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  Forgotten histories and out-of-date views, layers of interpretations now no longer relevant, the bookshops invite a kind of imaginative archaeology.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.