The start of something (or a memory unfurled...)

I remember clearly, so clearly, crystal, you would whisper, hushed, that the Devil’s greatest trick, his plus belle des ruses, was persuading the world that he does not exist.  Funny, he was not inclined to agree. Why would I wish people to believe me make-believe? Such a foggy notion.  I suggested, shrugging, that God works in mysterious ways. I am not God.  Our laughter realised the uncomfortable silence of unacquainted lovers.  An awkward shifting of weight from foot to foot, left to right and right to left.  Fumbled change muffled by corduroy.

You.  You used to call him the Great Deceiver.  Tucked tight into sheets I would fall asleep with the wetness of your kiss drying on my cheek.  I would dream. So vivid. A magician flourishing, presenting deceit for adoration. So real. The Great Deceiver. He protested. Why would I deceive?  I coughed, unsure, unable to recall a memorable reason.  His ineptitude has been clear from the beginning, has it not?  His dismissive tone convincing.  After all, I exist do I not?  True. His existence was real.  Realistic.  A reality.  Wryly, a smile curling to the left and a thinned eyebrow raising to the right, he proposed perhaps you were a deceiver.  Perhaps.  Although, perhaps not great.  He chuckled.  Was it not you, you who had insisted that his trait of chief trickster was suggested by God?  Bullshit. Only if God was French.  French and blooming in infernal flame.

The fear of foreign birds...

It is a Tuesday evening and a nuclear warhead has hit RAF Finningley. I watch a woman piss herself with fear and hear someone sat directly behind me who should know better laugh.  On this particular Tuesday evening contemporary Sheffield is settling into a seasonal darkness of autumnal damp and decay. However, in the projection playing out on the wall of my University, the City of Steel is about to become molten. I am watching Threads, a docudrama portrayal of a nuclear war and it’s aftermath in September 1984, directed by Mick Jackson and written by Barry Hines.

Threads was produced at a time when fears about and the consequences of a nuclear attack were heightened. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Jack Kibble-White reports, in his article ‘Let’s All Hide in the Linen Cupboard’, that ‘the White House changed its nuclear strategy from… mutually assured destruction (MAD) to an idea that nuclear war was winnable.’Evidence of this can be seen in a piece from the Chicago Tribune by Kenneth R. Clark published in January 1985 just prior to the premier of Threads in the United States of America. Writing in his article ‘Threads: Nightmare After the Holocaust’, Clark reports the on-going argument between scientists such as Carl Sagan, who argued a nuclear attack would cause a nuclear winter leaving ‘our little civilisation absolutely imperilled’, and Edward Teller, ‘the father of the hydrogen-bomb’, who believed that such an attack would be survivable and limited to ‘the bombs fireball’. Clark states that ‘the President of the United States’ shared the view of Teller. In Great Britain, Kibble-White writes that ‘in a 1982 Gallup poll… 38% of respondents declared that they believed a nuclear war to be inevitable.’ With the public consciousness so preoccupied with the prospect of a nuclear strike it is unsurprising that, when first broadcast ‘on Sunday 23 September 1984 at 9.30pm… 6.9 million [people]… a remarkable 40% share’ of available audience tuned in to watch Threads.

Threads charts the attack and its aftermath through a series of juxtapositions and contrasts. Two families of different classes come together through their children in, as Kibble-White argues, almost a parody of the northern kitchen sink drama genre. The film opens in spring with Ruth proclaiming her love for the season and the ‘buds coming out’, only for this particular spring to give birth to a nuclear winter rather than the fruitfulness of summer. There is the metaphoric contrast seen through Jimmy’s love of foreign birds, how they act as a sanctuary for him until the human-made nuclear missiles migrate from Russia to cause such devastation. Jackson’s use of the docudrama genre, the interspersing theoretical scientific fact through title cards and voice-over between the action is also an affective juxtaposition. This blending of apparent fact and fiction creates a sense of realism to what is being played out on screen and, as you watch a plastic E.T. doll melt following the direct strike on Sheffield, it is clear that the director and writer do not wish this to be viewed as science-fiction.

I believe it was the combined affect of these juxtapositions and the level of realism that left me finding Threads thoroughly depressing and horrifying. As I watched, even though the threat and level of paranoia in connection with a potential nuclear war is not at the levels of the 1980s, everything I saw had the potential of coming to fruition. It also started me thinking about the recent debate that has arose with the vote on the renewing of Trident and whether the next potential Labour Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn, would not ‘push the button' to launch a nuclear weapon to defend Great Britain. With the Russians seemingly supporting incursions in Georgia, the Crimea, and Syria and NATO positioning themselves against them, how long will it be before tension levels are at the same high as the early 1980s? How long before foreign birds migrate for a nuclear winter?

Castle Ring - Where are those who were before us?

During the Christmas break I went for a walk round Castle Ring. I hadn't been in years. The last time I was there I guess I was on my bicycle, weary from cycling up the hills around it (certainly not as weary as I would be now, with my post-Christmas coat of body fat...) Castle Ring is the highest point on Cannock Chase and is the site of an Iron Age hill fort. There's not much to it really, just some perimeter earth works shaped, yes you guessed it, in a ring with a path situated on the top of them allowing you to walk around. It does offer wonderful views of the surrounding countryside though and Rugley Power Station in all its concrete and mushroom-cloud glory. It wasn't the views though that over-whelmed me on that cold and snowy Sunday: it was the Ring itself, its presence. Im not sure if it was because the 'world's candle' was intense, low, and dazzling giving each branch, bramble and blade of grass extra definition or the crunch of the snow under foot and the soft sound of an inevitable thaw, but Castle Ring had a definite presence that day I had not experienced before. The thought that 1900 years ago people were living on this hill, exposed to the elements with only their wiles and hardiness to keep them alive was quite astounding. It's as if they were there in front of me. Pots boiling, mead running, scop's singing or reciting rhymes (I may be mixing my Celt's and Anglo-Saxon's here). It was all happening in front of me. I was there, with smoke stinging my eyes and shit stinging my nostrils. True it was all in my mind but I had travelled back 1900 years. 

This displacement in time, to steal a phrase from Vonnegut, may be because I'm interested in Old English literature and one of ambitions, as useless as it will be, is to learn Old English. This interest started when I first read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Beowulf is important for the history of these Island's as it's probably the oldest surviving long poem in Old English. Having always been a fan of Tolkien and immersing myself in his world of Middle-Earth during my teen years, I was always going to enjoy it due to the influence of Old-English and Nordic literature on his works. Beowulf is a triumph and everyone should read it (whereas no one should watch the awful film - 'tarn hag' would not be the first words I'd use to describe Angelina Jolie... they would be fake and self-important). Beowulf is rich in ubi sunt, a nostalgic meditation on morality and the transience of life. As Christianity was only just settling into these lands the Anglo-Saxons had little conception of an after-life. They believed that their lives lived on in glorious deeds and honourable actions rather than an immortal soul. This led them to ask 'ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?' ('where are those who were before us?') Where are those who were before us? That's a question and a half and who hasn't thought it. Where are those who were before us? It is the melancholy of Old English literature, this theme which I find so wonderful. Without the influence of any mass organised religion they treated the question with such sorrow and compassion as in the poem 'The Wanderer'. It wasn't shrugged off with the concept of an immortal soul. It was an unknown. Beyond human reasoning. It was sad. Still is and always will be.

This is what I was thinking on that bright afternoon, blinded by the same sun that blinded them and chilled by the same air. Walking on earthworks built all those years before by hands long since perished. Where are those who were before us? Of course I didn't have the answer and I still don't. I guess that will only become apparent when the inevitable happens (I must remember to steer clear of sailing boats in 2019...) Still, they were there in the humble marks that they had left in the earth. I did not know what they had looked like, I did not know any of their names, but I knew they had been. I knew they once were and I could appreciate their existence. What more can we ask for? Anyway, it was this question that stuck with me and led to the poem below. It's my poor attempt to write a poem in alliterative verse, the form used by the Anglo-Saxons. I hope it's ubi sunt but read Beowulf  if you want the real thing.

Castle Ring

Time travels and ticks eternal,

Without wonder or word for man,

But carries the cruel chaos of life,

Fickle-fires forgotten and snuffed.

The past not present presides here,

A lingering labour of love from old,

From the visionless void and vacuum of time,

Its endless eclipse. Enter the ring.

As frost-fetters forgo and thaw,

An era of earnest expression and honour,

A land of lore and law is in grace,

Seductive in simplicity, sundered from now.

I am ice-bound, an impression of modernity,

Foreign to forgotten forefathers and kinsmen,

A native of nowhere, no-time or place.

Songs of sorrow and sworn oaths,

Kingly kindnesses and kinsmanship sigh,

Breathe memories through barren branches,

Redolent rhymes rich in life-blood

Of weather weary wanderers lost.

The past not present presides here,

Eternal in this earth it endures iron-like,

Though departed, doomed to death, it sings,

Lyre-licks of lamentation linger in the mist,

The prayer-plume of pious pyres,

Heating mortal hearts with heaven-bound thermals.

Solitary I stand silent and free,

From portents of my profiled past,

My imagined identity impartially created,

Of a lonely lover and lost soul.

Time still toils and tolls for us,

And our life’s legacy will lessen,

Dwindle while dwelling on departures and regret,

But timeless and tireless territories will remain,

Earth will endure enshrined in ice,

Secure in swirled and scarred beauty,

The fortune of friends and family gone,

Not from now to nowhere, to time eternal.