The Jewelled Garden

Before him there were trees of precious stones,
And he went straight to look at them.
The tree bears carnelian as its fruit,
Laden with clusters (of jewels), dazzling to behold,
It bears lapis lazuli as foliage,
Bearing fruit, a delight to look upon.

[25 lines are missing here, describing the garden in detail.]

... cedar
... agate
... of the sea ... lapis lazuli,
Like thorns and briars ... carnelian,
...
Rubies, hematite, ...
Like... emeralds (?)
... of the sea,
...

- The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet IX, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs

This is the earliest known literary depiction of a garden.  Time wore away the clay tablet on which it was written so that we no longer have a view of the whole, just these imagistic fragments, a few imperishable precious stones separated by ellipses.  The jewelled plants in the Epic of Gilgamesh remind me of the crystal flowers in J. G. Ballard's story 'The Garden of Time' which, while they last, are able to keep at bay the progress of time.  There is an analogy with the nature of a garden too, as Donald Dunham pointed out in his essay, 'Architecture without Nature': 'just as evidence of an untended garden's existence slips gracefully back into the earth, so too elemental nature has eroded the ancient tablet's legibility.'

The Gilgamesh tablets were found in the buried Library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king who I described here in an earlier post, dining in the garden at Nineveh whilst a tree nearby hung not with jewels, but with 'the decapitated head of the conquered king of the Elamites.'  When Nineveh was sacked and burned, the library's contents were fired and thus, ironically, made more durable.  Over the years, as Egypt's papyrus libraries crumbled away or went up in flames, the clay tablets preserving the Gilgamesh Epic lay unknown under a mound near Mosul.  Heat had transformed a story originally written on wet clay with with a blunt reed into a part of the landscape, awaiting rediscovery.

This process came to mind when I read last week about a 100-foot Gillian Clarke poem written in clay onto the landscape of North Wales.  The BBC reported that

'a giant mural of a poem on a rock face in Snowdonia for an outdoor theatrical production has been likened to graffiti after attempts to remove it failed.  Rain was supposed to wash the writing off the slab near Gladstone Rock but there are worries it has been baked on due to the warm September weather.  National Theatre Wales has apologised and said it will rectify the problem. ... A spokesperson explained that Clarke's poem had been written on "bare rock with a non harmful clay-based product designed to wash away in the rain".  The spokesperson added: "However, the unseasonably dry weather in September has meant that her powerful words have remained visible longer than expected. With autumn now upon us nature can take its course and continue to wash away the poem."'

 

The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet XI

I wonder whether any traces of this poem will remain after the autumn rains, or if all efforts will be made to eradicate its words completely.  The Gilgamesh fragment shown above comes after the garden episode and describes a great deluge when the gods caused humankind to be almost entirely washed away.  In the nineteenth century, at a time when Biblical history was under intense scrutiny, the 'powerful words' of this ancient text were capable of provoking extreme excitement.  According to the British Museum site, 'this Assyrian version of the Old Testament flood story was identified in 1872 by George Smith, an assistant in The British Museum. On reading the text he ... jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.''

American Smoke

It was the season of autumn ghosts, a dampness in the soul.  November 2013.  I stopped outside the sea cadets building in Stoke Newington's Church Street, now re-purposed as an exhibition space: 'building-F'.  In the old bricks there were ghost traces of a painted sign: S S OKE.  The roof was an abandoned deck with white railings and a solitary flag pole.  Looking down at the street, a life-size photograph of J. G. Ballard.  In the new front window, a neat stack of Iain Sinclair's American Smoke.  Inside I was hoping to encounter the man himself, having heard that he would be selling off his old books for a limited period.  But there was no sign of him: just framed artwork and a bookcase filled almost entirely with his own publications, signed and annotated, with prices to match. Ridiculous, I now realise, to imagine he would be there in person, presiding over tables stacked with the remnants of his book selling days: paperbacks by overlooked London writers, pulp novelists, underground poets.  I lingered awhile - not buying anything felt like an affront to the couple from Test Centre who politely stood by as I looked at the shelves.  Eventually I left with a book of poems: Firewall.

American Smoke begins in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Sinclair went to deliver a lecture on Charles Olson, 'poet, scholar and last rector of Black Mountain College'.  There he met Henry Ferrini, whose film on Olson I included in a post here on the Maximus Poems back in 2010.  He visited Dogtown, where Olson came and walked in the woods 'to refine the art of getting creatively lost'.  He even booked a tourist whale-watching cruise (assuring us that 'the excursion was being made for my wife'). Olson's first book, published in 1947, was a study of Moby Dick.  The boat trip cancelled, he headed for the local library, looking for Olson's marginalia in books that had found their way onto the stacks after his death.  He says he found rough notes for a poem in the endpapers of one volume (much harder to decipher than the text Sinclair added to his own books for the pop-up shop in Stoke Newington).  Back in London he was pleased to have 'absorbed some of the weather of the place' but realised in watching Ferrini's film again that Olson can only be experienced in the energy field of his poems.

My landscape interest in American Smoke had been kindled by Sinclair's account of a journey to see Gary Snyder, published initially as an essay in the LRB.  Snyder evaded discussion of poetics but was happy to talk about logging, ecological threats and the day-to-day work needed to maintain the land he bought cheaply in 1966: 'a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass...'

'Taking responsibility for a portion of Sierra ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. ...  This Thoreau-inspired wilderness encampment, real as it appears, is underwritten by the requirement to represent itself as a topic for thesis writers, a reluctant paradigm.  A magnet for approved visitors, students, localists, or anyone needing to understand if this thing can be managed: a self-funding, functioning centre that is not a retreat, but a resettlement...'

The whole book is structured around these encounters with writers, living and dead: Corso in New York, Burroughs in Kansas, the grave of Malcolm Lowry in Sussex.  From Vancouver, Sinclair goes to the Burrard Inlet in search of the shack Lowry and his wife constructed from driftwood and sawmill lumber.  It was a kind of idyll - described as such in some beautiful passages in Under the Volcano - and Sinclair visits the spot on a crystalline morning.  He is led along a winding path through resinous woodland, down to the shore.  Lowry had enjoyed the view here, across the water to an oil refinery where the S had fallen from the word SHELL.  Sinclair is tempted to go in - 'I'd like to swim, the water is strobing gold' - but he paddles instead in the cold, sharp-stoned shallows.  There is an old bottle top glinting in the water - not Lowry's, but something to pick up and take away.

A mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake

Tacita Dean describes her latest film JG as an attempt to solve the mystery of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, a challenge posed by J. G. Ballard in a letter he sent her not long before his death.  Having watched it today I can report that the mystery remains and the film deepens it.  As a work of landscape art it is rewarding enough: turquoise pools, salt encrusted shorelines, shifts in scale from a beetle on the sand to a distant train passing into the grey hills.  But the film's originality and its blurring of any specific sense of time and space are achieved through the application of Dean's 'aperture gate masking process'.  This is described at the Frith Street Gallery site as analogous to a form of stenciling, allowing 'her to use different shaped masks to expose and re-expose the negative within a single film frame. This requires running the unexposed film through the camera multiple times, giving each frame the capacity to traverse time and location in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film. Among the masks used in JG is one that references the template and sprocket holes of a strip of 35mm Ektachrome slide film. The accidental black of the unexposed outlines of the other masks—a range of abstract and organic forms that suggest mountain horizons, planets, pools, and Smithson’s Jetty, appear to be traced by hand' (Frith Street Gallery).

Anyone who felt slightly underwhelmed by Tacita Dean's installation at Tate Modern in 2011 (Film), which explored some of these techniques, will, I think, be much more impressed with how they have been used in JG.  In a short Guardian interview with Adrian Searle you can see, for example, at 1 min 44, one of the semi-abstract compositions created through this process: a panoramic saltscape overlayed with three circular images that may be close-ups of rock particles (it is hard to judge).  There is an indefinable strangeness to some of these sequences, as if a view is being overwritten with the after-image of some other place.  Sound is used to telling effect throughout the film, as you would expect from Tacita Dean's previous work.  Back in 1997 she approached Robert Smithson's submerged land art through a soundwork, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty (not so hard these days, as she says in that interview, now that there is a road sign pointing to it).  In JG you hear lapping water, buzzing flies and slide projector clicks, occasionally interrupted by words: "If only one could rewind this spiral it would play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it has ever seen."

The film's deserts, lakes and salt formations evoke the parched, drowned and crystalline worlds of Ballards fiction.  There are explicit references to 'The Voices of Time' (which Robert Smithson had read), in which a character constructs a giant mandala in the landscape. Re-reading this story just now, the correspondences with Spiral Jetty are obvious: 'He turned the car off the road along the track leading towards the target range.  On either side of the culvert the cliff faces boomed and echoed with vast impenetrable time fields, like enormous magnets.  As he finally emerged between them on to the flat surface of the lake it seemed to Powers that he could feel the separate identity of each sand-grain and salt crystal calling to him from the surrounding hills.  He parked his car beside the mandala and walked slowly towards the concrete rim curving away into the shadows.  Above him he could see the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time...'

Tacita Dean has written at the Pew Centre for Arts & Heritage that both Spiral Jetty and 'The Voices of Time' 'have an analog heart, not just because they were made or written when spooling and reeling were the means to record and transmit images and sound, but because their spiraling is analogous to time itself.  Ballard proposed that it was a clock that berthed at Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which, he imagined, would have brought the gift of time to the Utah desert, whereas time is counting down inside the laboratories of his own fictional world. While Smithson’s jetty spiraled downward in the artist’s imagination through layers of sedimentation and prehistory, in ancient repetition of a mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake to the origins of time in the core of the earth below, the mandala in 'The Voices of Time' is its virtual mirror, kaleidoscoping upwards into cosmic integration and the tail end of time.'

Wastelands to Wonderlands

This J. G. Ballard poster can be seen outside the British Library, advertising the exhibition Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, which 'examines how the landscapes of Britain permeate great literary works.'  It is quite an ambitious aim and you'll have no trouble spotting omissions in the list of exhibits, including people I've written about here (The Anathemata by David Jones, for example). There is an understandable emphasis on the visual - so a whole case is devoted to Remains of Elmet and there is no place for, say, Charles Tomlinson's Stoke poems or Roy Fisher's City.  The writers are mostly British, so we don't get Sebald on Suffolk, and the language is almost always English, although one notable exception is a reading of Edwin Morgan's 'The Loch Ness Monster's Song' (my five-year-old son's favourite exhibit).  'Britain' is taken to extend as far as the Ireland of Yeats, Joyce and Heaney but there is quite a large focus on the city and suburbs of London, the River Thames and the M25.  Perhaps this reflects the 'London 2012' tie-in and the site of the exhibition.  I was puzzled by the inclusion of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone among these 'great literary works' permeated by the British landscape, but it may have something to do with the fact that the British Library is next door to the refurbished Kings Cross Station, with its newly sited mock-up of Platform 9 ¾.

As with earlier British Library exhibitions, the main pleasures are to be had from simply looking at books as objects - from fine art editions like Auden Poems, Moore Lithographs, to well-remembered paperbacks (Susan Cooper and Alan Garner) - and seeing original manuscripts like the 14th century copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or a poignant letter from John Clare asking for help from the Royal Literary Fund, or the heavily annotated typescript of J. G. Ballard's Crash.  There may be time to say more in later posts here about some of the specific exhibits - one listed simply as 'Robert Southey poem', for example, is much more interesting than it sounds. The texts are complemented by readings and sound clips: in addition to the Loch Ness Monster you can hear Ballard on Crash (it was not easy convincing my son he wouldn't want to listen to this exciting-sounding book).  There is also Ezra Pound performing his translation of The Seafarer, which John Woolrich wrote amusingly about some years ago: an attempt to fuse poetry with the sound of kettle drums, 'it would have been "magnificent", someone said, "with a rehearsal."'  Several short videos were made to accompany Writing Britain and I have included three of these below.  In the first clip Simon Armitage says "if I had to choose one thing that characterised British literature - both prose and poetry - I would have to say it was geography and, more widely, I would say: landscape."

The Westway at night

Chris Petit's road movie Radio On (1979) was for years a film I'd heard about but never seen.  Iain Sinclair mentioned it, in that entertaining Jeffrey Archer chapter of Lights Out for the Territory, and the soundtrack alone made it seem worth trying to track down.  Now you can see it on a BFI DVD where the extras include an interview with Petit and producer Keith Griffiths (who has also worked with Patrick Keiller, the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer), along with the digital video essay radio on (remix) (1998) in which Petit retraced the route taken in the original film.  Returning to his original locations, Petit found, like Simon English in the England Revisited project I mentioned recently, some places unchanged and others completely altered.  The most striking shot in Radio On shows two characters illuminated in the windows of Bristol's Grosvenor Hotel, taken from the Victoria Street flyover - a structure that Petit fund being demolished when he returned in 1998.

Wim Wenders lent Petit his director of photography, Martin Schäfer, and the clip above shows another memorable sequence in which the film's protagonist, Robert B, leaves the Westway Interchange to the sound of David Bowie's 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'. As John Patterson's has written, 'the film is peppered with long, coldly stirring shots from B's clapped-out Rover, moving through a series of defamiliarised, Ballardian English landscapes - the Westway at night, the M4, Hopperesque filling stations in deepest Wiltshire, and what Petit's collaborator Iain Sinclair refers to as "typically featureless Petit fields". Between them Petit and Schäfer attempt to remake our understanding of British urban space, much as Godard discerned contemporary Paris's futuristic foreignness in Alphaville.'

In addition to Bowie, the Radio On soundtrack includes Devo, Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury, along with the more cinematic sounds of Kraftwerk and Robert Fripp ('Urban Landscape' - see below).  Ian Penman wrote an article about the music to accompany the DVD, praising the way Radio On manages to avoid being date-stamped with signifiers.  'Spatially, and sonically, it doesn't feel like a UK film ... It's murky, strung out, hauntological.  Indeed there are long stretches of Radio On when we could be in some comparable backwater in Belgium, or France, or Germany.  Industrial estate, dockside, car park.  Rotterdam or the Ruhr or Weston-super-Mare.  Out of season arcades and signless avenues.  Suburban purgatory.  A DJ playing melancholy rockabilly to bored factory workers in spectral white lab coats - it might be anytime in Britain from the previous 30 years...'

Iron wind

My previous post described Peter Cusack's recordings of the sounds of nature at Chernobyl.  Jacob Kirkegaard's Four Rooms project, in contrast, sought to capture the atmosphere of the site's abandoned spaces: 'The sound of each room was evoked by sonic time layering: In each room, he recorded 10 minutes of it and then played the recording back into the room, while at the same time recording it again. This process was repeated up to ten times. As the layers got denser, each room slowly began to unfold a drone with various overtones.'

In J.G. Ballard's story 'The Sound Sweep', extraneous ultrasonic noise can be swept up, leaving only the most  beautiful vibrations of earlier sounds, like those emanating from the fragments of a thirteenth century church pediment.  Kirkegaard's amplification of the hidden sounds in resonant spaces like Chernobyl seems predicated on the idea that they hold a sonic memory of past events.  He has recently been working at Belchite, a village destroyed by Franco in the Spanish Civil War, making a book and CD in collaboration with Lydia Lunch. (I note in passing that Lydia Lunch is one of many post-punk musicians involved in one way or another with environmental sound art - Chris Watson and Jem Finer, for example, have been discussed here previously).

The Wire magazine had a feature on Kirkegaard earlier this year and their website includes 'images from Nagaras, a series of eight photographs shot on an expedition into the deserts of Oman in December 2008. The work explores a sonic phenomenon which only occurs in a few deserts around the world: The Singing Sands. The photographs aim to capture momentary visual fragments of the millions of sand grains which, in joint movement, emit such "marvelous" sounds. The seemingly chaotic patterns generated on the desert dunes during the sands' sonic emissions offer a visualization of sound in the making, through movement in matter.'

Here are some other examples on Kirkegaard's website that use recordings made out in the landscape:

• Tide (2006) - '16-channel sound installation located at the tidal sea shore of the Danish west coast, Vadehavet. The sounds are processed water sounds recorded in the area'.
• Iron Wind (2006) - 'recordings of iron fences stretching along the Cologne Rhine river in Germany. The movement of water, wind and passing ships make the iron fences vibrate and thereby to emit subtle tones. Attaching highly sensitive contact microphones (accelerometers) on the iron Jacob Kirkegaard recorded the hundreds of meters of fences throughout a period of four years. Unfolding the resonating body of the fences is the immense force of the Rhine river acoustically brought to life.'
• Sphere (2007) - 'a collection of VLF (very low frequency) recordings of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). It was captured during travels in Iceland in the year of 2004. Kirkegaard used electromagnetic antennas in order to pick up the electric and magnetic oscillations of the solar winds.'
  

The Drowned World

The death of J. G. Ballard is very sad news - a writer I've loved since reading his disaster novels and short stories as a teenager.

From the many riches of the Ballardian website, I'm linking here to a piece on Flooded London, with some great photos by Squint/Opera and a quotation from The Drowned World (1962):

'The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged...'

The Drowned World: cover by Yves Tanguy
(detail from Le Palais aux rochers de Fenêtres, 1942)

Utah Beach

It is now fifty years ago that J.G. Ballard published his first short stories. Rereading one of these, ‘Prima Belladonna’, recently I was surprised how much of the story is rooted in the form of fifties British SF, forgetting how much his work and the issues he writes about have changed, even though his preoccupation with surreal landscapes has always been there. Ballard’s vision of Vermillion Sands, the near future desert resort populated by idle dilettantes, first described in ‘Prima Belladonna’ remains pertinent, although perhaps its location would now have shifted to Dubai.

Another constant in Ballard’s work is his interest in landscapes transformed by military technology. In The Guardian last week, he was describing the strange Modernist structures of Utah Beach, which resemble those blockhouses of a nuclear testing site that feature in his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964). Ballard implies in his article that few tourists visit Utah Beach, although surely it is only a matter of time before there are guide books to such sites, following the example of Robert Smithson’s essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’. There is already a J.G. Ballard group on Flickr, where seekers of the Modernist picturesque can view and deposit photographs of decaying military installations, abandoned hotels, failed utopias and entropic ruins.