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Wanting only to see and to touch

In his poem ‘Lock-step’, John Barnie wryly observes ‘the disciples of iPhones’ taking endless selfies, lost in the images crowding those tiny screens. As the majority walk to the lock-step of technology and the virtual worlds it conjures, John feels he’s walking in the wrong direction, ‘wanting only to see and to touch’.

There’s a resonance here with John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Garp writes a short story about a man who owns a pair of magic gloves. Wearing them, death cannot touch him and he can do anything he desires. But life lacks meaning as a result — the gloves make it always slightly distant, always out of touch. The man throws away the gloves and death finds him. But in that moment he is truly in contact with life — he sees and touches for the first time and, in the last, his life gains texture and meaning.

From certain gnostic sects to René Descartes’ famous declaration that proof of his existence rested solely upon his mind and his thoughts, there’s a history of turning away from the body and favouring the cerebral. As the exercise craze of CrossFit weirdly echoes the extremities of a Medieval flagellant’s mortification of the flesh so that the spirt might be set free, so our culture’s increasing interaction with the physical world through apps and mobile computing devices mirrors those approaches to mysticism that turn away from the body to search for experience that are pure, immaterial… virtual.

The guitarist, Robert Fripp, has spoken of the difference between an LP or CD recording and a live gig as being like the difference between a love letter and a hot date. The letter brings back memories, even memories of having had strong emotions, but it doesn’t create emotion with the intensity of present, physical, carnal experience. It’s a difference in qualia, the textures and properties of experience that vary in the moment — or the ‘pressant’ as James Joyce calls it in Finnegan’s Wake. As Fripp has also pointed out, no drum roll experienced in the moment has ever swirled mightily around from left ear to right as they so often do in a stereo mix. That’s a conceit, an artificial experience that substitutes for being in the same room as the drummer, sharing the same ‘pressant’. It’s drumming while wearing magic gloves.

Fripp is touching on a theme drawn out further in Zoltán Huszárik’s dazzlingly sensual 1971 film, Szindbád, that it’s in the sensory, in the incarnate and bodily, that we truly anchor ourselves not in the shifting and untrustworthy landscapes of rolling news and social media. Descarte’s philosophical position is undermined by the advance of technology — in a virtual world, in which fantasy vies with direct experience and wins out more often than not, our minds become the worst foundation on which to build anything solid.

In contrast, for the eco-philosopher, David Abram, it’s only when we see and touch the world directly that we’re fully alive, fully human. To live as we are being encouraged to do, through the medium of human-made technology, Abram says, is to forget our past and our origins. If the ingrained notion that humans stand at the apex of creation and evolution would set us apart from the natural world, the truth is our bodies, our senses, our very being has been shaped by and has developed in intimate relation to the same planetary environments and forces as every other creature, plant and landscape feature we see framed in a smartphone’s screen.

Descartes argues that mind is the bedrock of reality, the only certain point in the otherwise uncertain welter of stimuli that constitute the ‘pressant’. There’s a separation here as misleading as the notion that humanity is a species different from all others. What happens when the ‘pressant’ of messages, notifications, news headlines, adverts, phone calls, images, zip-panned videos, clickbait, deadlines, popup events, flash sales, and all the rest reaches overwhelm? We feel anxiety not as an abstract but as a bodily reaction. Muscles tense, breath comes shallow, blood pumps faster, pupils narrow, adrenaline and other chemicals are released. Mind and body respond together. Culture might encourage us in the belief that technology’s mediation keeps the world manageably ‘out there’ but visceral experience argues otherwise.

Likewise, the imagination itself seems protean, boundless and, most importantly, separate from the brain that it haunts, ghost-like and untouchable except through the artefacts it brings into being. But, as David Abram has argued, our imaginations also spring from the body — from our senses, in fact. The taste of a madeline dipped in tea, the smell of a bonfire on an autumn afternoon, the caress of a lover, a child’s laugh: all are as intimately linked to the senses as they are evocative to the imagination. To see and to touch is to imagine.

Cover of a book
John Barnie’s latest collection, A Report to Alpha Centauri

Sometimes, there’s no choice but to listen to a record of a concert, read through old love letters, or wander the streets of a faraway town through the medium of digital images. But to only experience the world in this way — through magic gloves — is to loose a little of ourselves, to forego something vital, visceral, integral to who we are as incarnate beings. The word ‘human’ itself comes from a Latin word meaning ‘earthborn’, a word rooted in older words relating to the ground and to the earth. To want to see and to touch is part of who we are.

Szindbád and the presence of memory

At the beginning of Zoltán Huszárik’s film, Szindbád, a dying man is bundled into a driverless horse and buggy. The horse sets off at a trot to wander through a deepening twilight. Voices on the soundtrack make it clear the man is Szindbád himself, an ageing Lothario abandoned to his fate and to his memories.

Huszárik’s 1971 film is a beautiful — sumptuous, even — adaptation of Gyula Krúdy’s stories about a man addicted to romance and nostalgia, dapper and urbane in his wanderings around a Budapest transitioning out of its 19th Century, Imperial heyday, into a much less certain dawning of the 20th Century, troubled by a deepening melancholy and returning, more and more, to memories of past loves, past times. If Krúdy’s stories — poignant, sometimes witty, oft-times wistful — are steeped in the ever-presence of memory, Huszárik’s Szindbád deals more directly with the process of memory, especially the long memory of a life that’s been full of incident and regret.

We follow Szindbád on trysts and assignations, on visits to old loves, on attempts to make peace and sense of this life he has lived out of step with society, both in terms of his pursuit of the sensual and the sensory but also in his desire to keep hold of a past age now itself little more than a memory. Throughout, Szindbád is in late-middle-age, just as we first meet him. Only one past love shows the same passage of the years — and, perhaps significantly, she is the one person who knew him best, for all that she allowed herself to be taken in by his charms. For the rest, they remain youthful, as young and as beguiling as when Szindbád first saw them — even when decades separate the encounters we witness in the film from the time they originally spent together. His past loves are forever young. It is Szindbád who is old.

Huszárik is showing us the past from Szindbád’s perspective, wandering old haunts, reminiscing, an old man who sees his lovers as they were. They are present in him, in mind and thought. They cannot age. Time can only touch Szindbád himself, the repository of those precious memories.

It’s a convention in writing, one that’s often mimicked in cinema’s hazy, sepia-tinted flashbacks, that the past should be in past tense. It’s gone. It’s behind us. In contrast, the present, this moment, is often presented in present tense: She is remembering the past and the past was so much more than now…

Is this how things are, though?

In the Coming of Winter

At the recent launch for his collection, In the Coming of Winter, the poet Frank Dullaghan argued that memory is a thing not of the past but the present. It lives alongside us. We curate it and tend to it during the course of our days. We reach to it. We keep it close. As Szindbád’s memories are changeless and yet all around him, so are our memories. Memory, Frank maintains, is something that is now, in this moment, alive and interacting with us as we interact with it. The literary convention is upside down: when we think of a memory it plays out in the present tense, immediate and incarnate within us. This is the world that Huszárik’s Szindbád strolls through. This is the world that we find ourselves in, going about our daily lives to be transported, in a moment, to a different present by an association or a thought that connects us to memory. In contrast, the present is very often unfixed in time. It gets missed because we’re distracted. It’s conjured into being when we think ahead to something that’s yet to happen. It gets recreated in retrospect as we replay what was has just happened, the gaps in recollection filled in by supposition or fantasy. The present, unlike memories of the past, isn’t chronologically fixed. If anything we live in past tense, retailing events in the seconds after they have gone by.

This is the position of us in respect to memory and time that Proust explores, of course. It’s also the position of the traditional folk tale and the fairy story, where the story teller announces, ‘Once upon a time’, and then switches to present tense — the story sits beside us, it runs around us, it lives in the moment, not the past.

There’s a broader point to this, as we negotiate the fast-moving and treacherous media landscapes of the 21st Century, itself a time of nostalgia and reminiscence, an age where there’s as overwhelming sense of possible futures missed, of a present that we might want to avoid or escape altogether. At one point, Szindbád announces, ‘Death has no light, no shade. But it has a slight scent of rosemary.’ It’s in the sensory that we anchor ourselves, in the body, not in spite of the body nor in the hazy present of rolling news and the imperatives of advertising.

In one of the most celebrated scenes in the film we watch Szindbád eating a meal, taking delight in each savour and taste, each detail of each course. The camera lingers over the dishes. It moves in for close-ups that are as vibrant and vivid in their colours as we can imagine the flavours of the food on display to be. It’s not gluttony. It’s a celebration of being.

In many ways, it’s loosing touch with this connection to the now of the senses that leads to Szindbád’s lonely final journey in that buggy. The horse is still trotting at the end of the film but we know by then Szindbád is no more. The present of memory has given way to the past of a hazy, transitory present in which the mind, as alone as Szindbád on that final buggy ride, wanders through a twilight that grows murkier with each passing moment.

Disrupting perception as the world burns

Our last launch for September was an extraordinary evening of readings and questions with Kay Syrad, a poet, novelist, and editor who also collaborates with performers and artists, who was launching what is near. As the poetry infolded the audience poured out praise in the Zoom chatbox – words like sublime, clever, moving, terrifying, beautiful and tender. This is a collection that faces the horror of what humanity is doing to the planet. It’s unflinching, not afraid to see the absurd irony of ecological breakdown, but also a plea to disrupt this slide into our own oblivion that is wiping out so many other species in the process. It’s a powerful collection, yet also one that speaks with lyrical beauty, insisting that we name what is being lost or allowing language and form to unravel in those moments when there are no words for what is unspeakable.

If you missed the launch or would like to view it again, you’ll find in below and the discount code is good through October 2021.

You can’t have a hero called Ken!

In this follow-up to ‘Always judge a cover by the book‘, The Crossword Solver author, Andrew Dutton gives us an insight into the novel’s (long) gestation and the inspiration for the book. So, get yourself a glass of what you fancy and join the rest of us in the corner of the bar…

— Adam

You can’t have a hero called Ken!

I have always ‘wanted to write’, but perhaps my early efforts (as a student and then during an embarrassingly long period of unemployment) are in the best place — one known only to me. Obtaining full time work seemed to put an end to the notion: it was just a phase, eh, and anyway I had no life experience, what could I write about?

A new town, new people, ideas and experiences, it was all quite enough to be going on with; but perhaps the writer, although slumbering, was still taking note, if not actively taking notes. One of the new people was a gentle man called Alan, always there in the pub surrounded by a come-go crowd of friends and acquaintances, always with his pint and his cryptic crossword, talking, discussing, disputing, laughing, nailing those elusive clues. I was only ever a marginal presence at that pub table, but I was impressed by the camaraderie, the variety, the inclusiveness of that circle. When Alan died, suddenly and tragically, it seemed fitting that it should be in the pub with his pint of Guinness, worrying away at an annoying Five Down. A close friend of mine was with him when he died; Neil still holds Alan Day in that pub on the sad anniversary. To him I pledged that one day I would write ‘The Alan Book’. The writing was back.

Its return was problematic: I went through an uncomfortable period of refusing to read novels ‘In case I accidentally steal ideas’, for which I was rightly mocked, but like a musician who can’t shake off the sound-shade of, say, Bowie or the Beatles, I feared writing pastiches which may as well have been signed off by F. George Ernest Faulkner Hemingwell. I got over it, but deep down I still fear the late-night knock of the Ripoff Police.

Letting on that you are writing a book is a conversation-killer and room-clearer par excellence, but before I learned this lesson I set out my half-baked plan to another friend: a book set in a pub, telling the story of a man, ordinary and yet magnetic, who stole his paper every day from the Sainsbury’s next door to the pub, who was always surrounded by interesting characters, who would be the centre of as-yet unwritten adventures. As an ordinary type of hero, his name was to be Ken. “You can’t,” the friend slapped me down, “Have a hero called Ken.” . That was me told.

I began a notebook, working title The Crossword Solver; I asked Neil for his reminiscences, and then character names, chapter titles, an outline of the book began to form. My writer-ego was boosted by a short story prize in late 2009 and it seemed that the Alan Book could be the next step. 2010, however, had other ideas, and the Alan Book joined all the other stuff, in a box, out of sight.

Wind forward seven years; a great deal of writing had gone on, but with prizes, acclaim and, erm, anything at all, noticeably absent. I wrote a short story called ‘Magic Whisky’, in which appeared the character Pilot Ken; he had Alan’s appearance, his RAF-style jacket, playful manner and likeability — not that the central character of the story saw him that way. Within six months I had reopened my old notes, made big changes to the shelved plan, and appropriated ‘Magic Whisky’ as a chapter of the new piece.

The Crossword Solver proper took shape between 2018 and 2020: better nearly twenty years late than never. It was one of the things which helped me to manage the Covid lockdown; thinking, remembering, writing, being in a pub when I couldn’t actually go into one. As a spare-time writer, time is precious, and during the long lockdown evenings, with music booming away or endlessly-recycled episodes of old favourite murder mysteries on the TV and my cats coming to help add a few random words here and there, the new version of the book took its form. Pilot Ken is not Alan, but some things are taken direct from life – the nicked newspapers for instance, and his tales of exotic ex-girlfriends. The people surrounding him are fictional, but they have traits, strange stories, small heroisms, quirky views, based upon many different conversations in many pubs over a span of years.

Title of the book slanted and cross over puzzle between coloured disks
The cover of The Crossword Solver

My brother asked me ‘Is this new one going to have a beginning, middle and end?’. Well, yes and no. It definitely begins and definitely ends. Pilot Ken is at the centre of everything, but everyone’s story is told; most of the action plays out in the pub, some characters are exactly what they appear to be, but secret thoughts and hidden stories, not to mention agendas, also emerge. It’s odd what will sometimes come to light over a pub table. In the stories of Ken and his friends, I wanted to tell some old pub stories, commemorate a man and a time and a place, but also ask some questions, such as is it any longer possible to hold opposing views to the person on the other side of the table and air these civilly without them becoming enraged and regarding you as an idiot, traitor, dupe — and vice versa?

Pilot Ken doesn’t rescue anyone, doesn’t beat the baddies, save the day or triumph in a grand denouement. He is an ordinary man living in a town where the money is running out and the bulldozers are closing in. He is peaceful and tolerant, but he will stand up against the intolerant and bigoted. Like most of us, he can’t change the world, all he can do is look on, make the best of it, get another pint in, solve that wretched Five Down.

We can have a hero called Ken.

Bringing the past into the present — two novels of extraordinary characters

One of the unlooked for gifts of virtual launches has been the ability to bring together not only an audience from different parts of the globe, but also to have authors from different places in one virtual space, sharing their work and creating encounters enriched by both the different and similar threads that weave into and out of their narratives.

This was certainly the case tonight at the launch of Aldermaston by Kate Hoyland and The Pathless Country by James Harpur.

Set in both the future and the past with the strapline: the future is a thing of the past, Aldermaston journeys with Jean, an archeologist of a future, wading through a drowning world and determined, at the end of her life, to find a time capsule from the 1950s.  And it travels also with Ida, 19, searching for a life that breaks the stultifying conventions of post-War Britain and burying a time capsule, a love letter to the future, before joining the first ban the bomb protest in 1958.

Set in turn of the century cosmopolitan London among the glamour of theosophical circles and in rural Ireland in the early part of the First World War and the lead up the 1916 Easter Rising, The Pathless Country walks with Patrick Bowley as he preaches peace and makes an epic pilgrimage, discovering the true nature of ‘the pathless country’.

Both books feature protagonists who are prepared to challenge the societies they find themselves, prepared to find lonelier yet more authentic routes through life. Both raise questions about the nature of self, service and meaning and both place strong emphasis on landscape as a character that interacts with these important questions.

If you missed the launch you can catch up with the video here and the discount code in the video is good through October.