London panic dash

And now your triumph, splashed over me,

Like love forty-nine times magnified,

Like the first thunder cloudburst engulfing

The drought in August

When the whole cracked earth seems to quake

And every leaf trembles

And everything holds up its arms weeping.

Ted Hughes

“I was not at all curious about who she was, but rather took her for granted at once. Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic.” Kafka’s first sight of Felice Bauer.

They arranged to meet in Berlin at Easter 1913. This would be their first meeting since that August evening at Brod’s. But nothing was simple for Kafka. There were obstacles and delays, promises, postponements. When he did arrive, Felice was not there to greet him. He could not understand this. On paper headed ‘Hotel Askaniche Hof, Berlin’ he wrote: ‘But what happened, Felice? You must surely have received my express letter on Friday in which I announced my arrival on Saturday night. Surely this particular letter cant have gone astray. And now I am in Berlin and will have to leave again this afternoon at four or five.”

why oh why the doily

I got to hang out in the tiny NTS radio booth a couple of weekends ago. Listening to Carrie Plitt talk poems and to Octavia Bright, Julith Jedamus and Will Eaves read D.M. Thomas, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop. I read 'Why This" by Louis Simpson. Quite close to my idea of heaven.

You can listen here.

you make me want to drink bleach

The launderette. The site for all your domestic painful pain. And time machines. And sex. And grandparents. And clothes washing up gloves popcorn candlyfloss flirtation. I hope you enjoy these as much as me.

the on button

It is with great pride that I can finally announce the launch of STATIC's Buttons issue. And with huge thanks to Jane Levi, Lina Hakim, Emily Williams, James Hawthorne, John Patrick Attlee, Ben Cranfield and Heather Tilly.

The launch saw all manner of buttoning (and some unbuttoning). As well as a curator's introduction to the Touching the Book exhibition and some close-eyed Braille fingering. Our hands were very happy by the end of the evening. 

dream land

WITH HOLIDAY-MAKERS DESERTING BRITISH BEACH RESORTS IN FAVOUR OF OVERSEAS BREAKS, SOME SEASIDE TOWNS ARE SUFFERING SEVERE SOCIAL BREAKDOWNS WITH LEVELS OF SCHOOL FAILURE, TEENAGE PREGNANCY, LONE PARENTING AND WORKLESSNESS TO RIVAL THE INNER-CITY AREAS. i, monday 5^th august.

A report, poetically named ‘Turning the Tide’, calls for action to revive the towns of Rhyl, Margate, Clacton-on-Sea, Great Yarmouth and Blackpool. Can tides ever be turned?

In other news (in the same newspaper on the same page) we hear that postcards were the most popular form of contact during the last three decades of the 20^th century for those on holiday.

This is my postcard from Margate.

if I don't reply

If I don’t reply

It’s not because I don’t want to

Or rather, its not because I didn’t ever want to

It’s that somehow the want got lost

Shuffled and resorted amidst other

Emails other questions (other complete

Lacks of questions other asking

Without asking which is the worst

And least pleasant to reply to of all)

That now, when I look back

Through the white glare of a snow storm

I find I cannot see at all the time

Or space for getting back to you

I cannot see my hand in front of my face.

It is cold and the starred list

(or fist?) casts shapes

Like explorers in the mist. Odd shadows

That brim and glow

Like knives along the shower-curtain

Unanswered, droplet-speckled, immanent.

Unanswered, and yes there was

A time when I knew what it was I had to say

Because what you said was not unimportant

Perhaps it was too important

And caused my mind to stray

It is not that I read it and did not think

It is just that something happened

A bird flew across the window

And I had not seen a bird for a while

So I am sorry

(Though even this remorse

Will elude me too before long.)

There used to be something

Some things even in the space

Beyond my knuckles

Now there is only numbness

And the dull burn of fading bulb glow

That makes eyes remember their sockets.

in praise of things not seen

In deepest Bloomsbury, just before Museum Street turns into Tottenham Court Road, there is a small patch of land known as Malet Street Gardens; a tiny square of green hidden by trees and flanked protectively by the back walls of Gower Street university buildings. I have eaten lunch in this garden before (it really isn’t big enough to be called a square) and have marvelled at how secluded and empty it is. Nestling between Senate House, the British Museum and the various schools and colleges that make up the University of London you would imagine it to be riddled with picnickers, mess-makers and (worst of all) tourists. But it is still quite secret (quite safe). Not many people seem to know about it and if they do they assume it is not open to the public. This assumption is not without reason, the gardens are closed during the winter months and the imposing iron gate that serves them carries a sign which reads “THESE GARDENS ARE NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC”. However, in the summer, they are. Made all the more special for this limited period of existence, time in the gardens is stolen and consequently golden. The trees exude a sort of historical mist and the place is full of pollen, greenfly and a glimmering nostalgia made up (in part) of the residue of Virginia Woolf’s daydreams mingling with A.C. Grayling’s sighs (his office looks out onto the patchy green grass). It is the proverbial idyll, the clichéd oasis, it is the secret garden.

 

All last summer as I made my way from Malet Street to the wind tunnel of Senate House I was charmed by what I took to be a particularly tuneful erection of a marquee taking place inside the garden. The sounds of poles being bashed against poles had never sounded so sweet, as though the builders were playing a game, making hand percussion like children with wood blocks on the edges of an orchestra (the edges where those not to be trusted with violins or trumpets can be safely housed). I did wonder from time to time why the construction of the imagined marquee was taking so long but as my hours are irregular and my pace from street to library conscientiously fleet, I did not ponder on it for long. In London the sounds of construction are hard to avoid, and with the British Museum newly covered in a net of scaffolding and the snowy tips of a tent emerging over a cloud of plane trees in the nearby Bedford Square, I did not have to search far for possible sources of the noise. Come October (when marquee season is clearly over) I began to wonder why I could still hear the sounds. Peering into the secret garden, through dark trees, and seeing only grass and benches I stopped in my tracks, where were the happy builders? Where were these sounds coming from? I got close enough to the low stone wall that surrounds the space to notice a long black box dotted with perforations and the occasional blinking diode. The sounds were recorded! The happy orchestra of construction workers never existed! On the gate I read the following proclamation.

Phantom Railings; The length of wall to the right of this gate is the site of an interactive sound sculpture that uses the movements of pedestrians to evoke a phantom of a lost iron fence. Inspired by the wartime initiative to democratise parks and gardens by removing their railings, the project engages with an ongoing debate about the accessibility of public space. The aim is to bring this subject into question by promoting a critical awareness of the social and spatial history of the city in a way that is entertaining and accessible to all.

 At this point I still thought that the sounds were issuing in their random burbling from a spool of tape. I did not realise until I watched a couple walk towards me that it was the pedestrians themselves who were making the plinking and plonking of railing on railing. Every person who walked past brought the railings into being, as though running a stick along them like a child might. I returned later that day with my sister (interacting with sound art is best done with a partner) and we ran up and down Malet Street madly and gleefully. We played for about half an hour, running until we were out of breath, trying all the varieties of sound-making that occurred to us. We tricked the system by ducking under the sensors and then jumping back up, speeding up and slowing down, tearing back and forth and back again, listening to the rhythms we had made by throwing our bodies through space. It was miraculous. Running in the street is not normally something I can get behind unless in pursuit of a thief, a bus or an uncooperative umbrella. And yet there I was running jumping screeching and laughing, oblivious to the raised eyebrows of the students smoking outside the school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, impervious to the wry smiles of the Senate House librarians who had clearly made the discovery of the railings long ago.

  

The creators of this ‘public intervention’ are the Orwellian-sounding organisation C4CC (that’s the Centre for Creative Collaboration to the uninitiated). C4CC sound like the kind of group it is best to avoid. One imagines a keen and attractive bunch of innovators wearing white coats and lock jaw smiles that reach from soap-soaked ear to ear; the kind with mission statements and motivational strategies for ‘team building’ who would as readily develop happy pills as tear gas. –Which goes to show that it does not always pay to be sceptical about abbreviations. The C4CC are crediting the British government with a little more socialist zeal than they deserve when they write that the removal of the railings from outside Malet Street Gardens was part of an initiative to “democratise parks and gardens”. They were in fact removed for scrap metal to salvage material for the war effort. Some railings taken from other parks and gardens were ‘saved’ and replaced (Hyde Park has been re-hemmed since the late 194os) while some were not fit for use and therefore ended up in the Thames (something the rag and bone men of today should probably look into). It was George Orwell who thought the removal of the railings was democratising. He saw it as one in the eye for the ground-landlords of London who, in his words, “are just about as useful as so many tapeworms” . The removal of the railings opened up the parks and squares of the cities to the public and put them back into that rare group of spaces which belong to nobody and everybody at once.

 "Except for the few surviving commons, the highroads, the lands of the National trust, and the seashore below the high tide mark, every square inch of England is ‘owned’ by a few thousand families."

 It is interesting to think about that select group of spaces and the way in which ownership and codes of behaviour encroach upon almost every space we find ourselves in in the course of a day. Interesting too to note that it is through the erection rather than the dismantling of a new kind of boundary that the space of the street has been transformed in Bloomsbury. Something that should have been divisive has opened a seam in the street which produces a series of playful possibilities and practices. The C4CC have created something amazing. Not, I hasten to add because they have achieved their (profaned) aim of “promoting a critical awareness of the social and spatial history of the city” but because they have radically changed the way people use and enjoy the road. I have seen countless stone-faced pedestrians make the same discovery I did with a mixture of bemusement and delight. And these small mis-directions, the wrong-footing of the everyday, are part of the joy of what being in a city should involve. They are minute but they are meaningful.

And the ‘intervention’ is successful because it doesn’t actually intervene. Rather it insinuates itself into the landscape and, like the Malet Street Gardens, it is pleasurable because it is secret; the notice on the gate is quiet and sober and only noticeable if you are actually looking for it. I am almost loathe to write this article because I do not want to spoil the discovery for the rest of you (then I remember how few people will read it and I am consoled). The railings do not make me think about public space they make me play with my body, my ears, my hands and feet, they make me ignore the rules of the street, and in their innocuous and secret nature, they let me make discoveries. The piecemeal way the work fingered its way into my consciousness was a perfect example of the joy of accidents and surprises. No one can tell you ‘this public space is for you’ or ‘this art work if going to make you play’ because it won’t, but if you discover it for yourself it allows for a creative appropriation of both the space and the way in which you use it; it is not designated, it is just yours. Michel de Certeau cites Foucault’s idea of the unseen ‘grid’ of discipline (which subverts will with habit) and asks if we cannot identify “the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’.” He posits “a network of an anti-discipline” which is where we can argue we can place the invisible railings. I am writing this article to urge whoever makes these decisions to keep the railings there permanently, why are they coming down? How can we chain ourselves to them to stop the scheduled dismantling on October 20th?

 

This was written last October just before the railings were taken down. There is now a plan to put them back up. Please help the plan by signing the petition here