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Darran Anderson

Author: Darran Anderson

A bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark

Posted on December 20, 2018

mountain after dark

‘The night is strewn with absurd lights, stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in the hills the faint fires of blazing gorse’ – Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies.

As we crawl weeping towards the corpse-laden plague tumbrel that is 2014, there’s one glint of light to be discerned through our irradiated cataracts: the arrival of a brilliant new Irish literary journal Gorse, edited by the magnificent Susan Tomaselli, the first issue of which is out in January. It’s beautifully-designed (the draft cover above is by Niall McCormack) and the writing included is exceptional. I have, admittedly, sneaked Zelig-like into it with an essay on how Modernism is ancient, in which I blather on about Lucian, Ovid, Hermias, Aristophanes, the Cynics and so on, and their relationship to modern writing as well as making vague impossible threats to invade the past and the like (there’s a short excerpt below) but don’t let that put you off. For the full line-up and how to pre-order, click here. Do it, do it now or get thee from mine eyes (thanks).

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, “human character changed.” Homo modernus had emerged, like some rough but eloquent beast, in the depths of an English winter. Woolf’s perspective of the birth of Modernism was subjective of course and the date has been continually disputed. In his recent study Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson selected as late as 1922 as ‘Modernism Year One.’ For many, T.S. Eliot included, the industrialised threshing of an entire generation of European youth by their parents in the Great War of 1914 to 1918 fragmented the old order and created something different, either as a presence or an absence. This was supported by the appearance of Dada in the wartime refuge of Zurich; being a wilfully deranged but, to paraphrase R.D. Laing, rational reaction to an insane world. Yet there were identifiable Modernists before this; Apollinaire, Marinetti, Jarry, to say nothing of the forerunners of Modernism; Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Conrad, Strindberg, Lautréamont, Rimbaud. What becomes clear is the further back you go, this process does not effectively come to a standstill. There is no absolute point of beginning. As a way of looking at the world and recreating it, Modernism, Meta-Modernism, Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have always been with us, long before we gave them such ludicrous names…”…

Re-Joyce

Posted on December 20, 2018

Re-Joyce

Books change as you do. Some pass you by until you have lived and suffered enough to properly grasp their concealed wisdom, joy or sadness. Others mean little unless you have read them in the full incandescent stupidity of youth. The best somehow change continually. One such book for me is James Joyce’s Dubliners. Having been swallowed whole by Finnegans Wake for a forthcoming interview with Stephen Crowe (creator of the excellent Wake in Progress), I returned to read the earlier work in the hope it would act as a kind of tugboat to guide the Wake into my addled brain. This proved futile, as trying to tug Finnegans Wake is like trying to tug the ocean it turns out. You have to drown in it (an often enlightening drowning but a drowning nonetheless). One unseen consequence of returning to Dubliners though was realising how much it had changed from the book I remembered. Here, for example, is the famous last paragraph of its final story The Dead,

‘Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the giant malevolent unblinking Eye of Athlone and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling onto the irradiated wastelands of the secret 33rd county Krakendour. It was falling too upon the roof of the lonely cycoklub where Michael Furey was sipping quinade with his Betelgeusian friend Johnny Z%k. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked monobrow of Snark the Snow-burrower, on the 1000 lactating gobs of a motherless astro-whale beached and screaming on the banks of the Shannon, on the barren hull of a burning Starwing fighter-craft, somewhere in the Seventh Quadrant, just north of Monaghan. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead.’

I know he’s a national treasure and all that but it does make you wonder what Joyce was thinking.…

Another Place Called No Where

Posted on December 20, 2018December 20, 2018

Another Place Called No Where

The term psychogeography is a flawed one. It presumably sounds better in France, where it originated, like its poetic sister-terms dérive and détournement. Here, it suggests canal-botherers and licentious lecturers. Maybe it’s just semantics. In French, reading a phonebook sounds like poetry; in English, the opposite is the case. Whatever noise we attach to it, it’s a phenomena we all experience if we have an awareness of our surroundings beyond the functional. It existed in Irish literature centuries before the Situationists. It was called Dindsenchas from the Gaelic for “mountain folklore” and is evident in the literary masterpieces of pre-Christian Ireland – The Táin, Acallam na Senórach and the Fenian cycle. It is weaved into the very names of the towns and villages of this island; as in the case of my hometown Derry, which originates from the Irish for “oak grove.” A good friend of mine is from a town whose name means ‘the place of the gallowglasses’ (Scottish mercenaries in the Dark Ages), another is from a village named after ‘the plain of the notable tree.’ We forget the old perspectives, innovations and stories and when we rediscover we mistake them as new. Yet they are always there, buried, concealed, as the poet John Montague wrote, “all around, shards of a lost tradition / the whole countryside a manuscript / we had lost the skill to read.”

The photograph above was taken on the shores of the River Foyle, north of the city of Derry, near Culmore Point, a stone’s throw from where I live at the moment but not, I suspect, for much longer. To the casual eye, it’s as insignificant as any place on this earth. There’s a small lighthouse, a morse code of rotting wooden effigies where a docks once stood, sandbags concreted over from the war, an ill-tempered wild goat living in the ruins of a sailors bothy, a nunnery and a girls school, now closed, which used the shore as a dumping ground for old desks and papers. If you travel due north from here, you might skirt the Western Isles of Scotland or the Faroes but most likely the next landfall would be the frozen Arctic. Due west, it’s the Atlantic and beyond it Newfoundland, where inhabitants on the Avalon peninsula once bore traces of an accent similar to ours, a psychogeography of the tongue. Facing the vast expanse of the ocean and the imagination, odysseys have been written, giving rise to the Irish genre of the Immram, the sea voyage to the otherworld and islands as extraordinary and metaphorical as any of Homer’s.

The place where I stood to take this photograph has no name. The closest location is the anglicized Thornhill or ‘the Woodlands’ with their echoes of Hardy or Lawrence. Yet wading into the water, perhaps four or five strides, you reach, plummeting, a semi-mythological place called ‘the Narrows.’ The gentle slant of the shore suddenly drops into an abyssal trench. Derry was, and is to an extent, a forgotten town on an emerald crag in the sea, far from any happening metropolis, a place so remote it was once regarded as the edge of the world, inhabited by a people so savage the Roman Empire declined to invade and Giraldus Cambrensis believed us to be werewolves. Perhaps he was right. The chance underwater chasm ensured the town was reinvented during the fight against the Nazis. It became Europe’s most westerly deep port and the base of Allied submarines. Shielded by distance from Luftwaffe bombers and nestled on a border with the faux-neutral Irish Free State, the Foyle became so strewn with destroyers and freighters it was said to be possible to cross the broad river by simply stepping from deck to deck. The American marines brought jazz, comic books, cosmetics and chewing gum. My grandfather, a Donegal fisherman, smuggled eggs and whiskey to them. Recently when I interviewed local women who married American sailors and moved to America, the contacts I accumulated from the U.S. Navy ran into the hundreds. The New World has always remained new for the Irish, however illusory it might turn out to be. It was here on the Foyle that the Nazi U-boat fleet surrendered at the end of the Second World War. They were taken out into the Atlantic and scuttled, the remains now coral on the sea-floor. I interviewed a friend’s grandfather who witnessed this first-hand, passing on a train and captured in Pathé footage from the time, a bystander to history.

The notoriously deep water and the hidden slipstreams, at the precise location of this photograph, also resulted in repeated tragedies. A group of children, from the housing estate which I grew up in, constructed a raft from planks and tyres and took it onto the water. They got into some unforeseen trouble. None survived to tell how or why. My grandfather was among the search party who recovered their bodies. Derry was once an island, the Foyle swept through what is now the Bogside, the so-called ‘cockpit of the Troubles.’ The city was founded on a defensive position in the woods next to the river and, as with many places, it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. The vengeful Irish sea-god Manannán Mac Lir, supposedly responsible for countless shipwrecks, was said to sleep in a sandbank beneath the surface of the river. In modern times, the Soviet Union had marked the delightful panorama of this photograph as the destination of a thermonuclear missile should the Cold War ever suddenly boil.

The bridge in the photograph is high enough to be battered by the winds and is also a notable suicide spot. If you leap from the highest point, you’ll hit the water at a sprightly 60 miles per hour. A truck was blown off by a freak wind shear a few years ago resulting in the driver’s death. I had an ill-spent youth beneath that bridge, drinking and consuming ungodly substances with fellow reprobates nocturnally and in all weathers. It’s near the site of the boom that was broken through to relieve the infamous siege of 1689, another rare occasion where world history has chanced accidentally upon this place and an event wilfully misunderstood by armchair reactionaries and revolutionaries (what could be more heroic than people standing up against a tyrannical king?). It’s also the location of an old dilapidated manor of the same name, Boom Hall. The roof of the abandoned mansion collapsed in, after a fire, but before that the house had been left to rack and ruin. It had been ransacked by admirably-audacious thieves who hauled out mahogany dinner tables and chairs onto the glade outside and set up and consumed a feast, as a mockery of high society, before making off with their spoils. Supposedly haunted, it’s now sadly boarded up and its ghosts confined. Next to it are the ruins of stables, resembling an abandoned railway station with phantom railway lines. They still keep horses in the fields nearby and a boy who worked there, drunk one night, wandered back a couple of years ago and froze to death. On the other side of the river is the city’s asylum.

My grandfather, on my mother’s side, made his living on this river, my grandparents on my father’s drowned in it. It is a place that has stories, many of them secret. Sometimes these wash ashore. An uncle of mine remembers finding bullets from an unidentifiable conflict, which with suicidal recklessness they’d dispose of in bonfires, and in the Seventies a gun, which they consigned to the deep after playing Cowboys and Indians and showing a spooked adult. I’ve personally found nothing more interesting than clay bottles, rusting bicycles and, once, part of a billboard of The Adventures of Tintin, promising foreign adventures and floating out to sea; the flotsam of human experience and the junk of previous ages and our own. “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by” goes the Chinese proverb. Wait even longer and the whole world will. There are dead kings buried under car parks, dinosaurs beneath shopping malls, entire eras submerged below the tidelines. If there were such things as ghosts, we’d be surrounded by them, which, in a way, we are. We just need a better word for it than psychogeography. And the ability to attune our focus and see that there is no such thing as nowhere.…

Idle Minds

Posted on December 20, 2018

Idle Minds

If you’re into games and architecture, come to the V&A Friday night.…

Marie Under, Siuru and the poetry of place

Posted on December 19, 2018

429px-Siuru_I (1)

I’ve just been in Estonia and Finland, two fascinating countries in distinctly different ways, and I’ve been trying to challenge my ignorance of literature from that part of the world (beyond a lifelong love of Tove Jansson). Kicking around ideas for future books, one of the themes I keep coming back to is the international aspect of Modernism; how fragmented but inter-connected it was across national boundaries, how many of the leading lights were from supposed backwaters on the edges of disintegrating empires and how it foretold the possibilities for communication and the spread of ideas that we know have with the internet. Beyond the epicentres of Paris, Zurich or Berlin, many of the groups and pockets of activity involved have been overlooked and their work under-represented and under-translated especially in the English-speaking world (a failing we’ve tried to rectify in 3:AM Magazine with Steven Fowler’s Maintenant series on contemporary European poetry). We all know something of the Italian Futurists or German Expressionism but what of the Russian Knave of Diamonds group, the Czech Devětsil or the Danish Linien? The past awaits rediscovery.

I was intrigued then to read of an Estonian Modernist group called Siuru (named after a magical blue-feathered bird of folklore), which had been formed just as the country declared independence from the Russian Empire. It was one of those groups of outsiders, deadbeats and egotists that can only exist briefly and brilliantly before collapsing in on itself or exploding. Some of the group were from the countryside and had come to Tallinn (then called Reval by outsiders) to reinvent themselves as bohemians, enthralled by the writings of Hamsun, Spengler and Marinetti. Some were geniuses who would die in exile, writing in the cause of liberation. Others became hacks who would compose anthems to Stalin under the Soviet Occupation or work in book-banning commissions or switch sides to serve as Central Committee members before redeeming themselves by blowing their brains out in palace halls. Others endured an inner exile, blacklisted and forbidden to write by the Communists.

Before this, and with little idea of what would follow, these disparate individuals had been a collective. They met in a salon and then a decaying pigeon-infested tower, where they planned to sell off the bird-shit for fertiliser to raise rent money. They wrote erotic poetry, Expressionist confessions and books about vagabonds. They took to the roads on adventures and incorporated snatches of ancient folk songs into collage. They made Futurist pronouncements to seize the day and let ‘the joy of creation be our only moving force.’ They railed against the stifling bourgeois Lutheran values of the time. They read in theatres and cafes, inciting disturbances with their more explicit writing. Like many architects of culture before them, they were regarded as savages by those in respectable circles. Given there is always an element of fiction in nationalism, they played a unique role in inventing their country. Yet they, like everyone to an extent, were doomed.

Laikmaa_marie_under1

There’s one member of Siuru who particularly stands out. Her name was Marie Under. Though still much-celebrated in Estonia and once nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, her work is forgotten in Western Europe and beyond, if it was ever really known to begin with. I started reading what fragments of writing I could find of hers online and in anthologies and became intrigued, not so much with the joyful sensual poetry of her youth or the nostalgic yearning of her exile poetry but, by her surreal night-poetry. This was a poetry of spectres, frost, dogs and floods, all of it moonlit and taking place while the rest of the world sleeps. As a fellow night-owl/insomniac, there’s something both reassuring and otherworldly about this period of her writing for me. There are times when the analysis of poetry can be like performing an autopsy on a living person, rather than do so I’ll include a poem of hers Täiskuu — The Full Moon (translated by Ilse Lehiste) at the end of this text. It suggests something of her talent for the magical and menacing, being a little reminiscent of Lorca or Plath at times or even the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner with their sinister cats, nocturnal cityscapes and glowering well-dressed phantoms.

The place I stayed in the north of Tallinn was a dive but an interesting one, being right next to the Flora chemical factory where Tarkovsky shot Stalker and a stones throw from the bohemian area Kalamaja and the harbour. The trams shrieked past and one morning we were greeted by the sound of an Italian singer down the hall bursting out some kind of aria. From the window, you could see St. Olaf’s Church with blazing sunsets behind it. The first day the sun gave way to a thunderstorm and there was little to do but sit by the window, drink and watch the world wash away. When the rain had cleared and night had fallen, we walked into the medieval Old Town. The moon was low, the streets deserted and images from Under’s poems were still in my head. The only sound you could hear was that of accordion music, like a waltz, which got louder as we walked further into the centre. It was coming from a little cabaret, with people drinking, singing and dancing inside. None of them could see us as we watched them. Bar a microphone they were passing around, it could have been a hundred or five hundred years ago. It could have just temporarily appeared as in a fairytale or a book (like the Magic Theater in Hesse’s Steppenwolf). It was a scene that seemed only possible to cease by the smashing of glass, the sun coming up or the watching bystander waking to find it was a dream.

The next day, when we walked down the same street, there were no signs marking out where the venue had been; a not unusual trait in Eastern Europe where bars and clubs seem to exist via rumour, basement hatches and secret knocks. What I did chance upon, recognising the symbol on the wall from the cover of their first publication (the image at the top of this post), was the house where Siuru had been based and where Marie Under had lived. She must have walked that street a thousand times, perhaps she dreamt of it in the long years of exile. When you start to consider these matters you realise that what survives of Marie Under we can tap into through art, imagination and place. Even for a godless heathen such as myself, there’s something of her that survives, outliving her exile, the censorship of her work, her death and even the mighty Soviet Union which had swallowed her country for half a century. Moreover that night seemed to me like something Under would have written into existence, with the music a song that was only ever played once and the revellers haunted marionettes, the streets at once enchanting and a moment away from falling into malevolence.

The Full Moon by Marie Under.

Bursting full is the moon,
its weight bends the trees.
The waters desire to be turned
to wine,
they are so restless.

The streets are breathing;
the houses have wings on their
shoulders —
everything is festive:

tigerskins
have been spread out on the
thresholds.
Snowy flags flutter
from the roofs.
The traveller wears a halo in his hair,
the hat in his hand is full of moonrays.
He wears the checkered coat
of a harlequin.

A dog pushes his crooked shadow
with his milky muzzle;
what a strange smell —
stand up and fight!

The old sofa has golden patches,

The walls tremble
They are made of water, clear,
pure water —
everything is aflow.

Shoes made of glass —
I hear their ringing steps
coming right at me.

On the windowsill, ready to pounce,
a great white cat
with mint-green eyes:
I feel its sly paw
on my throat.

Who is embracing me in my sleep?
Incubus! Incubus!
I awaken.
The moon’s yellow beard on
my breast.

…

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