For near-sighted readers:
***
By the Brush
Look: darkened spark of
memory stares. Sly Reynard,
sans rustle, exits.
***
Situated where I saw a fox on the first night of university.
Saturday, 7 February 2009
Thursday, 5 February 2009
10. For Shoah
First published in Plan B #31, March 2008.
Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation)
A question: how long can one keep up despair before choosing death? For how long does one tolerate the law of diminishing returns before abandoning the whole farce? It’s been over a decade since the first Godspeed You Black Emperor! LP, but its members are still making records for crushed souls and thwarted revolutionaries. So, on opener (discounting the 12 tracks and 75 seconds of metallic drone that comes before it) ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’, Efrim Menuck roundly declares all capitalist culture morally abhorrent, and even finds “the pretence of their awful gardens” too much to take: “Give me a goddamn shovel/I’ll dig my own damn hole.” Ho hum.
Menuck’s voice spends much time front and centre of the mix, to the record’s detriment: he slurs, wails and emphasises random syllables, in order to leave the listener in no doubt that he is ‘impassioned’, or whatever. The lyrics when recognisable, pressgang impenetrable symbolism – “There’s ravens in the gun-trees!” goes the title track’s refrain – in the service of Clash-simple protest – they unfortunately stoop to slogans like “I JUST WANT SOME ACTION!” and “NO HEROES ON MY RADIO!” – and killjoy paranoiac misanthropy. The music – well-recorded, churning electric rock grooves of varying intensity, with occasional string embellishments – is a far cry from both the ethereal tenderness and excoriating, heaven-sent noise of their first two albums, or GYBE!’s magnum opus, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. The hazy, heart-breaking drift of their earlier work, and the truly communal singing they patented on 2003’s “Thee Broken Satellites Gather & Sing: This Is Our Punk Rock”, suited Menuck’s vocals – an acquired taste – and the group’s anguished politics much better.
It’s not that it’s actually bad – just… disappointing. When I first came into contact with Godspeed! and SMZ, they immediately became Important Bands – you know, the kind who prescribe and transcribe your entire worldview; their mixture of fragile sorrow, ecstatic intensity, and very personal collectivist politics provided a conduit for my own disgust and rage, and a glimpse of salvation in a world I hated. Maybe it’s simply that I no longer want to punch through glass windows, or tear my own skin off: I’ve become used to the world (and a little numb to its horrors). I can’t be bothered destroying myself and any lingering hope I have for humanity in pursuit of useless protest. SMZ would probably argue that such a direct, angry approach is necessary after “six years of their wars”; but protest and despair are two sides of the same coin, and protest is only made on the assurance it will make no difference. The Gnostic, heavenly light of the first GYBE! records, promising to sweep away the world of exchange like so much bad scenery, is almost entirely buried here.
There are glimpses, though: the enormous coda to the title track – hypnotic riffs, frantically sawing strings, Efrim’s desperate, mechanical shouts straining against the bounds of technology; the raging, electric-storm guitar and manic free percussion that opens ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’; and the spare ‘Blindblindblind’, which builds into a group-sung chant – “Some! Hearts! Are! True!” they sing, over and over, finding new ways around the words, as if this incantation, if uttered with enough conviction, will prove true: the world will live again. As the instruments drop out and the voices continue, ever more emboldened, my heart leaps, my breath goes. This was what I came for: true love, again.
Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation)
A question: how long can one keep up despair before choosing death? For how long does one tolerate the law of diminishing returns before abandoning the whole farce? It’s been over a decade since the first Godspeed You Black Emperor! LP, but its members are still making records for crushed souls and thwarted revolutionaries. So, on opener (discounting the 12 tracks and 75 seconds of metallic drone that comes before it) ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’, Efrim Menuck roundly declares all capitalist culture morally abhorrent, and even finds “the pretence of their awful gardens” too much to take: “Give me a goddamn shovel/I’ll dig my own damn hole.” Ho hum.
Menuck’s voice spends much time front and centre of the mix, to the record’s detriment: he slurs, wails and emphasises random syllables, in order to leave the listener in no doubt that he is ‘impassioned’, or whatever. The lyrics when recognisable, pressgang impenetrable symbolism – “There’s ravens in the gun-trees!” goes the title track’s refrain – in the service of Clash-simple protest – they unfortunately stoop to slogans like “I JUST WANT SOME ACTION!” and “NO HEROES ON MY RADIO!” – and killjoy paranoiac misanthropy. The music – well-recorded, churning electric rock grooves of varying intensity, with occasional string embellishments – is a far cry from both the ethereal tenderness and excoriating, heaven-sent noise of their first two albums, or GYBE!’s magnum opus, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. The hazy, heart-breaking drift of their earlier work, and the truly communal singing they patented on 2003’s “Thee Broken Satellites Gather & Sing: This Is Our Punk Rock”, suited Menuck’s vocals – an acquired taste – and the group’s anguished politics much better.
It’s not that it’s actually bad – just… disappointing. When I first came into contact with Godspeed! and SMZ, they immediately became Important Bands – you know, the kind who prescribe and transcribe your entire worldview; their mixture of fragile sorrow, ecstatic intensity, and very personal collectivist politics provided a conduit for my own disgust and rage, and a glimpse of salvation in a world I hated. Maybe it’s simply that I no longer want to punch through glass windows, or tear my own skin off: I’ve become used to the world (and a little numb to its horrors). I can’t be bothered destroying myself and any lingering hope I have for humanity in pursuit of useless protest. SMZ would probably argue that such a direct, angry approach is necessary after “six years of their wars”; but protest and despair are two sides of the same coin, and protest is only made on the assurance it will make no difference. The Gnostic, heavenly light of the first GYBE! records, promising to sweep away the world of exchange like so much bad scenery, is almost entirely buried here.
There are glimpses, though: the enormous coda to the title track – hypnotic riffs, frantically sawing strings, Efrim’s desperate, mechanical shouts straining against the bounds of technology; the raging, electric-storm guitar and manic free percussion that opens ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’; and the spare ‘Blindblindblind’, which builds into a group-sung chant – “Some! Hearts! Are! True!” they sing, over and over, finding new ways around the words, as if this incantation, if uttered with enough conviction, will prove true: the world will live again. As the instruments drop out and the voices continue, ever more emboldened, my heart leaps, my breath goes. This was what I came for: true love, again.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
9. Two Flash Fictions
Written for our final seminar with Maureen Freely. Burial is a rewritten fragment from a longer story, Spiderland. For the other, we were required to take an urban myth, rumour, or piece of apocrypha, and rework it.
Burial
The drops began to spatter the pavement with the usual rhythm, broken and dull; it would soon speed to a barrage. The street forked off, the sign on the left with the word for ‘museum’. It was at the end of the street, towering over the other buildings by virtue of an extra storey. Its only identifiers were the remnants of massive lettering on the whitewashed walls scarred with years of dirt and rain. I repeatedly pushed the door, then pulled it open.
The interior was no better: the cracked white paint was draped with cobwebs in the corners, the floor tiles were stamped with dirt. I dripped over to the booth, bought a ticket from the acne-plastered boy, walked through. The first room was lined with photographs, the captions plastered thick with the local language. There was – what? – some bored girl milking a cow, shoulders hunched resentfully; farms that even then knew what mud was. A field of rubble, a woman in a muddy peasant skirt picking through the demolished cottages, a dog next to her, mid-yap. How bizarre it was, that all these things had not merely come together for the picture, but been. The caption said 1943. I tried to remember whether the place was no smoking as I squinted. Then men swimming in a river, not far from the town, Red Army uniforms piled on the bank in the foreground. My grandfather’s pictures were different only in the insignia. It reminded me of the cover of Spiderland: the rippling, opaque water, the heads popping out of it, smirking like it was a happy coincidence they were in shot; behind them the stony bank, the cliff, the trees, stretching away into a white sky. I remembered wondering what they were like, these people with their bodies out of sight; ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, it looked like someone had simply found it, dredged up from the bottom of a box to be hemmed in by black borders. It was only later I found out Will Oldham, who had made the Palace records, took the photo; he’d grown up with the rest of Slint in Louisville, a backwater like this one, or mine.
The next room contained glass cases, misty with grease in the light. I could only half-glimpse some content: scraps of fabric, some the size of half a pyjama top, their wide stripes still visible, some almost tiny, ripped and muddied. On the shelf below, rusted pick-axe heads or spades without shafts, the caption-cards unreadable. One rag had a cloth triangle sewn on to it. ‘B’ for ‘Britisch’. Red to indicate a POW. I crossed to another case. Skulls, some with bullet holes in the back of the head, some with jaws missing, craniums cracked. Eye after hollow eye. Femurs, ribs, the odd dark mud-spattered beige they have before being boiled for display. On the shelf below, rusted razorwire. Bizarre to think they’d been below the hills and plain where we had driven, below stratum on stratum. I walked on.
Where does the past go? I thought.
Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
The decision had been made. All of the Vatican procedures were in place, the bureaucracy dealt with: now all we needed was our saint. Being one of the novices handiest with a shovel, I was given the honour of helping with the exhumation.
The snow drove down on the cemetery of the convent; we had not been out to complete our chores for many weeks, as even our habits proved scant protection against the cold. We five trudging down the path were the only thing to be heard, the white landscape quashing any other sound. The grave was in a space off the path, bracketed by two stark naked trees clawing at the white sky. Standing huddled around the marker stone, we drew our cloaks around us as the wind picked up. Whilst Tomas, in the centre of the circle, tried to light the fire, it blew a thick sprinkling of white upon our backs. Setting a saint’s grave aflame is hardly a pious action, but we were in no position to argue with the labourers; if the Vatican saw things in a practical light, this nonsense would not be necessary. Not permitted socks, we crouched to have our skirts protect our ankles whilst we waited for the ground to thaw, the magic circle of the pyre spreading down and out through the powder.
The coffin was buried deeper than we had thought: some ten feet of earth had to be hauled out, the fire relit each time we came on another stratum of icy soil. By the time the coffin was exposed, we were tearing with gloved hands to avoid damaging the submerged casket. Brother Tomas and I demanded a prayer before they set about it with the crowbar; our imprecation to the Saviour was paralleled by the workmen blowing on their hands.
The sight the coffin-lid exposed was the strangest ever met my eyes. Á Kempis’ body was remarkably preserved, its flesh intact save for where the mice had been at it, stripping the skin from what had been the thighs. All else was leathered and shrunken, like something pulled from a bog. I must have been the first to glance down at his arms. They were in a state of disarray on his chest, quite apart from the cross of resignation, in which state, witnesses maintain, he was buried. Lifting the lid from where the workmen had placed, I could see snow clinging to indents streaking the surface. Scratchmarks. Brother Tomas, the most senior clergyman there, dared to lovingly lift the hands that had written The Imitation of Christ, and inspect the fingernails. Wood-fragments.
While he ran back to the convent, I stood over the pall-draped coffin. This was, he had said, No way for a saint to face death. I wondered how long he had been surrounded by that wood before life left him. Quite a while, I suspect. He had, I considered, followed his doctrine to the end. They could at least give him that.
Burial
The drops began to spatter the pavement with the usual rhythm, broken and dull; it would soon speed to a barrage. The street forked off, the sign on the left with the word for ‘museum’. It was at the end of the street, towering over the other buildings by virtue of an extra storey. Its only identifiers were the remnants of massive lettering on the whitewashed walls scarred with years of dirt and rain. I repeatedly pushed the door, then pulled it open.
The interior was no better: the cracked white paint was draped with cobwebs in the corners, the floor tiles were stamped with dirt. I dripped over to the booth, bought a ticket from the acne-plastered boy, walked through. The first room was lined with photographs, the captions plastered thick with the local language. There was – what? – some bored girl milking a cow, shoulders hunched resentfully; farms that even then knew what mud was. A field of rubble, a woman in a muddy peasant skirt picking through the demolished cottages, a dog next to her, mid-yap. How bizarre it was, that all these things had not merely come together for the picture, but been. The caption said 1943. I tried to remember whether the place was no smoking as I squinted. Then men swimming in a river, not far from the town, Red Army uniforms piled on the bank in the foreground. My grandfather’s pictures were different only in the insignia. It reminded me of the cover of Spiderland: the rippling, opaque water, the heads popping out of it, smirking like it was a happy coincidence they were in shot; behind them the stony bank, the cliff, the trees, stretching away into a white sky. I remembered wondering what they were like, these people with their bodies out of sight; ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, it looked like someone had simply found it, dredged up from the bottom of a box to be hemmed in by black borders. It was only later I found out Will Oldham, who had made the Palace records, took the photo; he’d grown up with the rest of Slint in Louisville, a backwater like this one, or mine.
The next room contained glass cases, misty with grease in the light. I could only half-glimpse some content: scraps of fabric, some the size of half a pyjama top, their wide stripes still visible, some almost tiny, ripped and muddied. On the shelf below, rusted pick-axe heads or spades without shafts, the caption-cards unreadable. One rag had a cloth triangle sewn on to it. ‘B’ for ‘Britisch’. Red to indicate a POW. I crossed to another case. Skulls, some with bullet holes in the back of the head, some with jaws missing, craniums cracked. Eye after hollow eye. Femurs, ribs, the odd dark mud-spattered beige they have before being boiled for display. On the shelf below, rusted razorwire. Bizarre to think they’d been below the hills and plain where we had driven, below stratum on stratum. I walked on.
Where does the past go? I thought.
Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
The decision had been made. All of the Vatican procedures were in place, the bureaucracy dealt with: now all we needed was our saint. Being one of the novices handiest with a shovel, I was given the honour of helping with the exhumation.
The snow drove down on the cemetery of the convent; we had not been out to complete our chores for many weeks, as even our habits proved scant protection against the cold. We five trudging down the path were the only thing to be heard, the white landscape quashing any other sound. The grave was in a space off the path, bracketed by two stark naked trees clawing at the white sky. Standing huddled around the marker stone, we drew our cloaks around us as the wind picked up. Whilst Tomas, in the centre of the circle, tried to light the fire, it blew a thick sprinkling of white upon our backs. Setting a saint’s grave aflame is hardly a pious action, but we were in no position to argue with the labourers; if the Vatican saw things in a practical light, this nonsense would not be necessary. Not permitted socks, we crouched to have our skirts protect our ankles whilst we waited for the ground to thaw, the magic circle of the pyre spreading down and out through the powder.
The coffin was buried deeper than we had thought: some ten feet of earth had to be hauled out, the fire relit each time we came on another stratum of icy soil. By the time the coffin was exposed, we were tearing with gloved hands to avoid damaging the submerged casket. Brother Tomas and I demanded a prayer before they set about it with the crowbar; our imprecation to the Saviour was paralleled by the workmen blowing on their hands.
The sight the coffin-lid exposed was the strangest ever met my eyes. Á Kempis’ body was remarkably preserved, its flesh intact save for where the mice had been at it, stripping the skin from what had been the thighs. All else was leathered and shrunken, like something pulled from a bog. I must have been the first to glance down at his arms. They were in a state of disarray on his chest, quite apart from the cross of resignation, in which state, witnesses maintain, he was buried. Lifting the lid from where the workmen had placed, I could see snow clinging to indents streaking the surface. Scratchmarks. Brother Tomas, the most senior clergyman there, dared to lovingly lift the hands that had written The Imitation of Christ, and inspect the fingernails. Wood-fragments.
While he ran back to the convent, I stood over the pall-draped coffin. This was, he had said, No way for a saint to face death. I wondered how long he had been surrounded by that wood before life left him. Quite a while, I suspect. He had, I considered, followed his doctrine to the end. They could at least give him that.
Monday, 2 February 2009
8. Dragging of inertial frames
Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, week 9. Context: we were challenged to take a topic from a science textbook or periodical, and write a piece on it in the style of popular science writing.
The first thing to do is to picture a bath-mat. Imagine time, the fabric of your life, stretching out into infinity (itself a difficult image to master), and space, your concrete surroundings, extending as if caught in a rapidly zooming-out camera-eyepiece. Take the co-ordinates of these two, plotted together, and you get… a bath-mat.
Bear with me here. This, after all, was Einstein’s view of the nature of reality. Everything that exists in time and space exists on this bath-mat, making in it greater or lesser indents according to their mass. These curvatures in the fabric of space-time were how Einstein pictured gravity – one can imagine Earth, on this infinite suspended bath-mat, as a golf-ball, and perhaps Jupiter as a water-filled Zorb, weighing down one spot so much that it causes everything around it, from the breadcrumbs of asteroids to the peas and sweetcorn of Io and Ganymede, to roll toward it. If we follow this logic, then the nature of time itself changes in tandem with the shape of space: under the crushing force exerted by, say, Jupiter, time will, from moment to moment, be stretched and warped; if we could have watched Europa’s fragmented form rolling languidly in towards Jupiter’s orbit, we would have seen its progress slow further and further. And if, indeed, we could stand on Callisto’s hyperborean desolation of a surface, and look out, we would see the rest of the Solar System whizzing around us like an overcharged children’s mobile, and Earth’s population going grey before our telescope-aided eye.
All this fascinated me when I was younger – poring over encyclopaedias with crumbling spines, absorbing what my parents called “useless facts”, marvelling over illustrations and comparing the rendering of dinosaurs between books – a longer neck on the brontosaurus here, shorter arms on the tyrannosaurus rex there. I must have been relatively old – 12 or 13, perhaps, aged from my vantage point then – when I began to be curious about what Einstein had actually said. It eludes me now where I first read about the theories of general and special relativity; perhaps it’s appropriate that one time can’t access another’s knowledge. But I know what struck me was the sadness inherent in the ‘twins experiment’: a thought experiment in which, with one twin travelling on a space-ship (I imagined it as one of the smaller shuttles from Star Trek, the latest series of which I would watch with my parents) close to the speed of light, and the other left on Earth, the former, for whom time would slow to the most infinitesimally creeping of flows, would return and confront, with unchanged countenance, a brother on the brink of death. Terrified as I was by the constant, lurking thought of death, and of life’s brittle shortness, it was both depressing and liberating – the idea of remaining young appealed to my sense of childhood desperation. I’m not quite so keen on it now.
This was, perhaps comfortingly, just a thought experiment; nothing – as my younger self might have feared – was actually done in the way of concrete testing – although, ominously, second-long time disparities have been found between the previously-synchronised watches of those carried in ultra-sonic aircraft and those left on the ground. But there is something, indeed, in this that affects us everyday. If we assume that time is experienced relatively according to the distribution of Einsteinian mass-energy (keep in mind that energy is related to mass by the figure of the speed of light squared) or our own acceleration, then it is apparent we have our own ‘frames’ of time-experience, local to us. But what, then, about objects undergoing no acceleration at all? Look at any object in the room which is not moving, or, on hearing a likely noise, look outside your window, and see if you can spot a bird or an aircraft moving at a constant speed. Both these things are in a state of ‘inertia’, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they have their own local ‘inertial frames’, systems in which they exist in an inertial state.
Einsteinian physics, of course, can’t just leave things be at that. According to the model of classical physics as formulated by Isaac Newton, all inertial frames exist in relation to ‘absolute space’; you can picture the universe, in this version, as an enormous fish-tank, in which objects sit still, or move at a constant speed, in relation only to the unchanging glass walls. In Einsten’s conception, there are no fish-tank sides, the quality of water, altering in viscosity, changes from place to place, and this character is dependent on the nature of the objects themselves. Once time’s relativity is grasped, it isn’t that difficult to understand.
However, there is a certain implication of this theory which needed to be tested practically. Imagine two satellites, travelling in fixed orbits at identical heights, at a constant speed, around the Earth. Their conditions, theoretically, are the same, so their inertial frames will be identical – a small refuge of stability in Einstein’s flux. Unfortunately not, though. Imagine these two satellites launched and fixed with clocks, travelling in opposite directions with regards to Earth’s spin. When they arrive back in the same place, the clock of the satellite travelling against the axial twirl, will be considerably behind the other – for it, less time has actually passed. The centrifugal force of Earth’s strange circling has carved changes in time and space, has dragged the satellite’s inertial frame. This is, incidentally, known as the Lense-Thirring Effect, which I rather enjoy for its suggestion of boffins with exotic names, spectacles perched on the ends of their noses.
In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts visited the Sea of Tranquility, a region of the Moon with one of the best views of Earth. They left behind an array of retro-reflectors, like a single, mirrored eye, a tiny trace of home, winking at those still trapped on the other planet. From Earth, laser-beams – no longer simply the preserve of clichéd Bond villains – were fired repeatedly at this oasis of glass, and, once returned, used to measure not merely the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the degree to which the frame of the Moon’s inertial orbit is itself dragged, subject to the Lense-Thirring Effect, by the spin of the enormous gyroscope of Earth. The same principle has been observed in binary pulsar systems – those stellar conglomerations, unlike our own, with two stars that send out regular light or radio pulses; calculating their distance from us by the inertial travel of light, we can see how that changes from star to star, altered by the effect of their rotation on each other, and measure the frame-dragging involved. Our own lives are warped by these same forces, and, in doing so, connect us with the circling of the stars.
The first thing to do is to picture a bath-mat. Imagine time, the fabric of your life, stretching out into infinity (itself a difficult image to master), and space, your concrete surroundings, extending as if caught in a rapidly zooming-out camera-eyepiece. Take the co-ordinates of these two, plotted together, and you get… a bath-mat.
Bear with me here. This, after all, was Einstein’s view of the nature of reality. Everything that exists in time and space exists on this bath-mat, making in it greater or lesser indents according to their mass. These curvatures in the fabric of space-time were how Einstein pictured gravity – one can imagine Earth, on this infinite suspended bath-mat, as a golf-ball, and perhaps Jupiter as a water-filled Zorb, weighing down one spot so much that it causes everything around it, from the breadcrumbs of asteroids to the peas and sweetcorn of Io and Ganymede, to roll toward it. If we follow this logic, then the nature of time itself changes in tandem with the shape of space: under the crushing force exerted by, say, Jupiter, time will, from moment to moment, be stretched and warped; if we could have watched Europa’s fragmented form rolling languidly in towards Jupiter’s orbit, we would have seen its progress slow further and further. And if, indeed, we could stand on Callisto’s hyperborean desolation of a surface, and look out, we would see the rest of the Solar System whizzing around us like an overcharged children’s mobile, and Earth’s population going grey before our telescope-aided eye.
All this fascinated me when I was younger – poring over encyclopaedias with crumbling spines, absorbing what my parents called “useless facts”, marvelling over illustrations and comparing the rendering of dinosaurs between books – a longer neck on the brontosaurus here, shorter arms on the tyrannosaurus rex there. I must have been relatively old – 12 or 13, perhaps, aged from my vantage point then – when I began to be curious about what Einstein had actually said. It eludes me now where I first read about the theories of general and special relativity; perhaps it’s appropriate that one time can’t access another’s knowledge. But I know what struck me was the sadness inherent in the ‘twins experiment’: a thought experiment in which, with one twin travelling on a space-ship (I imagined it as one of the smaller shuttles from Star Trek, the latest series of which I would watch with my parents) close to the speed of light, and the other left on Earth, the former, for whom time would slow to the most infinitesimally creeping of flows, would return and confront, with unchanged countenance, a brother on the brink of death. Terrified as I was by the constant, lurking thought of death, and of life’s brittle shortness, it was both depressing and liberating – the idea of remaining young appealed to my sense of childhood desperation. I’m not quite so keen on it now.
This was, perhaps comfortingly, just a thought experiment; nothing – as my younger self might have feared – was actually done in the way of concrete testing – although, ominously, second-long time disparities have been found between the previously-synchronised watches of those carried in ultra-sonic aircraft and those left on the ground. But there is something, indeed, in this that affects us everyday. If we assume that time is experienced relatively according to the distribution of Einsteinian mass-energy (keep in mind that energy is related to mass by the figure of the speed of light squared) or our own acceleration, then it is apparent we have our own ‘frames’ of time-experience, local to us. But what, then, about objects undergoing no acceleration at all? Look at any object in the room which is not moving, or, on hearing a likely noise, look outside your window, and see if you can spot a bird or an aircraft moving at a constant speed. Both these things are in a state of ‘inertia’, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they have their own local ‘inertial frames’, systems in which they exist in an inertial state.
Einsteinian physics, of course, can’t just leave things be at that. According to the model of classical physics as formulated by Isaac Newton, all inertial frames exist in relation to ‘absolute space’; you can picture the universe, in this version, as an enormous fish-tank, in which objects sit still, or move at a constant speed, in relation only to the unchanging glass walls. In Einsten’s conception, there are no fish-tank sides, the quality of water, altering in viscosity, changes from place to place, and this character is dependent on the nature of the objects themselves. Once time’s relativity is grasped, it isn’t that difficult to understand.
However, there is a certain implication of this theory which needed to be tested practically. Imagine two satellites, travelling in fixed orbits at identical heights, at a constant speed, around the Earth. Their conditions, theoretically, are the same, so their inertial frames will be identical – a small refuge of stability in Einstein’s flux. Unfortunately not, though. Imagine these two satellites launched and fixed with clocks, travelling in opposite directions with regards to Earth’s spin. When they arrive back in the same place, the clock of the satellite travelling against the axial twirl, will be considerably behind the other – for it, less time has actually passed. The centrifugal force of Earth’s strange circling has carved changes in time and space, has dragged the satellite’s inertial frame. This is, incidentally, known as the Lense-Thirring Effect, which I rather enjoy for its suggestion of boffins with exotic names, spectacles perched on the ends of their noses.
In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts visited the Sea of Tranquility, a region of the Moon with one of the best views of Earth. They left behind an array of retro-reflectors, like a single, mirrored eye, a tiny trace of home, winking at those still trapped on the other planet. From Earth, laser-beams – no longer simply the preserve of clichéd Bond villains – were fired repeatedly at this oasis of glass, and, once returned, used to measure not merely the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the degree to which the frame of the Moon’s inertial orbit is itself dragged, subject to the Lense-Thirring Effect, by the spin of the enormous gyroscope of Earth. The same principle has been observed in binary pulsar systems – those stellar conglomerations, unlike our own, with two stars that send out regular light or radio pulses; calculating their distance from us by the inertial travel of light, we can see how that changes from star to star, altered by the effect of their rotation on each other, and measure the frame-dragging involved. Our own lives are warped by these same forces, and, in doing so, connect us with the circling of the stars.
7. An Account
Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, term week 8.
What I remember was the quiet. In spite of a tendency, stronger than in most boys my age, to solitary play, games of imagination, my days were still the hubbub of noise typical of children: chattering classrooms, the omnipresent television.
My family wasn’t really religious, except in the wishy-washy Anglican way typical of New Foresters; the place seemed to breed ambivalence. When I asked my parents what exactly happened to us when we die – after my grandfather’s death from cancer; I was three – I received the comforting answer that: We go to Heaven. During the next few years, marked by the constant, poisonous malice and ritual humiliation only children are capable of, I would bring out this answer repeatedly, as if my classmates, cynical beyond their years, should be cowed and swayed by its total obviousness.
It’s perhaps appropriate that the contextual details refuse to slot exactly into place: I must have been somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, between Years 4 and 6, and it continues to escape me whether my friend Jon had been confirmed, at that point, like his mother, into the Catholic Church. I know that I spoke to him enough times about death, as if he were an expert on the subject. But this must have been earlier, at a moment when Jon wasn’t around to reassure me with erudition inherited from Oxford-educated parents.
The constant psychic violence my peers meted out had begun keeping me awake. It was one night, when my eyes had remained shut in the dark for three hours. Thoughts rattled in my exhausted head like pennies in a shaken jar. I have the impression that the last trail of thought had been about animals. It’s difficult for me now to count the numbers of pets who had died during my lifetime: a ginger tabby, a rapacious golden retriever, perhaps four marbelled goldfish, a mischievous guinea pig, and a rabbit who would be given an identical replacement years later are the only ones that come immediately to mind. I was wondering, I believe, as to whether I could rejoin them in the afterlife I had so vividly pictured (which following the cliché, involved lots of clouds.)
I had already begun to ask what exactly underlay these visions, this belief: exactly what evidence was there for God’s existence? The question recurred to me, developed: if, as it seemed, God left no fingerprints on His Creation, could the believers be wrong? And then, the answer landed like a sneaky blow to the abdomen: in that instance, there was no God. Before I could even formulate it, the train of thought started itself moving, shaking my entire nervous system. I thought, with enormous reluctance, my way through it: logically, in that case, there could be no afterlife. Thus, there was the possibility that, when death came, I would simply cease to exist. The black behind my eyelids seemed to thicken, spread. I puzzled, with the shocked compulsion of a trauma victim, what, then it would feel like. It wouldn’t. There would be no me to feel it.
That sudden vision of not merely total darkness, but total and utter nothingness, seemed to manifest bodily: a vespertine flower of a vaccuum opening up in the depths of my stomach, my mind and nerves reeling, scrabbling to get away from this sensation, but knowing that it was inside me, in the most literal sense. The end, whatever happened, and in whatever form, would come eventually; the body that was carrying me forward in time – the movement I took for granted, even, at times, enjoyed – was also bearing me inexorably toward the grave. I saw, as vividly as any afterlife seen, its own dissolution at the hand of worms, insects, soil-borne microbes; the scattering of my proteins through the dirt.
And what I remember was quiet: the weak streetlight filtering through the curtains, the apparent disappearance even of the uneasy creaks and gurgles of the house. I used to believe that nameless creatures lurked for me in the gloom, and that if I shut my eyes they couldn’t harm me. Now there was nothing but the darkness, waiting to swallow me up.
What I remember was the quiet. In spite of a tendency, stronger than in most boys my age, to solitary play, games of imagination, my days were still the hubbub of noise typical of children: chattering classrooms, the omnipresent television.
My family wasn’t really religious, except in the wishy-washy Anglican way typical of New Foresters; the place seemed to breed ambivalence. When I asked my parents what exactly happened to us when we die – after my grandfather’s death from cancer; I was three – I received the comforting answer that: We go to Heaven. During the next few years, marked by the constant, poisonous malice and ritual humiliation only children are capable of, I would bring out this answer repeatedly, as if my classmates, cynical beyond their years, should be cowed and swayed by its total obviousness.
It’s perhaps appropriate that the contextual details refuse to slot exactly into place: I must have been somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, between Years 4 and 6, and it continues to escape me whether my friend Jon had been confirmed, at that point, like his mother, into the Catholic Church. I know that I spoke to him enough times about death, as if he were an expert on the subject. But this must have been earlier, at a moment when Jon wasn’t around to reassure me with erudition inherited from Oxford-educated parents.
The constant psychic violence my peers meted out had begun keeping me awake. It was one night, when my eyes had remained shut in the dark for three hours. Thoughts rattled in my exhausted head like pennies in a shaken jar. I have the impression that the last trail of thought had been about animals. It’s difficult for me now to count the numbers of pets who had died during my lifetime: a ginger tabby, a rapacious golden retriever, perhaps four marbelled goldfish, a mischievous guinea pig, and a rabbit who would be given an identical replacement years later are the only ones that come immediately to mind. I was wondering, I believe, as to whether I could rejoin them in the afterlife I had so vividly pictured (which following the cliché, involved lots of clouds.)
I had already begun to ask what exactly underlay these visions, this belief: exactly what evidence was there for God’s existence? The question recurred to me, developed: if, as it seemed, God left no fingerprints on His Creation, could the believers be wrong? And then, the answer landed like a sneaky blow to the abdomen: in that instance, there was no God. Before I could even formulate it, the train of thought started itself moving, shaking my entire nervous system. I thought, with enormous reluctance, my way through it: logically, in that case, there could be no afterlife. Thus, there was the possibility that, when death came, I would simply cease to exist. The black behind my eyelids seemed to thicken, spread. I puzzled, with the shocked compulsion of a trauma victim, what, then it would feel like. It wouldn’t. There would be no me to feel it.
That sudden vision of not merely total darkness, but total and utter nothingness, seemed to manifest bodily: a vespertine flower of a vaccuum opening up in the depths of my stomach, my mind and nerves reeling, scrabbling to get away from this sensation, but knowing that it was inside me, in the most literal sense. The end, whatever happened, and in whatever form, would come eventually; the body that was carrying me forward in time – the movement I took for granted, even, at times, enjoyed – was also bearing me inexorably toward the grave. I saw, as vividly as any afterlife seen, its own dissolution at the hand of worms, insects, soil-borne microbes; the scattering of my proteins through the dirt.
And what I remember was quiet: the weak streetlight filtering through the curtains, the apparent disappearance even of the uneasy creaks and gurgles of the house. I used to believe that nameless creatures lurked for me in the gloom, and that if I shut my eyes they couldn’t harm me. Now there was nothing but the darkness, waiting to swallow me up.
6. All Ye Unbelievers
Review/interview of The Mountain Goats. Originally published in Plan B #30, February 2008.
The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride (4AD)
A strange tale: after signing with 4AD in 2002, The Mountain Goats – a.k.a. John Darnielle, a prolific purveyor of magical realist narratives, coated in otherworldly tape hiss – began to literally clean up their act, recording with a full band and professional studio set-up. The result was his most satisfying work yet: the claustrophobic Tallahassee, the damaged, heart-breaking We Shall All Be Healed (a concept album about his years as a teenage meth addict), and The Sunset Tree, an album both darker and more defiant in its exploration of his abusive childhood.
You might think that a man so well-exorcised would be running on empty, but Heretic Pride comes up with riches, by mining a seam of vividly-realised fiction. A collection of short stories or character studies – think of the snapshot constellations of Raymond Carver – with perhaps the only thing binding them together being the characters’ status as freaks, misfits, in some cases outcasts from others’ stories (H.P. Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer). ‘San Bernadino’ sees an unmarried couple escaping to a motel with their new son; ‘In The Craters On The Moon’ is populated with recluses haunted by disasters, awaiting their extermination; the title track describes an execution-by-angry-mob, the narrator being beaten and then set alight to the soundtrack of an upbeat, rolling, piano-and-organ-flecked groove.
It’s Darnielle’s way with ambiguity, best evidenced here, that gives much of these songs their magnetic power: the shattering ‘Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident’ sets the discovery of a corpse, the narrator comparing her with his ex-lover, against skeletal acoustic, delicate strings and the cooings of the Bright Mountain Choir; it’s hard to say whether the narrator of ‘Michael Myers Resplendent’ is an actor preparing for the role, or the serial killer himself anticipating finally playing his own part. It’s disappointing that the accompanying press release – drawn by Jeffrey Lewis – so bluntly pins down the songs’ meanings, because their suggestions, questions and lacunae – tales dead-ending, voices guttering out – are so much more powerful. The little details of sound and story – how appropriate Darnielle’s weak, nasal voice sounds in these emotionally strained songs; the melancholic religious speculations of ‘Sept 15 1983’, about the death of Prince Far I – provide the reasons to love these songs.
If what you want is a lump in your throat, a smile on your face, and ideas in your head, there’s literally no-one better around than The Mountain Goats, and Heretic Pride is possibly their best transmission yet. A strange tale, but true.
Interview with John Darnielle
Every Mountain Goats album seems more lush and complex than the last. Are you hoping to attract more fans, or is there some other reason?
You know, I just do whatever seems most interesting and fun to me at the time - I think any other way of doing things would probably be a disaster. I'm sure there are people who're able to say "ok, how can I attract more listeners?" and so on but I follow a pretty instinctive process: write the songs at home, send them to the people I want to play them with, then see what happens when we get into the studio. These songs seemed kind of lively for the most part and we were really enjoying playing as a band so they came out like that.
A lot of these new songs involve other people's fictional creations - Sax Rohmer's spies, Lovecraft's malevolent entities, Michael Myers - how did they end up in there?
Well I partly blame this concrete room I rented to keep as an office since my guitars were sort of colonizing the house - I started going down to the office in the morning and sitting on the floor in there with my guitar, and I felt like I used to feel when I'd spend a few weeks of summer vacation visiting my father in Oregon: he had a full basement at his house and I'd hang out down there, sometimes chopping wood with an axe or reading science fiction paperbacks and wondering whether monsters were real and stuff like that. I think of this record as a sort of indexing of life-long obsessions.
The last few Mountain Goats albums have been largely autobiographical, but they've been written in the same first-person narrative style, and exhibited many of the same feelings - lovelessness, pain, desolation - as these new ones. What, then, is the border between autobiographical and fictional writing?
Well everybody seems to think Get Lonely was autobiographical but it really wasn't - it just sounded like it must be but those were just stories The two before that, yes absolutely, in differing degrees. Anyway, I think whatever border there are tend to err more in favor of fiction - nobody's feeling occur to them in rhyming couplets or notes of the scale or even words, right? The line on writers is that they're only ever telling their life stories in some way or another but I wonder if it's not the other way around - that even people who're trying to tell their stories are in the end only making things up to try and make sense of a lot of disorder.
Did you enjoy making this album as much as the last few?
More! Adding John Wurster on drums was just awesome, and we'd toured with him earlier in the year so it wasn't like adding an unknown quantity - and we had JV back in the studio so it was like a family reunion with this awesome new relative that only some of us had met. Plus these songs were just more fun to play than the last couple of albums - "Get Lonely" was like digging a tunnel and "the Sunset Tree" was this massive catharsis for me, but this one was like getting to hang out in a haunted house or something. Really fun.
What might we expect next from The Mountain Goats?
Touring. Lots of touring. I'm not thinking about the next bunch of songs I'll write next - the one thing I'll say is that the last few albums I've played a little piano (on "Dinu Lipatti's Bones" and "Wild Sage" and here on "Michael Myers Resplendent") and it's really been great for me because that was the first instrument I ever learned how to play, so I've been thinking about doing more with that. The trick to using more classical instruments is not trying to sound like you're trying to write showtunes. Unless you are actually capable of writing showtunes. In which case, fire away, right? For me though anyway I'm thinking about trying to rethink the instrumentation while preserving that sort of gone-slightly-insane feeling that I like.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
5. The Empty Page
First published in Plan B #35
The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (edited by Peter Wild, Serpent’s Tail, 2008)
The video for Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ not only marks out, through its collaged footage, an alternative canon, but insists on an intellectual, extra-musical, element: Bill Burroughs and Harvey Pekar appear alongside Patti Smith, The Stooges and Sun Ra. Literature and theory have always informed SY’s output, from Thurston’s love for the Beats and Kim’s absorption of feminist theory to Lee’s parallel career as poet and diarist. This intellectual fertility, echoing the band’s stylistic breadth, perhaps explains the fascination they exercise for writers, musical and otherwise: they provide a limitless number of jumping-off points, which the authors in this anthology, each taking an SY title for their own, use.
The results, perhaps predictably, are varied. Even by the standards of middlebrow publishing, many of the authors here are less-well-known, which results both in some pleasant surprises and some duds. The majority of the stories seem to be ‘inspired’ by the more exoteric elements of SY, particularly during the Goo/Dirty period: pop-culture refs, nihilistic blankness, psychosexual menace. Some, such as Tom McCarthy’s incendiary fantasy about Marxist icon Patty Hearst, or Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘Snare, Girl’, which perfectly captures the suffocating mental claustrophobia of adolescence, work very successfully; others, including Scott Mebus’ ‘Bull In The Heather’, which grafts an embarrassing pun onto a mundane story, or Kevin Sampsell’s ‘Swimsuit Issue’, where a potentially fascinating theme is ruined by an empty prose style, are less so. A number, such as Katherine Dunn’s ‘That’s All I Know (Right Now)’, wherein a severed hand temporarily fascinates a gentrified community, are amusing in their deadpan oddity, but nothing more.
The best stories seem to follow the melancholy traces in SY’s post-Washing Machine work, peeking at the desolation beneath the poise. The autobiographical, starkly poetic ‘Little Trouble Girl’, by SY’s peer Emily Carter Roiphe, ends with the discovery of a child – the return of rock’s repressed responsibility – reminding us that, for those excluded from the inner sanctum of bohemia, the world still turns. Meanwhile, Jess Walter’s moving ‘Rain On Tin’, ironically commenting on the preceding stories, quietly reveals a despair at its heart to equal that of Murray Street’s ‘Karen Revisited’.
If the fascinating stories here don’t outweigh the number of ones that left me indifferent, that’s not necessarily the writers’ fault: ‘my’ SY and the band many in this anthology seem inspired by seem to be two different outfits. Such are the perils of fandom. There is, however, definitely a lost opportunity here: SY’s greatest legacy was re-introducing the Modernist project to rock music – the formal possibilities opened up by Daydream Nation, where they caused the time and space of rock form to buckle, should serve as more of a lesson to writers than their thematic gewgaws.
The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (edited by Peter Wild, Serpent’s Tail, 2008)
The video for Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ not only marks out, through its collaged footage, an alternative canon, but insists on an intellectual, extra-musical, element: Bill Burroughs and Harvey Pekar appear alongside Patti Smith, The Stooges and Sun Ra. Literature and theory have always informed SY’s output, from Thurston’s love for the Beats and Kim’s absorption of feminist theory to Lee’s parallel career as poet and diarist. This intellectual fertility, echoing the band’s stylistic breadth, perhaps explains the fascination they exercise for writers, musical and otherwise: they provide a limitless number of jumping-off points, which the authors in this anthology, each taking an SY title for their own, use.
The results, perhaps predictably, are varied. Even by the standards of middlebrow publishing, many of the authors here are less-well-known, which results both in some pleasant surprises and some duds. The majority of the stories seem to be ‘inspired’ by the more exoteric elements of SY, particularly during the Goo/Dirty period: pop-culture refs, nihilistic blankness, psychosexual menace. Some, such as Tom McCarthy’s incendiary fantasy about Marxist icon Patty Hearst, or Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘Snare, Girl’, which perfectly captures the suffocating mental claustrophobia of adolescence, work very successfully; others, including Scott Mebus’ ‘Bull In The Heather’, which grafts an embarrassing pun onto a mundane story, or Kevin Sampsell’s ‘Swimsuit Issue’, where a potentially fascinating theme is ruined by an empty prose style, are less so. A number, such as Katherine Dunn’s ‘That’s All I Know (Right Now)’, wherein a severed hand temporarily fascinates a gentrified community, are amusing in their deadpan oddity, but nothing more.
The best stories seem to follow the melancholy traces in SY’s post-Washing Machine work, peeking at the desolation beneath the poise. The autobiographical, starkly poetic ‘Little Trouble Girl’, by SY’s peer Emily Carter Roiphe, ends with the discovery of a child – the return of rock’s repressed responsibility – reminding us that, for those excluded from the inner sanctum of bohemia, the world still turns. Meanwhile, Jess Walter’s moving ‘Rain On Tin’, ironically commenting on the preceding stories, quietly reveals a despair at its heart to equal that of Murray Street’s ‘Karen Revisited’.
If the fascinating stories here don’t outweigh the number of ones that left me indifferent, that’s not necessarily the writers’ fault: ‘my’ SY and the band many in this anthology seem inspired by seem to be two different outfits. Such are the perils of fandom. There is, however, definitely a lost opportunity here: SY’s greatest legacy was re-introducing the Modernist project to rock music – the formal possibilities opened up by Daydream Nation, where they caused the time and space of rock form to buckle, should serve as more of a lesson to writers than their thematic gewgaws.
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