NaNoWriMo 2015

And so it begins: target is 50,000 words by the end of November. This year I am resurrecting my old post-apocalypse novel about a post-inundation world where a remnant Indo-Chinese culture dominates the world.

Word quota for today has been achieved. Hurrah!

Fragment from a winter bike ride

From the flicker of winter sun-shadowed trees

In the lane ahead

An adult buzzard glides from shade 

Into full sunlight,

Under-plumage a vivid blur

Of greys, white, black and browns.

Ghosts into the shadows of the copse.

Short poem about going out for a walk at sunset on a day soon after the onset of spring; a day on which the clear skies and sunshine of the day give way to a surprisingly chilly evening as the sun dips below the horizon

Sheep field.

Moist earth.

Mist-rise.

Dusk blue.

Cold moon.

Beyond the Forest

Beyond the Forest

Heard the Radio 3 breakfast-show presenter refer to Transylvania this morning, in respect of Bela Bartok, 'today in 1919 being the day when Transylvania was annexed by Romania'. 

Having been brought up in the English-speaking cultural tradition, and not having examined enough of my accreted stereotypes, I couldn't help but see Bela Lugosi loom up out of the mist, intoning ominously in his faux-central European accent. 'Transylvania', in the shorthand of this culture, is an amalgam of Stoker's "Dracula", the Universal 'monster' movies of the 30s, and perhaps the Hammer films of the 60s and 70s: a gloomy, bucolic land of hills and forests, scattered with crudely rustic villages and castles denizened by aristocrats and ghouls.

Obviously this is a travesty of the region's long and rich history (Rome, Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire...), its beautiful landscapes, and immensely complex and diverse religious and ethnic history.

By the same token, the one-dimensional and toxic stereotypes of migrants from 'Eastern Europe' that dominate the press and much of popular consciousness/discourse rest on a narrow foundation of prejudice and simplification.Perpetuating them risks embedding them in the minds of  the young, the ignorant and the impressionable, and with more damaging effects than Bela Lugosi wrought on my subconscious.

P r o p o s i t i o n s   f o r   N a s c e n t   T h o u g h t s   o n   L M I

LMI = Language, Morality, Ideology

1. Reading seventeenth century English radicals reinforces the knowledge that - in those Bible-literate cultures - their appeal to morality was predominantly couched in the language and quotation of scripture as a legitimising force.
2. In 'Western' cultures, morality (and law) is rooted predominantly in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of Bibical-/revealed truth-legitimation.
3. For 20th century radicals and leftists, the language of Marx/class was the central armature around which was built the argument for radical change/reformation of society.
4. Marxism as constituted in its ideological form aspired to the status of science (pseudo-science is a better description).
5. Mainstream left-socialism eschewed largely eschewed the religious tradition, bundling it together with the 'forces of reaction'.
6. In the post-Marxist, post-Socialist world, there is a paucity of language/models with which to frame the moral argument for a different way of being (as the language and conceptual frameworks of the mainstream 20th century models have been junked alongside their failed/outmoded/outdated political manifestations). 
7. The absence of a simple, clear, articulable model of morality/reform leaves the field clear for the status quo's continued dominance.
8. Language is crucial in framing the case for alternatives/fundamental change/reform; I haven't yet heard/found that compellingly articulated case.
9. Where is it? On what base will its morality be built?

Confession

It's time I owned up: I rather like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films that I've seen (all of 1, half of 2, fragments of 3). There, I've said it.

There's a lot of stupid mess in my head about why it's sort of shameful to admit this: all sorts of things around intellectual snobbery, received wisdom from critics, sneering differentiations between 'high' and 'popular' culture, the inability to give myself up to something simple and fun, and the associations between mainstream Hollywood money-making output and the decline of civilised values in the age of neo-liberal dominance and the commodification of everything.

But, leaving that aside, whenever I see a bit of these films, there are a number of things that appeal to me. At one level, I think the leads are attractive and funny, and the supporting cast is great (Tom Hollander and Jonathan Pryce, take a bow). And you could even make a case for Keira Knightley as something of a Bechdel-test icon.

The personalities thing has always been an important part of movies' appeal, and remains so for me. But more important for me is the 'world building' element. What I love about these films is the way that the world and its atmosphere is beautifully crafted through locations, props, sets, lighting and effects: this is a world that I would like to visit, a consistently-realised alternative universe where you know how things are going to look and feel. It's rather like luxuriating in a beautiful dream.

Thinking about this made me realise that I have similar sentiments with regard to literature: the books that I have really loved, and which I keep going back to, are appealing to me primarily because of their world-building, their atmosphere, and their prose. For me, 'plot' is just the thing that all these other elements hang on: even in Dickens, where the plots are as structurally integral as the steel rods in a concrete bridge, what's interesting to me is not the logic of the story progressing towards its conclusion, but rather the imagery that we see on the journey, and the vignettes of atmosphere, emotion and mood, and the playful language that sometimes stops you in your tracks and makes you re-read passage after passage.

I think this is why I often feel a sinking sense of disappointment as the pages held in my right hand dwindle down to nothing and the weight of the book is all in the left hand: the knowledge that the familiar patterns of redemption and conclusion are going to play out (which often feels like a bit of a cheat...), and - more - importantly - the sense that you will shortly have to emerge from this beautifully-rendered world that has entranced you.

An(dy)logue and Digital

I was thinking this morning about  that sequence in ‘Three Colours: Red’ [?] when the camera follows the path of the phone call being made by (Trintiginant?) - down the telephone line into the skirting board, into the external duct etc, then through the undersea cable and up to the phone ringing, unanswered, in an empty room on the other side of the channel…and then the return of the signal, as I recall, to Trintiginant’s phone…

And there’s also something here, I think, about how the metaphors we use to think about things are embedded in the *infrastructural technologies* of a particular time, and how those metaphors of the *technical* basis of things shape our thinking and ways of processing information. So the Kieslowski sequence works because, as someone who grew up familiar with the banal realities of analogue technology, you (I) understand that *physical* connectedness of things (also…there’s a point here about how you *accept* the technology that you are introduced to as a child as *normal* - so for (most?) ‘children of the analogue age’ the way that an international telephone call works is - in itself - not a thing of wonder…):

1a. You dial a number on the dial, which (somehow) translates into a connection, via the equipment at your telephone exchange, into a connection to some specific cables that will route your call to the desired destination’s telephone receiver; 1b. your vocal cords vibrate (let’s leave aside how the brain makes that happen…); 2. the sound waves propagate through the air, and impinge on the diaphragm of the (analogue) telephone’s microphone, which converts those waves into an electrical signal; 3. That signal propagates along the little phone line, into the wall, and out into the street, where it goes into a cable duct; 4. the signal whizzes along to the exchange and is routed to the target telephone, where the signal is converted into impulses that make the ringer ring; 5. If the person picks up, the circuit is completed, and the sound waves emitted from your vocal cords can be transmitted, converted back into sound waves by the receiver’s speaker, and your interlocutor’s ear starts of the process of turning those waves into meaningful components that can be interpreted by the incredibly complex hear-understand-formulate response-speak machinery of their brain…]

I realise that there’s *masses* of the technical components of this interaction that I don’t understand even in the analogue model…and the *digital* mode is even more mysterious. So my point here about the stuff you absorb ‘unproblematically’ holds, I think…I just ‘used the telephone’, focused on the speech act, and not thinking about the technology (while *hating* using it, a function perhaps of my Asperger’s, and not being able to see the person’s face…? So shy!), and not understanding the technology, or the infrastructure, beyond the most primitive level…

….but I think the difference for me between the analogue and the digital modes is that, because I was brought up in the analogue world, I had a *sense* of how it worked, and could construct - even if it was quite abstract - a *model* of how this activity might be embedded in concrete ‘things’ (even if some of those ‘things’ were ‘black boxes’) - you could still build a mental model based on electric current making some kind of actuator click, and that current then doing some more work somewhere else, on some other *mechanical* thing that moved, and did work…so you could create a model of *mechanism* that you could slot your understanding into. I’m much less confident in my ability to be able to do that for the *digital* model…maybe if I thought about it a bit more I *could*….but I also wonder if there’s something about the way that digital technology seems (for me at least) to *abstract* things away from the idea of ‘physical’ connectedness that renders the abstraction more profound? And whether this works in the same kind of way for the ‘digital natives’ of today?...

Scene

Shot a short video on my camera phone today: an air ambulance helicopter taking off from the play-park adjacent to my office's car park. Even from inside the ofiice, we'd heard the chopper go over very low earlier (you could feel the vibration in the pit of your stomach), and, after circling, the pilot put the helicopter down in the park, blowing leaves and wood pigeons out of the trees.

An hour or so later, sitting in my car reading under the shadow of the trees, I heard the whine of the helicopter's engine as it started to turn the main rotor. I jumped out of the car and started to film the preparations for flight, finding a gap in the hedge where I could get a vantage point. One of the crew stood on the grass making hand signals to the pilot,then climbed in just before the different pitch of the tail rotor joined the sound of the main rotor. The chopper wobbled into the air, rose slowly, and the rotor's down-draught sent a gust of dust and gravel across the grass, spattering my face. I kept filming as the hedge's branches flapped around in the rotor wash, and the helicopter disappeared into the overhead sun and tree branches.

"That was exciting," I thought, thinking about how I cold trim the video and post it online somewhere.

And then started to think about the context. Why would an air ambulance touch down next to a housing estate - perfectly accessible by road - unless there were some dire medical emergency that potentially required the patient's rapid carriage to a hospital? And what could have happened that meant that the helicopter was there for more than an hour? Pessimistically, I reasoned that the patient's need for urgency must have disappeared - presumably through their death.

At that point, I realised that my excitement at the spectacle of the powerful machine preparing to fly had taken me completely out of the reality of the moment: I was more concerned to try and get a shot and to capture the visual spectacle than to engage with what the reality of the moment might be.

And it struck me how natural, how *unthinking*, this instinct to 'take the picture' has become for me: always looking for the 'shot' rather than seeing the landscape; always thinking about what this scene will look like back on the computer, and how I can crop it - rather than actually drinking in the actual experience that I'm having...rather than being present. 

I don't like this. Always being somewhere else mentally; seeing the moment as if from outside, through a visualised distance of time and medium. And - especially - losing sight of the fact that there was probably someone's tragedy at the heart of this moment. I have become a cold bastard.

Winstanley in Plainer Sight

I'm reading Christopher Hill's 1973 edition of Gerrard Winstanley's writings at the moment. It's instructive that (in the Introduction) he reads Winstanley through the lens of modern (as it was then) socialist political thought, and frames a lot of his discussion in terms of Winstanley's thinking being a precursor for the communist/socialist models of ownership/distribution.

What's particularly striking to me - reading this afresh in my post-Marxist incarnation - is how Hill has to downplay the centrality of religious thought and experience in which Winstanley was soaked/embedded in order to make his reading fit better with the tenets of secular modernity. Hill says at one point: "We must make allowances for the Biblical idiom which Winstanley shared with almost all his contemporaries, and try to penetrate through to the thought beneath." How patronising is that? As if we, with our modern political theories, can know better than the person themself what they were thinking and saying?

So interesting to re-read things with a different mindset: when I read Hill on Winstanley et al originally, I too was looking for the echoes and signs that might reinforce or 'validate' my own Marxist commitments. Now, I can read Winstanley anew, less encumbered by those particualr ideological distortions, and see his writing afresh. And he's good.

Showers in May

As the clouds thin and break,

Late afternoon sun picks out

White blossom beaten down to a swirl

Of confetti on the glistening tarmac.

Each puddle vibrates with tiny ripples

As flotillas of frisky flies skim

Across the water's surface.

Everything is abuzz, green and pulsing with life.

America

Thinking about America today. 

Well, about the way it portrays itself, and the way it constructs and perpetuates its self-image. (I know it's problematic to personify a nation of millions, but bear with me.)

The land of the free. The paragon of democracy, openness and possibility. 'The American Dream'. The epitome of free enterprise. The culture that Britain seems to want to emulate - so dominant are American cultural values/elements here.

A country founded on the destruction of a native population. An economy founded on slavery. A country where a civil rights movement was necessary as recently as the 1960s. A country where - it appears to the outsider - to be left wing (or, God forbid, 'socialist') is beyond the pale...where the message of freedom/plurality is dominant, but where in reality what's permissable is narrowly constrained. Iraq, Grenada, Central America in the 1980s, Vietnam.

I'm not anti-American. But I have problems with the way that the 'official narrative' of a nation is draped uneasily over the more angular and uneven skeleton of its historical reality. (See also Britain and its 'Imperial History' narrative.)

The Shock of Nostalgia

Went on one of my familiar walks today. The last time I did this walk, maybe three weeks ago, the fields were under thick snow, the usual sheep nowhere to be seen, and the bridleway had drifts of snow blown across it where there were gaps in the hedge.

As I walked up the bridleway today I got a nagging awareness that something was different, but this awareness was just a faint suggestion at the edge of conscious thought, like that fuzzy sensation you get a little while before you know that you're going to sneeze. Sometimes something can be changed in such a big way that you don't notice it consciously, as if your brain struggles to process the magnitude of the information.

Eventually, though, I realised that the huge field normally given over to sheep-grazing had been very roughly ploughed over.

I was surprised at how shocked I was, especially by the realisation that they must have abandoned sheep-farming on this site. That saddened me: I have always enjoyed the encounters with the sheep here, especially in the dusk and in winter.

But now all the gates were open.

I guess what saddened me was the sense that this change was irrevocable; that I'd had no warning about it; and that it was a reminder about how suddenly everything can change, and all things that you take for granted as eternal turn out to be ephemeral.

There's something so brutal and transformative about this sudden, total transformation of green grass into rough earth. All that power transmitted through tractor and plough to create a new landscape.

Three good things about today (10/01/13)

1. Hearing a beautiful Spohr clarinet concerto on Classic FM as I lay awake at a quarter to two this morning.

2. Actually waking up when my alarm went off (as opposed to sleeping through four of them...).

3. Life being a miracle. http://youtu.be/glnZpeaHfwU

Three good things about today

1. The late afternoon view from the third floor: a clear winter sky, colours grading down from blue zenith to warm brown horizon haze, and a gorgeous red kite cranking its crooked wings across the sky, warm-lit by the low, golden sun.

2. Nightboat to Cairo on the iPod shuffle on the way home along the foggy M40: great driving music, with your clutch foot doing the bassline and your forearms twitching to the clipped guitar upstrokes on the offbeat.

3. The mist clearing as I got back to the village, and Orion leaning over, low above the horizon, looking at least twice as big as usual.

Vague thoughts on a more detailed thingy

One of the books I've got on the go at the moment is "The Cloud of Unknowing", a fourteenth century treatise on contemplation as the route to the divine. One of the things that has struck me about it so far is the author's insistence that God cannot be known through the intellect or through the senses, but only through meditation, rooted in love. This almost feels like a zen-type approach, with the 'active' mind switched off so as to free yourself from the distraction of the uncontrolled torrents of conscious thought. It's only by sidling up to the transcendent God, as you mosey around in the cloud of unknowing, that you can happen upon those moments of divine clarity and insight.

Anyway, this started me thinking about music. Specifically, how we come to music when we are young, before any 'contamination' of our innocent ear has taken place - that is, before we know what individual instruments are, before we can identify each instrument's voice, and before we have any sense of genre, form, or convention.

At this stage in our development, we must be responding in the purely sensory and emotional modes: it makes us feel good or bad, depending on certain characteristics of the music: rhythm, melody, timbre, harmony and so on. But as young children we have no idea about what those things *are*, only that this thing - this noise,these voices amongst the noise - make us feel something that we like or dislike. Hence we like to repeat those experiences - so we say 'Again! Again!' once we can talk. I have a hazy sense that while this is going on we're starting to wire in connections between the auditory cortex (if there is such a thing) and the channels and circuits of pain and pleasure. Certain pathways are being reinforced within and between these parallel systems, bonding together the sensory and emotional response patterns.

Later, we start to learn technical things: what instruments are, what they're made of, and how they are played, strummed, struck or caressed. We learn that there are genres of music, stratified by age and future, and that there's stuff that it's ok to like, and there's stuff that we *shouldn't* like. Because...

And perhaps we start to specialise. And we start to listen in a different way...for the lyrical content, and the way that it carries or invokes complex clusters of political, cultural or emotional elements. Or we might start to analyse the music in terms of how it compares with other versions of the same thing, how the players emphasise this element or that,this tempo or that one, and on and on to the tiniest nuance.

And in the end we might just be listening with the intellect so intensely that we forget to hear and to feel simultaneously. I know I have felt like this sometimes in a concert hall: that I am listening to the technical execution of the piece, listening for a flaw or trying to follow an individual instrument's voice, and on such occasions I have realised that I'm hardly listening to the music at all, but rather analysing the performance.

I would like to try and get back to listening with a more innocent ear. At the end of a recent performance of the Britten War Requiem, I said to my mate, "I don't have words to describe that." And in a way I think that's how it should be.

The Pissed Princess in the Lepidopterium (fragment)

On winter evenings, when the dark seems to fall like a cold wave, and the stars glimmer dimly through the city’s haze, she abandons the roof terrace early and often seeks warmth and comfort in the palace’s lepidopterium. Built by her father when the steam heating system was installed, the broad, high ceilinged space is always in a state of semi-gloom, with a thick, moist atmosphere derived from the vents that connect, via copper duct pipes, to some steam-powered contraption in one of the palace’s sub-basements; somewhere down there, hundreds of feet below her, in the levels that she has never seen - nor wanted to see - there must be a final stone floor, beneath which there is nothing but rock.

Her half-empty wine bottle makes a faint ringing sound as it brushes against the stiffened fabric curtains that form the entrance to the lepidopterium as she pushes her way through, having waved away the attentions of the flunky who had stood waiting to open up the gap for her. She refers to the lepidopterium (inside her own head; she can’t ever recall saying the phrase aloud) as the ‘moth room’. Formerly the room had been brightly lit by the new electric lights, but after the palace devolved to her she had given instructions that the collection of exotic, vibrantly-coloured butterflies be removed and replaced with the biggest, darkest, prickliest moths known to the Imperial Zoological Service.

And so it was that the moth room’s shadowy spaces were thronged with heat, moisture, and the fluttering of dark wings at the periphery of vision.

She takes her usual seat, leaning over to place the bottle and the glass carefully on the stone floor before pulling the flaps of the suit of lights up over her shoulders and lap, and pushing her arms into the sleeves. She can feel the weight of the electric wires and insulation that run through the suit’s fabric, and the moisture that has cooled and condensed out of her sweat from the last session; but she doesn’t care - the slight tackiness against her skin and the imagined scent of her residual dankness is all part of the pleasure.

She pours the rest of the wine into the glass. After the flunky has taken away the empty bottle, she gestures to the attendant to turn off the room’s main lighting and to switch on the the suit of lights.

*    *    *

I Am the Interwebz

I’m currently reading Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus (which is really good, by the way), and this morning it struck me that I now think about the internet in the same way that I have been thinking about books since about 1968: that is, not at all. 

‘Not at all’, in the sense of not thinking about their physical structure; not thinking about the carrier signals/layers (paper, ink, language, the alphabet; wires, networks, data packets, electrons); and de-centring them in the mind such that only the content is of importance - all the rest is invisible.

This seems more explicable to me in terms of books, because when I was learning to read I was not old enough to be conscious of the act of learning, nor of the different conceptual frameworks were  in play: I was just doing what I was told to do - writing those letter shapes over and over - and my pre-programmed sub-conscious brain and its plastic wiring were doing all the work to make it all fit together (well done, evolution). 

With the interwebz, however, things were different: the publicly-accessible development of the hardware infrastructure and the software overlays all took place during my adult life, when I was professionally or casually involved (more or less) in activities that revolved around computing. I’m pretty sure that I used to pretty much understand how this all worked. Now I don’t really have much of a clue. 

This makes me sad. Need to find a primer.

Something Wonderful

Went to see the John Wilson Orchestra at Birmingham Symphony Hall on Saturday, on the first night of their Rodgers & Hammerstein tour. A glorious evening’s entertainment: this is music with a wry smile on its face, a cheeky glint in its eye, and an unadulterated spring in its step.  

Everything about this performance was uplifting: superb, nuanced musicianship; terrific arrangements and varieties of mood; some wonderful singing; and, at the heart of it all, the art and craft of some glorious ‘popular song’ - memorable melodies and clever, literate lyrics. I realise that there’s a lot more going on here than my objective critical outlook: a lot of these songs are bound up with my childhood memories, and associations with loved ones, but I can see past that mist of personalised romanticism clearly enough to realise that these are not (just) ‘show tunes’ - I think that this is great art.

It’s well-known that Wilson has revivified this genre through his painstaking reconstructions of the arrangements (the studio scores of which were lost), and I have seen enough of his work at the Proms to be a fan of the music and of his approach. But seeing these songs, overtures and ballet sequence music performed in a concert hall has somehow opened them up to me in a different way. For a start, seeing the interplay between singers, conductor, and orchestra from a single vantage point (rather than the multiple camera angles and cuts of TV coverage) makes you realise what a great achievement it is to be able to change pace and tone while maintaining a sense of momentum and coherence:  the music sweeps through all sorts of moods, led now by the sweet, romantic strings, now by a melancholic oboe, and now by the jazzy swing of the brass section. These different focuses are swapped back and forth among the sections of the orchestra, sometimes fading into the background as the vocal lines dominate, but always providing the solid undertow above which the main tide of the melody flows.

The singers were uniformly excellent. The soprano Annalene Beechey was new to me - she has a lovely rounded voice, sweet and rich, and her accuracy and security throughout were faultless; beautiful to listen to. I’ve seen/heard Julian Ovenden and Kim Criswell often enough on Proms broadcasts to know that they are class acts in this repertoire: Criswell always convinces as the knowing, slightly rumpled female lead, and Ovenden brings a weight and authority to the songs that can seem surprising given his slight frame. Sir Thomas Allen’s baritone is also a weighty instrument, albeit slightly quavery in the upper register in places; that said, once he got into the full flow of the songs, the dynamics of the voice seemed to change, and the climaxes of Some Enchanted Evening and Come Home were irresistible, and hugely pleasing.

Thomas Allen’s an interesting one for me: I haven’t always found him convincing in this repertoire: there’s something about the residual overtones of classical technique that get in the way of me seeing him as ‘truly inhabiting’ the song. I’m using the word ‘convincing’ a lot here - because for me this repertoire’s success rests on the authenticity of the singing and acting: the dissolution of the performer into the song and its sentiment, such that you stop seeing the performer and the song as separate entities; this is always a magical effect, and there are many barriers to its achievement. With Allen, the barriers seemed to be gradually dismantled as the momentum of the songs picked up.

Another element for me here is that the singers of each song have a line of ghosts standing behind them: all the previous performers who have inhabited the role. Some of these performances are iconic - be it from film version, classic stage run or recording - and their presence haunts the present. So for me Criswell is always channelling Ethel Merman or Judy Garland, Ovenden draws on Howard Keel and Joel McRae (in delivery if not in pitch), and Beechey on - in particular - Julie Andrews. The real trick here, it seems to me - is to make the audience conscious of these ghosts while making sure that your own performance is uppermost. When this happens, again there’s a magical effect.

I have a different kind of relationship with this music than I do with ‘art song’. The latter is ‘closed’ to me, in a way, because I have little personal, emotional connection with it: partly because I am largely ignorant of its technicalities, conventions and historical contexts; and partly because much of the meaning is obscured by foreign languages and opaque forms. Sure, there’s some of the repertoire that reaches through and touches me, but my attachment to this kind of music is mostly cerebral and admiring rather than direct and emotional. My relationship with the ‘popular song’ that the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire typifies is much warmer and more ‘felt’. Partly this is because I have family associations with it: it’s the kind of music that would have been on my grandparents’ and parents’ radios and record players when I was young, and the repertoire and its warm, romantic imagery and sentiment has seeped into my psyche through repeated exposures via TV showings of the films. It’s almost as if this music has been absorbed by osmosis, diffusing deep into the structures of brain and memory. 

When the enchanting melodies and smart lyrics reactivate those stores of memory and sentiment through such a skillful and charming performance as this, it’s hard not to conclude that the art of the popular song is indeed ‘something wonderful’.

Moral Neutrality

Thinking back to my 'intense' military modelling days, I was reminded of how startled I was to find a letter in one edition of 'Military Modelling' magazine, questioning the degree to which the building of models of SS soldiers and their vehicles was morally questionable. In my innocence at that time, I had never even considered such a question.

Disappointed in not being able to find much reference to 'the ethics of military modelling' online, I googled the title of the book that the letter had referred to - 'Wenn alle Bruder Schweigen' (it has stuck in my mind for 35+ years, testament to the impression that the letter made on me.).

Dismayingly, the Amazon reviews of the book (a pictorial study of some SS elements), contain plenty of (not very coded) references: 'highly recommended, especially considering that the text does not engage in the generalized bias and character assassination so often associated with works on the SS'; 'Many SS veterans were prosecuted as criminals for their conduct in combatting guerillas who illegally disguised themselves as civilians...'; 'A must buy for anyone willing to learn how the SS developed, served and was ultimately disgraced - not by its own actions but rather by those whose agendas were (and remain) subject to political jingoism and post-war correctness.' That said...the three different reviews do all seem to have been posted by the same person.

Anyway...this has started me thinking about the 'moral neutrality' of the military modelling world: something that struck me as troubling personally after I read that letter (until that point, I had seen all the German military hardware/figures I had been building as just innocent recreations of interesting vehicles/uniforms); and something that still strikes me as a bit odd - how we can compartmentalise the political/racial/ideological elements of Nazism from the aircraft, tanks, ships and people depicted in model form.

Funny feeling. (Not very well articulated...just proto-thoughts, really.)

Memory

Memory is the damnedest thing, when you think about it: it makes us who we are (in terms of the continuous sense of self that we reconstruct, unconsciously, every morning), and yet at the same time it is *itself* a construction - a conflation of externally-derived 'facts', stitched together by conscious and sub-conscious processes into a stable (but shifting) narrative of who we are, and who we were, and who we think we were. We bring our memories to the surface, sometimes actively, sometimes passively, and we draw upon them to bolster our sense of self, or to bolster our authority, and we largely treat them as if they are dredged up from a place where the truth holds: where facts are encoded objectively.

And so much of this activity goes on below the level of consciousness. At work the other day, I stood in the queue at the coffee 'pod' (or stall, or counter - whatever you will), and as usual my mind was racing over the immediate problems of the working day: why did that idiot do that? how am I going to be able to fit that task in alongside all the other things I have to do? why won't that new 'barista' hurry up? why am I projecting my stress and impatience onto that poor sod? how can I reconcile the reality of my business-drone existence with my self-image as a free-spirited creative socialist?

Eventually, I ordered my habitual morning latte, paid my money, and moved off around the curve of the counter front to the coffee-collection area (I am a well-trained consumer and know how to insert my corporeal being into the various production lines that I participate in). As I took my first step I bumped into the floor-standing metal frame that holds the 'queue here' sign for the coffees stall - some inconsiderate operative had sited it about eight inches away from its usual position; I must have made that ‘pay-and-then-go-to-the-collection-area’ move hundreds of times, and my brain had embedded all the elements of this activity into a routine that runs automatically, below the level of conscious thought. As I steadied the twanging metal of the sign, the woman at the collection point in front of me said 'I just did that as well'. We commiserated with each other, and I shifted the sign back to its usual position to save anyone else the embarrassment of knocking it over. 

It's a trite observation, I know, but I still think it's true that a lot of the time we are not really 'present' but are away in a seemingly separate mental world, while our bodies are negotiating the angles, planes and solid structures of the external world for us. Memory, and 'muscle memory' - the auto-generated behaviour of the motor cortex that carries us through the day: running our heart, moving our limbs, working our lungs, digesting our food, driving our cars, controlling the hundreds of actions as we write ourselves a note or tap out an email at the keyboard.

At the moment the model I have in my head about how *conscious* (purposive/directed/active) memory works is based on the idea of a labyrinth: when I follow a memory trace, it's as if I am in a dark, stone-built corridor, with a candle or lamp in my hand. I pass along through mainly familiar passageways, illuminating walls and archways that I recognise, but mostly my attention is on the thing that I’m searching for in the gloom; the stuff off to the sides is merely peripheral, and I don’t linger, or dodge off into the side-passages to see where they lead. And so it’s as if you’re always walking along pretty much the same path, over and over again, reinforcing the familiar retelling of the landmarks and increasing the likelihood that the same images and associations will be drawn forth when you set out on that path the next time.

This metaphor is itself built - in part - out of imagery from a book I first read in the 1970s - Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy; there’s a section where Flay, the Earl of Gormenghast’s servant, is stalking his angular way along ‘The Stone Lanes’, a network of passageways that riddles the great castle, and which are hidden away behind the walls of the castle’s public spaces. Flay is being followed by the young Steerpike, who is lost. As he tries to keep pace with Flay, the servant’s figure is alternately silhouetted  and illuminated by the burning torches that hang in niches, creating a particular rhythm of light and darkness. 

I think this image stuck with me because I associated it with a couple of dark/light rhythms that I had previously experienced. Firstly, I had memories of being in the back of a car as it drove along a road at night. I remember lying across the seat, feeling the vibration of the road being transmitted through my cheek and the bones of my head, and noticing the way that the intensity of the orange-yellow street lamps would  wax and wane as you approached and then passed them: I tried to track the growth of the light and fix the point where the angles of the light were momentarily fixed before they flipped to the ‘diminishing intensity’ configuration, and the interior dimmed again before the car entered the next cone of light. Secondly, I had a memory of lying in bed as a child at night, with the curtains closed, and how the headlights of the cars on the main road  would create similar rhythmic patterns as the cars approached and passed the house: that same puzzle of trying to work out the pattern of angles, intensity, and the flipping point between approach and recession. I could also remember the disappointment/frustration of not being able to work it all out and visualise it all in my mind.

Now, I realise that all three of these memory components - Flay, the car interior, the bedroom - had interpenetrated each other, and modified each other, creating a cluster of associated elements that they now shared, but which had not all been present at the time when the original experiences occurred. And now, with the years of repeated recall overlaid, they are embodied in neat narratives that treat the experiences as if they were separate, distinct and objectively factual, rather than being smoothed conflations that suit the purposes of my remembering.

In contrast, *involuntary* memory seems to take you to different places, in different ways: down corridors and pathways that you had forgotten about, places where you haven’t shone the light for a long time - places that you had forgotten even existed. I am sometimes amazed by the power of this kind of sudden, unbidden memory - the way that a burst of bright light opens up a vista of colour and detail that you didn’t even know you had registered (albeit which are still subject to the ‘active reconstruction’ mechanisms that are operating in the realms of active remembrance).

Sometimes a sentence or a phrase, or a piece of music or TV footage, or a scent, will suddenly bring a flare of light into the gloom of the memory labyrinth, and a chain of associations will spring into life in colour and with texture, like Marcel’s memories of Balbec in Proust’s novel. Whereas Marcel’s initiating stimulus was a cake and cup of lime tea, mine tend - at the moment - to be image-based. 

One such trigger happened the other day, when I somehow happened across the packaging artwork for an old Airfix model kit: in this instance a Spitfire Mk. IX.

As soon as I saw this picture I was transported back to my childhood bedroom in suburban Greater London, with the contents of the model kit’s polythene bag spread out on some newspaper on the floor (I can also remember the crusty bits of the red carpet where polystyrene cement had found its way past the newspaper; and the tacky feel of the glue on your fingers; and the way that the fabric of the carpet felt when you tried to rub the glue into it/off of it so that your mum wouldn’t realise that you had made a mess…). In these memories, my friend Stephen Holmes is present: we used to buy these kits at the toyshop over the road, and then rapidly build them in parallel; I recall the Spitfire and a Hawker Typhoon in this context.

And even as I write this I can start to see how our brains are doing us a favour by not allowing us to keep remembering everything we have ever experienced: the curtains of habit are powerful and keep most of the unstoppable flow of association invisible from us for most of the time - otherwise we would be overwhelmed. At the same time, I feel a real thrill of recognition as these memories and their associations start to spill over  - the same kind of recognition and sense of validation that you feel when someone on one of those ‘I Love the 70s’ programmes reminisces about some object or cultural artefact that you were particularly enamoured of in your childhood (e.g. a Chopper bike, or an Arctic Roll, or a 7-inch single version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep playing on a stackable record player in a sunlit summer room). 

I realise that these model-making and associated memories are deeply embedded and very important to me at some level: I spent so much time around war-related toys and models when I was a child that they have become bound up with my sense of my own history, the formation of my self, and the way that I look at the world. And they are also associated with family, with family relationships, and with particular moments and seasons of experience, all tied together and blurred together in a rich mixture of sensory memories, emotions and reconstructed narratives.

The very richness of all of these associations - buried, rediscovered, re-embellished, renewed - makes you think that you must hang on to them and value their content: as if they are imbued them with a significance and importance by the very fact of their vividness, depth and actuality. They make you who you are. Partly this is pure nostalgia and self-indulgence, but I think that without them you would be different, poorer in spirit, and diminished - even if you are only half-aware of them most of the time. The hinterland of the brain is so rich and constantly amazing.