Fragments

 

There is in my possession a collection of photographs of cities, photographs taken in the middle of the last century on the kind of camera every family once owned and used to record important occasions.  The photographs, all black and white, are of the standard size of 3” by 4”, and each has been glued to a page in a photo album.  This album is itself defined by its quotidian nature. The photographs are of ruined cities, no more than heaps of rubble and fragments of architecture. Each is accompanied by a hand-written inscription – Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne.

Second-hand bookshops are time machines, cabinets of curiosities that allow the shifting between the present into the past of the once-owners of the books that cram the shelves.   The books themselves allow further slippage, into the past of the author, into the past of the ideas in the book.  Forgotten histories and out-of-date views, layers of interpretations now no longer relevant, the bookshops invite a kind of imaginative archaeology. The random nature of the arrangements often means that serendipity plays a part in what is discovered, it being easy to slide from a shelf of books on cookery via science fiction to the publications of the Age of Aquarius.   Here can be found books that begin with a simple fact, for example the sighting of lights in the night skies of Pembrokeshire, and then build this into a fantasy involving aliens and megaliths.  The second fact, that of there being military establishments in that area, and night firing by tanks, is absent.  And then there are those books that deal with real secrets, with the hidden side of the military industrial establishment, with the listening stations and the test facilities that hide behind razor wire fences.

Large nineteenth century paintings hang at the side of the staircases, and one in particular always drew my attention.  This depicts Samson and Delilah at the moment that Samson is bound by his enemies, while Delilah holds aloft the hair she has cut from his head to deprive him of his strength.  Delilah has the appearance of a starlet from the 1920’s, as if this painting is a publicity still from a film by Cecil B. DeMille. The painting is by Solomon J. Solomon, an artist little known these days aside from those who have a passion for the obscure end of Victorian painting. He has another claim to fame, and a surprising one for those who regard art and artists as useless in times of war.  During the training for use of the Mark I tank at Elveden Explosives Area Solomon J. Solomon was stationed in a barn where he worked on developing camouflage schemes for the machines, trying to find ways to make the slowly crawling tank blend in with the shattered landscape of the Western Front.  The abstracted pastoral scheme may have helped to disguise the vehicle at the first encounter, but the rhomboid design of the first tanks was too recognisable to be fully hidden.  The image of the member of the Royal Academy literally painting tanks is one that is comical because of the unexpected juxtaposition. The markings on tanks carry symbolical meanings beyond the strategic, beyond the numbers and signs used for identification of formations and battlegroups.  The first German tanks had the name Wotan painted on the side, and the British tanks had the symbol of an eye on the front.  The eye that sees all danger.  Mythology and symbols, a magical language to ward off evil.  And to increase power.

One item in the newspaper drew my attention, not so much for its description of the ongoing fighting in Europe, but for one fact about the loss of a battleship.  The battleship was carrying a fragment of the True Cross, and had been blessed by priests. When the battleship sank the shock came not just from the loss of the ship to a supposedly inferior enemy, but also from the fact that the vessel was, in theory, protected by magic, by an invisible barrier guaranteed to defeat any common weapon.  The rites had been observed, the invocations made, and entities made to submit to the greater power.  Now they must protect the vessel with means that were beyond technology.  To bind these forces to their task of protection a relic had been placed at the centre of the armoured ship, and the perfect fusion of weapons technology and occult belief produced. To name something is to be involved in a complex web of meanings; naming as giving a degree of control over forces that are unknown; naming as identifying something as autonomous, as individual, as alive.  Naming means that the entities are under your power.  And naming a machine gives it life.

The legend of the golem deals with information as an animating force, the figure of the golem brought to life by the insertion of the correct formula.  I am not certain about the animating force that is called into action, is it something that is inherent in the clay of the figure, so that the paper on which is written the magical text merely brings forth what is already there?  Or does the text bring something from outside into the golem?  In which case the text is like the runes that carry the curse. I knew of the golem from stills from the 1920’s film, and fragments of the legend discovered in books on myths.  There are other stories of humanoid figures animated by means that seem magical rather than scientific, and behind the robot in Metropolis are symbols that carry occult meanings, and she sits on a throne that makes her seem like a goddess rather than a machine.  And that image, the mechanical future Eve, kept reoccurring in my dreams. In this the magician was not a Jewish Rabbi, but an industrialist, one of those who supported the rising militarisation.  He places his animating text in the chest of an armoured figure.

As familiarity with a building becomes part of how it is regarded, the imagination works to produce new narratives to populate the quotidian blankness.  When factories were part of everyday life, when industry was a central part of life, there was no threat.  Once fallen into disuse they become the site of ghosts, of the possibility of strange events.  Perhaps they follow the same route as the church, once the centre of a community, now a place to be avoided during the dark, when the owls and foxes fulfil their task of being messengers between worlds.  This may be a function of the interior spaces, for in both old churches and factories the roof is high, in one allowing space for cranes and lighting that ensures no one sleeps at work, in the other the space is lit with the ethereal light from tall windows, and spirits may inhabit the rafters.  These old factories contain the traces of vanished industries, abandoned as if the demise of engineering had been a sudden event and the workers had fled as industrial capitalism was overtaken by the service industries.  The remains of the test facilities had that feeling of forced evacuation, of there being some reason for the immediate closure.

In the medieval period there were stories of automatons, of machines endowed with life either through cunning art – the sophisticated application of hydraulics and fakery – or magic.  This latter was used to discredit those with too much mathematical knowledge, perhaps because such understanding was not being used for the furtherance of the aims of the state, the monarch through whom all power must flow.  Philosophers became magicians, and their machines were animated by demons. Roger Bacon is said to have constructed a head of brass, an intelligent automaton that could speak and foretell the future.  When Bacon’s assistant interrogated the machine while the Friar slept, it spoke three phrases and then fragmented.  Whether this was mechanical failure or the anger of a trapped spirit is not recorded, It was growing dark when I left the site and returned to my car.  As I switched on the headlights a sign was illuminated.  A sign that simply said this was the site of an ancient monument.

According to what has been released from the official report into the closure of the site, all the machines were buried in the munitions disposal area of a military range in the South West.   The documents gave a list of those in charge of the final disposal, a list that included a senior cleric.  Some sort of ceremony had taken place before the machines were buried, something akin to a burial service – or an exorcism.

Labour of Love.

 

Although my mum told me grandfather worked for the Post Office, I found it difficult to imagine him in a postman’s uniform, sack of letters over his shoulder, trudging the streets of Liverpool 8 in the rain, avoiding the puddles with their reflections of terraced brick houses.  I could see him working at the sorting office, placing the letters in the correct box for each street in Toxteth, streets with names drawn from the novels of Dickens, or from small towns in Wales.  But delivering letters?  No, not really.

 

He was a quiet man was grandfather, and, in my memory, he is forever knocking out the ash from the pipe, cleaning the stem, filling the bowl, lighting the tobacco, then contentedly sitting wreathed in smoke.  That ritual of the lighting of the pipe was undertaken with the same quiet care he brought to everything, which may be why the idea of his working at the Post Office did not ring true. It is possible it was something I made up later, though why I would do that is another matter.  Which is not to say he was boring.  He had a ready line in nonsense songs that he would sing when he came to look after me, and his favourite saying was “I’ll knock your head off and throw it in your face!”.   It took me a few years to understand the joke, serious child as I was.

 

I think he must have retired from the Post Office just after I was born, and so used the freedom this now gave him to concentrate on his passion, the job that was his real calling.  This employment was in keeping with the ritual of the pipe, with the quiet contemplation of the slow passage of time while engaged in a task, for my grandfather rebuilt and fixed old clocks.

 

In the last century clocks were common, real clocks that is, ones that took their power from a tightly-wound (though not too tight I hear my grandfather say) spring, mechanisms that ranged from the bedside alarm clock, set to wake the worker to another day in the factory, to the late Victorian long-case clocks that could still be found for little money.  These grandfather clocks must have come from from the houses of the well-to-do, houses that were slowly being given over to bedsits as the local economy changed and the financially secure bought country houses in Cheshire.  Naturally I thought they were called grandfather clocks because my grandfather fixed them.

 

My grandparent’s small house was full of clocks, two large grandfather clocks on the upstairs landing, various mantle clocks on sideboards and cupboards, and an upstairs backroom full of clocks undergoing repair and rebuilding, a room full of tins of gears, small screwdrivers, and the smell of light machine oil. 

 

I have often wondered where he gained this understanding of the mechanisms of clocks, this knowledge that meant he was a local celebrity.  He was the man you went to with your late-running alarm, with the old clock your Gran had left you when she passed away, with the pocket watch you thought looked good, but which no longer worked.  Did he pick up this knowledge from magazines and books found in second-hand shops, becoming like many in Liverpool a self-taught expert in an obscure discipline? A Scouse autodidact with a love for knowledge?  I doubt there was anywhere he could go to learn the trade.

 

I can imagine him in these bookshops, standing in the dusty interior searching for manuals, part of a secret brotherhood who met to discuss the arcana of gearings and escapements, the twentieth century equivalent of the Medieval Guilds.  Craftsmen allied by the love of their craft.

 

On my trips back home I often visit these second-hand bookshops searching for the out-of-print volume that will help my own work.  Standing between the shelves, scanning the books of art and design, the philosophical tracts now forgotten, searching for half-remembered science-fiction classics, I listen as the bookshop owner and customers talk knowledgeably about obscure occult philosophers with all the assurance of Oxford Dons.  This desire to find a subject and make that your own comes, I think, from the history of the city.  Liverpool has had its problems, with high unemployment.  But, rather than allow that to define their lives, people become experts, using their time to explore a subject that fascinates them.

 

My grandfather had a son, Frank, who inherited his need for self-education, though not in a realm as practical as the mechanics of clocks.  Uncle Frank was quiet, reserved, shy.  He still lived in the family house, the result, so my dad said, of a love affair that broke his heart.  When my parents, my brother, and I, visited on Sundays, because that was what a good Catholic family did after Mass, I would ask to look at the newspaper Uncle Frank had bought.  This newspaper was the Sunday Times, at that time the only newspaper with a colour magazine, and with supplements dealing with the Arts.  Uncle Frank was an avid reader, with a small library of books kept in the locked cupboard in the front parlour, that room that was only used on special occasions.  When I was allowed into the front parlour I would wonder at these books, many with titles beginning with the phrase “Teach Yourself…”, with some on subjects totally unknown, even to my dad.   What, for heaven’s sake, was Theosophy? 

 

Uncle Frank was entirely unpractical, despite having been in the Royal Engineers at the end of the war, or maybe because of this, and his exploration of philosophy, science, and politics, was his only passion.  He had once worked in a shop selling carpets, and, when that closed, became a taxi-driver, though a taxi-driver who had very little interest in driving people around at night-time, or indeed during much of the day.

 

When my grandfather died, and shortly after my grandmother, Uncle Frank stayed on in the family house.  He sold all the clocks to someone who offered to ‘take them off his hands’ without really thinking.  Perhaps all those clocks marking out time in a now-empty house was too much for him.  When I moved away to study art I didn’t keep in touch, something I now regret, for I know he followed my progress from Masters to PhD. 

 

I look back at my grandfather, at my uncle, and think about their work.  Not about their jobs, not about the thing they did to get money, not about how they fitted into the system of employment that in theory defined them, but never did.  I think about what they did that meant something to them, that gave their days contentment, that felt like discovery without someone, or something, controlling their actions and thoughts.  And in that I see myself, another Scouse autodidact reading philosophy and making things.

The madness of the real

 

One of the ideas floating around in my mind when I began to make the model architecture was a connection of JG Ballard and Derrida, with a nod to Mark Fisher; the idea of structures that seemed like ghosts from the future, ruined semi-military bunkers that appeared to foretell the return of war, as if the future was casting shadows into the past as a warning of paths that should be trodden with caution.  Do not pass through this rusting barbed wire, for if you do you will enter a time stream where the dogs of war once more stalk the land, and ruined concrete and rusting wrecked machines of war litter the landscape.

Although the technologies of war are ever-present, the underpinning of once empires and those who wish to rebuild their empires, they were shadows.  Conflict had shifted to finance, to resources, and militias sought to control places far away from the shining towers of The City.  There were still the dealers, those who took stands in the Fairs of Death to sell the latest piece of expensive equipment, and the factories still made the machines, and the research establishments still ran simulations and tested things that looked more fiction than fact. 

 But we passed through the wire, and the landscape changed.  We hold onto the belief that we can find a path through, that the light will disperse the fog and smoke and the ruins and wrecks will return to history, that tanks in museums will be relics and not functional, that lights in the sky will bring hope and not death. 

Meanwhile…I continue to make scenes that chase the world, wishing ruins to be hopeful signs of what has been left behind rather than a present reality.  There is hope in agency, we can do things, even little things, and work to change the path we travel.