Aestheticise and Fetishise the Odyssean Songs of Exile

Or: Connected thoughts on art and politics from May & September 2023

1. Listening to Tuareg guitar while enjoying dinner

Around May last year, like Mole, I was spring cleaning. From a stack of magazines, I stopped to re-read an issue of The Wire from 2019, which has a great feature on Tuareg Guitar or Desert Blues: that genre of North African rock music made globally famous by Tinariwen.

I remember first hearing Tinariwen when they came to European prominence around 2004. Andy Kershaw, recently farmed out from Radio 1 to Radio 3 at the time, definitely played them, and I have a grainy VHS tape of their performance at Womad 2004 that was broadcast on BBC television. Imagine that. Of course my VHS is (thankfully, I suppose) made redundant by the appearance of the concert on ‘youtube’ (complete with typically laughable BBC intro montage):

At the time, Tinariwen were heralded in the press as the vanguard of an entirely new style of rock music: a pulsing rhythmic repetition and wiry guitar sound, like a north African Velvet Underground. I didn’t delve much deeper than that myself.

The introduction to the Wire article (by Francis Gooding: ‘The Primer: Tuareg Guitar’, The Wire 420, February 2019) explains the political situation that Tuareg Guitar groups emerged from. The history dates at least to 1963, taking in the various roles of French neocolonialism, Gaddafi, al Qaeda, Islamic State, American drones and uranium mining. The armed role of key Tuareg musicians in rebellions and the struggle for political recognition feeds into the legends and mystery surrounding Tinariwen and their peers.

Gooding did a good job of contextualising the origins of the music, while focusing mainly on the music itself. The article judged well the line that sometimes writing about Tuareg Guitar makes a proper mess of. So often we hear picturesque anecdotes about musicians putting down their guns to pick up their guitars before going on stage, packaging a Romantic legend of the freedom fighter for our consumption.

Teshumara: Les guitares de la rébellion Touareg, dir. Jérémie Reichenbach, 2005

I’m certainly not qualified to comment on a political situation I know more from LP sleeve notes than from anything else. From the comfort of my desk, there’s undeniably an unease in the vicarious pleasure I derive from listening to the authentic voice of armed struggle (although these days, the recordings are often augmented by American or European musicians). Or perhaps the unease is part of the pleasure? The disjuncture is most acute if, say, you put the record on to accompany your dinner, then put the fork down to read the translated or annotated lyrics. And suddenly the roasted vegetables are thrown into the traumatic memories of death, war and exile.

At the same time, I recognised this queasiness as the useless handwringing of the comfortable. Shouldn’t we just enjoy the fierce riffs, cresting rhythms and the voices that communicate across language barriers? I suspect that the aestheticisation or fetishisation of songs of sorrow is an ancient process.

Bombino performance outside the Grand Mosque in Agadez (a video recommended in Gooding’s article).

2. Tuareg, Tyrians and Romans and epic

The Phoenician Expansion c. 11th to 6th centuries BCE. Map by Simeon Netchev, World History Encyclopedia.

The myths of Carthage, as told by Romans such as Vergil, incorporated post hoc justifications of the Punic Wars (3rd – 2nd centuries BCE) which ended with the total destruction of Carthage and the subordination of Phoenician settlements to Rome in 146 BCE. And it is war that is famously, synecdochally invoked by the first word of the Aeneid: arma (variously translated ‘weapons’, ‘arms’, ‘war’, ‘warfare’). Equally famously, Vergil is following Homer’s thematically-loaded first words of the Iliad and Odyssey.

War drenches the language of epic poems. One theory goes that the Homeric poems were developed in an oral tradition during the Ancient Greek ‘Dark Age’, c. 1200-800 BCE. As with other Dark Ages, it simply connotes a loss of a written record, as the people who wrote Linear B died or were enslaved or driven into exile, or whatever else may have happened during the so-called ‘Bronze Age Collapse’. So we imagine the bards singing songs of the heroes of the previous generation, of wars and palaces, of divinely-gifted warriors, cannibal giants, sea monsters and geo-political upheaval across the Aegean. When did these authentic songs of first-hand-experienced trauma and loss become aestheticised and fetishised? As soon as Homer’s poems appear in the written record, they are already aesthetic objects. They may have had roots, once, like the Tuareg Guitar, in real conflict, but they were transplanted out of their immediate historical context, becoming generalised poems of war, rage, quest and nostalgia. If the songs ever told of material reality, we only know their mythical reality.

3. Political art in times of crisis

This all came to mind in the context of the UK’s political situation: observable on the high street, where once-indominable chain stores become vast boarded-up palaces of void, as the holders of the highest offices of government continue to use the country as a cash machine for themselves and their already-unspeakably-wealthy friends and contacts, where every GP appointment carries with it the fear that it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Surveying this managed decline from above is the dispassionate eye of the media class. Perhaps it was around 2019 when I began to notice this: comfortable liberal journalists pitching articles in the press about how times of political hardship are good for the culture. The argument goes that regressive politics inspires fiery, impassioned, and thrilling music, comedy, theatre and art. If I could be bothered spending ten minutes with The Grauniad‘s search engine I could probably find one for you. Commentary of this sort explains the wider phenomenon of the patrician coolness of the press when reporting times of crisis: they are personally insulated from the sharpest edges of political power. And it helps explain why, in 2019, despite all the bluster, the seemingly ‘left of centre’ ‘legacy media’ feared the loss of charitable status for private schools much more than they feared ‘brexit’, and why, with the clubbable and purchasable Sir Kid Starver as opposition leader, they’ve all calmed down. Still, as I noted in July 2022, you can say what you like about Starmer, at least you know what you’re going to get from him. He looks like a plastic bag of offal pressed into the shape of a frightened little boy and pushed into a suit, and he’s got the principles of a plastic bag of offal pressed into the shape of a frightened little boy and pushed into a suit.

The media commentators were wrong about the art, as well. It’s toothless as ever. I enjoyed the recent Sleaford Mods album, but from a political point of view, it’s just whinging. There’s some comfort of solidarity in realising that other people can see the same things you can see, but I’d rather had a fully-funded health service and a halt to fossil fuel expansion.

It’s a Romantic cliché that great art comes out of great suffering. Even in Classical Athens it probably isn’t quite true. Aeschylus certainly had first-hand experience of combat in the Greco-Persian wars, but Sophocles, by all accounts, had a comfortable life, and yet he composed tragedies of the most harrowing psychological insight. Nevertheless, suffering may accelerate or catalyse the process. And if we then derive pleasure from the product, is there any harm?

4. Art in and out of context

Another legend, told by Cicero, c. 55 BCE, says that it was Peisistratos, the tyrant of Athens in the sixth century BCE who commissioned authoritative written editions of Iliad and Odyssey. Is this Cicero’s early-Roman Empire back-projection, imagining that the Archaic Greeks were as desirous of a nationalist epic as Augustus was soon to find in Vergil’s Aeneid? Even if the “Peisistratid Recension” is mere fable, it fits with the supreme importance that Homer had for the Classical Greek imagination.

There is no art pour l’art: art absorbs the material conditions of its creation, and it endlessly radiates its spiritual product into the worlds that receive it. If Homer’s epics transcend the specificity of their creation, it’s not necessarily because the concerns are eternal, but because they are mutable.

5. P.S.

Belatedly typing this up as February turns to March 2024, here is the ferocious new song from Nigerian shredder Mdou Moctar, which mixes the Tuareg style with influences (as cited in Gooding’s article) from Hendrix, Prince and Van Halen. ‘Funeral for Justice’.

 

Meeting Blake

William Blake (engraving) after John Flaxman (drawing), Homer invoking the Muse (1805)

We happened to be in Cambridge on the day the William Blake’s Universe exhibition opened at the Fitzwilliam. The last time I saw Blake was the big exhibition at the Tate (11 September 2019 – 2 February 2020) which I saw in its final week in January 2020. That was the last exhibition I saw before lockdown. There’s plenty of reckoning to have with lockdown and the continuing, if ignored, pandemic. And we can’t ignore world-historical events when discussing Blake. But there’s an opportunity for optimism, should we seek it, in William Blake’s Universe.

Blake’s house at Felpham, February 2019. The plaque reads, ‘WILLIAM BLAKE Artist, Poet & Mystic. Lived here 1800-1803’. Photo: Ben Pestell

William Blake, Milton (1804), plate 36 detail: Blake’s house at Felpham. Library of Congress.

A few months before visiting the Tate exhibition I found myself at Blake’s house in Felpham by mistake (he wasn’t in). Two signs on the local William Blake Trail report the story of Blake accosting a soldier who entered his garden in August 1803, saying that ‘if Napoleon invaded he would win easily’, ‘Damn the King!’, and ‘All soldiers are slaves’. Blake was acquitted of sedition at Chichester, but I wonder if he would be so lucky with the courts today for saying the same words.

Sign on the William Blake Trail, Felpham, February 2019. Photo: Ben Pestell

One of my former teachers once remarked of Blake that he wrote good poetry and did paintings that some people think are good. This catty remark is reflected in some of the responses to the Fitzwilliam exhibition, which places Blake in his cultural universe, alongside contemporaries such as Philipp Otto Runge, Caspar David Friedrich, and John Flaxman. We might say that Blake lacks the purity of Flaxman’s line, or Friedrich’s compositional perfection, or the visionary splendour of Runge.

Having got started on disparaging Blake’s engraving and painting, we might turn our fire on his verse. And I confess I have, on occasion, struggled to respect the apparent simplicity of some of the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, while also being lost in the complexity of his idiosyncratic pantheon.

I imagine it’s possible to meet clever people who dismiss both Blake’s visual and literary productions as at once unsophisticated and self-indulgent. You might even entertain these doubts yourself. But what, you may ask, does Georges Bataille think?

Blake’s curious words . . . . go beyond purely poetic words. They are an exact reflection of a definitive return to the totality of human destiny. . . . From this peak he saw, in its integrity and violence, the extent of the instinct which propels us towards the worst, but at the same time raises us to glory. Blake was in no way a philosopher, but he pronounced the essential with a vigour and a precision that might make a philosopher envious.

(Georges Bataille, ‘William Blake’, Literature and Evil [1957], trans. Alastair Hamilton [1973], Marion Boyars, 1997, p. 90)

T. S. Eliot made a similar judgement of Blake’s naked statements, but was qualified in his praise, feeling that Blake’s philosophical works suffered from their disconnection from a broader cultural connection (something, Eliot claims, that wouldn’t afflict writers in the Latin tradition). Eliot wrote,

We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy . . . that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house.

(T. S. Eliot, ‘Blake’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism [1920], Methuen, 1980, p. 156)

Certainly since Eliot and Bataille a huge amount of work has been done on Blake’s poetry, art, philosophy and theology (including a chapter in a book I co-edited, Translating Myth, Legenda 2016, viz. ‘The Evolution of Blake’s Myth’ by Sheila A. Spector), but it’s sometimes clarifying to return to some original Old Farts for perspective. These anxieties about Blake are worth airing, and the Fitzwilliam invites us explicitly to compare. Blake may be the headline figure, but Friedrich and Runge are also prominent in the promo puff.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Plate 15: A memorable fancy and illustration of eagle clutching a serpent. As on display in the William Blake exhibition, Tate Britain, 2019-2020.

The 2019 Tate exhibition was a huge and comprehensive collection of Blake’s visual art. It foregrounded the historical and spatial context of Blake’s work, presenting his work chronologically and evoking the London of his lifetime, and even recreating a room of his 1809 exhibition in Soho. The context supplied by the Fitzwilliam is less personal to Blake himself (some mutual borrowings with Flaxman notwithstanding), looking instead to the political, philosophical, and spiritual zeitgeist of the Romantic era in England, France and Germany.

My son noticed the impact of the colours decorating each room. The exhibition begins with dark blue- and green-painted walls as it introduces us to some of the self-portraits and technical achievements of Blake and his contemporaries. The central room is painted in shades of red or orange, reflecting the bloody drama of the political and revolutionary works. The final room is a dazzling sunny yellow, where the spiritual, transcendental and visionary works dominate. It is also the room where Blake takes a back seat to Runge and Friedrich.

Illustration from Jacob Böhme, The True Principles of All Things, 1781.

The prominent inclusion of these two German Romantic painters jars only in that they have no personal connection to Blake. Some of the artists or writers included in the exhibition did have some direct lineage with Blake. I was particularly taken by the page from an eighteenth-century edition of The True Principles of All Things by the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Böhme — an avowed influence on Blake. Runge and Friedrich, on the other hand, were there purely as comparable figures in visionary, Romantic art.

This makes Blake part of a broader conversation in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics — not that, in 2024, anyone needs to make a case for Blake, but it is refreshing to see the different pictorial approaches to these questions of reality and experience in the same room.

Caspar David Friedrich, Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man: 1. Sunrise over the Sea – the Dawn of Creation (c. 1826)

I was moved by Friedrich’s cycle Seven Sketches in Sepia: The Ages of Man (c. 1826) which presents a linear life in the context of transcendent eternity. The first of the seven was especially evocative: before any human figures appear, Friedrich depicts ‘Sunrise over the Sea – the Dawn of Creation’. Light appears in the undulating waves against a starless horizon. It is a small image, but conjures the blank immensity of the primordial void, or, rather, the face of the waters of the biblical Genesis. Although the waves may be undulating, the image is, naturally, still, and reminded me of the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Friedrich’s influence on Tarkovsky’s images is well-documented, with the Zone’s sand room echoing Friedrich’s The Monk By the Sea, but I wonder if this particular sketch has been studied in that connection.

Still from Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Back in the red room at the Fitzwilliam, my thoughts were more grounded on the earthly plane. The poverty and political oppression lamented in Blake’s revolution-era works are reminders that our freedoms are hard-won and require reclaiming again and again. It’s an almost comforting thought, though no comfort to those on the sharpest end of the political barbarism of the early twenty-first century.

Display juxtaposing Jacques-Louis Pérée, Rights of Man (1795 or 1796) with William Blake, Albion Rose (1794-96)

By the door between this political room and the transcendental yellow room the curators placed a powerful juxtaposition. On the left, Jacques-Louis Pérée’s Droits de l’homme (1795 or 1796) has revolution personified, having cut down the tree of church and monarchy, holding aloft a scroll with the Rights of Man, endorsed by a revolutionary lightning bolt. By any standards of draughtsmanship, it is more sophisticated than the picture to the right: Blake’s Albion Rose, or Glad Day or The Dance of Albion (c. 1794-96): a naked man saying “ta-daa!” against a rainbow backdrop. The juxtaposition threatens to make Blake look unserious. But it returns us once again to the same argument that is made for his poetry. The nakedness that Eliot archly and reservedly admired, and the vigour that Bataille envied in Blake’s verse is apparent in the joyful simplicity of Albion Rose. The material factors of revolution become subtextual as the visionary element predominates. Consistent with Blake’s philosophy, the human form itself radiates the divine light. Today we talk in terms of caring for our mental health when so many of the factors driving our anxieties are the material facts over which we have no or little control: our political system, conditions of employment, media landscape and cost of living. Blake’s evident compassion and capacity for delight, combined with the idiosyncratic theology that frees him from dogma, feeds a body of work that embraces the transcendental potential without neglecting the remorselessness of the material.

Jacques-Louise Pérée, Droits de l’homme (c. 1795)

William Blake, Albion Rose (copy c. 1796), British Museum

Grave of William and Catherine Blake, Bunhill Fields, photographed July 2022. Photo: Ben Pestell

Standing on One Hand. Don Van Vliet in Mayfair

We walked through Grosvenor Square. The American embassy is gone now. Moved to Battersea? The giant ram-raid-protective bollards outside the embassy building are now obscured by wooden hoardings promising an exciting new development. Just like the one at the recently closed site of Fenwick on Bond Street which we’d just passed. More marks of the central London’s ongoing transition into premier money-laundering site for billionaires. And how distressing that the American imperialist war machine is just as strong as it was when Grosvenor Square was the site of the famous protests in 1968.

Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave spoke on behalf of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign at the anti-Vietnam war demonstration on 17 March 1968 that marched from Trafalgar Square to Grosvenor Square. At Trafalgar Square, ‘the stewards who were counting the numbers reported just as the speeches began that there were over 25,000 people present already. Vanessa Redgrave had brought greetings from other actors, actresses and film directors. The speeches were short and to the point and every speaker attacked the complicity of the Labour Government’ (Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years, Verso, 2018: 254). At their destination, Ali reports, ‘Then we saw the police horses. A cry went up that “The cossacks are coming”, and an invisible tension united everyone’ (255). Redgrave was escorted away from the ensuing violence.

Among the 25,000 present was John Peel, plausibly enough. He was on the radio that Sunday afternoon, presenting the Top Gear show between 2 and 4 pm on the new BBC Radio 1 station. I imagine he made the ten-minute walk from Broadcasting House down to Grosvenor Square after playing his last record or session. In session that afternoon were Roy Harper, the Bee Gees, Spooky Tooth, and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. And on this February afternoon in 2024, it’s Captain Beefheart we’ve come to see in a road that crosses Grosvenor Square.

One of the songs in that afternoon’s Magic Band session was ‘Sure ‘Nuff’n Yes, I Do’. (The session was recorded in January, so they weren’t in town; they were back in Europe in May, that other pivotal protest month). ‘Sure ‘Nuff’n Yes I Do’ is essentially a re-write of Muddy Waters’s ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” (via Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Down in the Bottom’) from the period where white rock acts repurposed the blues with a psychedelic mystery. (Canned Heat released a version of ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” with a similar arrangement in 1967.)

The Magic Band’s song begins with the singer’s proclamation I was born in the desert. It’s also the first song on their first album, Safe as Milk (1967), and is a useful reminder that the American desert was a formative and persistent influence on the imagination of Captain Beefheart, né Don Vliet.

Don Van Vliet, “Dream Sloth” (1988) in the Michael Werner Gallery, London, February 2024.

Desert sun-blindness might be a fitting guide through the paintings on display at the Michael Werner Gallery in Mayfair. It’s one of those private galleries that you would miss: no sign outside of any description. We stepped up to the door of the townhouse, pressed the bell and were buzzed in.

I was familiar with Don Van Vliet’s style from the artworks that adorned several Magic Band LPs from 1970’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby to 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow, but I had never caught an exhibition of his works before. After Ice Cream for Crow, Vliet left the music world and dropped the Captain Beefheart stage name to focus purely on painting. The paintings in Standing on One Hand date from the 1980s and 1990s and are vital with their thick splurges of oil on canvas or linen. From a distance, a painting like “Dream Sloth” (1988) captures the lazy oneiric haze of the title, while other abstracts, like “Luxury Rack” (1994) seem to dance like his music, with jolting angles and colouration. At times it felt a shame that we were viewing these in a smart, quiet Mayfair townhouse, and not immersed in the chiming contrapuntal guitars that the members of the Magic Band so expertly arranged from Vliet’s untutored melodies.

Don Van Vliet, “Luxury Rack” (1994)

At other times, the setting seemed quite fitting. The third room of the exhibition was the Winter Garden: a spacious room with a thick frosted-glass roof. Carved into the fireplace were hermaphroditic figures and eye-rolling lion’s heads, while the cornice displayed Pans or satyr-like faces. It is a room where you could imagine Christopher Lee drawing a protective chalk circle, as he does in the tense climax of The Devil Rides Out (also from 1968).

Still from The Devil Rides Out (1968, dir. Terence Fisher)

Don Van Vliet, “Red Cloud Monkey” (1988) in the Michael Werner Gallery, London, February 2024.

The juxtaposition of sylvan cornice and the painting “Red Cloud Monkey” (1988) must have been a deliberate curatorial decision. The painting is slightly reminiscent of the drawing on the back cover of 1980’s Doc at the Radar Station — an LP which closes with the Mellotron fantasia “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on my Knee”. An undercurrent of menace is ever-present in Vliet’s work.

Rear sleeve of Doc at the Radar Station by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

Incidentally, Doc at the Radar Station has perhaps my favourite pop group photo, with the assembled Magic Band dressed sensibly in the normcore attire of shirt, tie, jacket, yet none of them looks remotely normal.

Don Van Vliet, “Standing on One Hand” (1994)

One painting in the exhibition drew me back to it. From a distance, “Standing on One Hand” (1994), is an unassuming abstract of jagged coloured interruptions on a mostly white canvas. An image of the desert again, I assumed. I fancied for a moment that the rectangular purple shape in the bottom right corner represented Frank Zappa’s moustache. On stepping closer, I could see how the purple rectangle had likely been the source of the paint used to sketch the faint standing-on-one-hand stick-figure in the top left. Here, with Vliet’s rough signature, and the thickest squeezes of oils on the linen, I could picture the artist as present in the room: summoned from 1968 by way of 1994 into the space with me.

Don Van Vliet, “Standing on One Hand” (1994) in the Michael Werner Gallery, London, February 2024.

With thanks to Fintan, and to Derek for the tip-off.

Ceasefire.

There are times of the day where it feels obscene to enjoy life inside the imperialist vassal state that is the UK. Times when our complicity with the genocide in Gaza is so blatant, yet all the howls of pain which reach the ears of Sunak and Sir Kid Starver are met with an indifference which is the purest essence of evil. Such people are alike in having their ears so stuffed with, what? cash? dinners? – that not even the smallest step is taken that might save a life.

And some days it feels obscene to write a blog post about aesthetic matters. But to append this apologia to an otherwise irrelevant blog felt even worse, so this statement stands alone, to say: my silence feels like complicity; I support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, for Israel’s total withdrawal from the occupied territories and a free Palestine.

Why do I chose to mention this issue among so many other instances of military horror in the world? Because it is in Gaza that we clearly see a genocide being committed with the assistance of UK state, the state to which I materially contribute.

A few helpful links.

Aid organisations, etc.:

• Palestine Red Crescent
• UNRWA (you may have read some unsavoury reports about this agency, but the reports have been either debunked or are unverified, see, e.g., this from Al Jazeera)
• Medical Aid for Palestinians
• Médecins Sans Frontières

Some non-imperialist news sources / explainers:

• https://www.middleeasteye.net/
• https://www.democracynow.org/topics/gaza
• https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/north-africa/israel/palestine

Actions:

• Palestine Solidarity Campaign
• Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)

Dispatches from the island tutor

View from bus window, 2019.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about my most strange and disagreeable teaching experience. Before I begin, though, I should say that, in five years of teaching courses on myth and literature in Adult Education, this was the exception. My courses were usually great, or at worst, simply fine. Sometimes I wouldn’t connect with an individual student: that’s normal. But here, the atmosphere was different…

If I called the location “The Lindisfarne of the South”, that would convey too much historical grandeur. There are no Viking-struck ruins, though Vikings were frequent visitors to this part of the coast too. My destination was a community centre. It required two buses to get there. The second bus quickly sped out of town to hare around winding country lanes as only experienced double-decker bus drivers can. Over a reservoir, past numerous ploughed fields, with kestrels or buzzards hovering keenly above. The setting was sometimes bleak, but mostly very beautiful. As if to announce the strangeness, I once saw a baby’s nappy being changed in the middle of a roundabout. I always sit at the top of double deckers if I can, and saw the flattening land arrayed around the roads as we approached the causeway. It wasn’t quite wilderness, though: a bus went to and from town every hour, passing heavily industrialised farmland, and much evidence of a military presence and remembrances. And yet, a sense of isolation intensified — a familiar sense: the British, or, rather, English, sense of exceptionalism, splendid isolation, and incurious suspicion was heightened. The typical welcome is signposted at the car park, which I noticed some months later. “No disabled discounts at this car park.” The surly islanders’ welcome. I’m not saying it’s remote, but one week, the course time had to be delayed because otherwise the the road would have been under water.

On my first day, I got off the bus, and a helpful woman immediately told me where I needed to go. How did she know? Do outsiders stand out that much here? Am I to be sent for processing without delay?

No, it was clear when I saw the bus stop: there was a picture of my face advertising my course. “How to identify the outsider: speccy landlubber, puny biceps, no good on the docks, probably carrying a book and laptop, but no projector and not enough handouts.”

Meeting my face at the bus stop.

The venue was fine, but the lack of a cup of tea disappointing. The course organisers were present and helpful, one returning home to fetch the projector when it became apparent that no-one had told me there wasn’t one at the venue. Then I was asked, “Does the name J___ H___ mean anything to you?” I have redacted the name to protect the innocent. But the unredacted name did indeed mean something to me, although I hadn’t heard it in over fifteen years. It was the name of a friend I had lost touch with around 2002. I say, “lost touch”, but the simple matter was, he stopped replying to my letters and emails. It was a loss that perturbed me for a long time because it exposed to me my total mis-reading of the nature of our friendship. The sudden cessation of communications from this person caused me to (unnecessarily) reassess our relationship, and I never quite got to the bottom of it.

It turned out that my former friend’s parents had moved to the area and were neighbours of the organisers; they had recognised my name or picture from the course promo. I received a brief update that the family was well, my old friend alive and employed, and I politely passed on my regards.

Looking back now, I see that this moment was actually very healing for the self-doubt I had carried. Hearing that he was alive in the present served to remove him from the frozen, confused period of 2002 in a psychologically therapeutic way. In that moment, though — anxious as I was about a new course in a strange community centre — having this historical figure named in front of me by an elderly stranger was a temporary shock. You don’t invoke Satan to the priest just before he tips the baby in the font, and you don’t name the mythicised demon to the visiting adult education tutor just after you’ve told him there isn’t a projector. It wasn’t her fault, she was simply the agent of cosmic forces.

I needed to remove myself for a moment. I went to the toilet, washed my hands, splashed my face and looked in the mirror, trying to process the apparition of this figure from the primordial past, to shake off the jumble of memories, and to focus on the task at hand. If, by chance, you read this, “Hi, J___, I still listen to the tapes you made me, especially that revelatory Lee Perry one!”

I collected my thoughts, taught the class, took the buses back home.

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The second week of the course rolled along. I wasn’t connecting with the class. It’s a challenge for a teacher: you can have a prepared session that’s been a success in the past, and for mysterious reasons, it completely fails to land with another group. One of the kindest pieces of advice I received when I started teaching, at a university, was, “it’s not your fault”. This wasn’t in reference to anything in particular: it was just a standard bit of advice, applicable to all teaching situations. This loving and tender piece of wisdom, from the late Joe Allard, carried me through.

But still, I tried different techniques to mollify this fractious group. At the start, they tried to get me to use a microphone, but it proved erratic. The people at the back could hear me anyway. One or two sat at the front and, apparently couldn’t hear me whatever I did. In the “tea break” at one session (there was no tea), I heard a student complain to her friend that she found the texts I provided “boring”. I thought that a shame, and took it as a challenge.

I returned the following week with a new plan: rather than try to stir them to life with questions based on a previously-read text, or attempt to re-introduce them to a pantheon of dimly remembered gods, I would stand, and read, in a clear voice, not too fast, not too quiet, a literary evocation of Pan. I would take them (metaphorically) out of the community centre, into the dryad-haunted wood, to confront the beauty and terror of the sylvan god.

I read the text with all the awe-struck expression I could muster, feeling the presence of the god slowly impress upon the everyday, while images of pan animated on the screen behind me.

I finished my reading and left a short pause to let the scene linger in the imagination. A loud voice from the front row: “But I can’t hear a word he’s saying!”

Oh well. I looked around the room… A question from the back? — no — it’s just a comment: “the problem with this text, is that it’s just a bit boring.”

It was a tough crowd.

In a way, I had to admire this student — who had obviously realised that I had overheard her the previous week saying the texts were boring — deciding, this week, that the best way to defuse any potential embarrassment or awkwardness, was to double down and loudly tell the whole class that it was boring. I began to wonder why they came back week after week. It’s not like there was tea and biscuits.

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The time-frame is significant. It was late autumn 2019: a time of heightened political anxiety in the UK. Well, a particular peak of the heightened political anxiety of the past seven years. (Replace “seven” with “thirteen”, “twenty-one”, “twenty-six”, “forty-four”, etc., depending on your own political memory.) With the third Prime Minister in as many years, unable to force through their monstrous policies due to the parliamentary weakness inflicted on the government by the 2017 election, the miserable consequences of “brexit” had yet to become fully apparent to many. And I, no lover of the EU, but a committed devotee of the socialist principles of adult education, had taken my blatant ideological worldview into this haven of Retired Tories.

At that time particularly, I felt the need to announce in my classes that we leave politics at the door. It always finds its way in anyway. If I am teaching a course that deals with the ideological and propagandistic uses of myth, a little bit of politics is always going to emerge. The trick is to keep the conversation on general terms: “you can see how political parties and media organisations use these tricks today” — that sort of thing, without getting people too personally affronted. I swear I never even mentioned “brexit”, and if I started laughing when I referred to a myth that dealt with the unintended catastrophic consequences of a badly-thought-through decision, I didn’t mean to. (No-one else found it funny.)

Anyway, it was after one of these references to the political mis-uses of myth, that, one day, we went into the “tea break”. (There was no tea.)

“Of course you’ve got to remember, in the 1930s, Germany had been punished by the whole of Europe for the First World War, and so I can definitely see the appeal of Hitler.”

I hadn’t expected to hear that. It was from a conversation between two students, and was met by a patient “hmm, yes”.

The first went on to say, “Of course, that doesn’t excuse what he went on to do, but we couldn’t have known that in the 1930s, and they needed a strong man. I would have voted for him”.

The following week, the 2019 election was announced.

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That week, I turned up at the community centre (I’d bought a cup of tea from the nearby café), and began to set up the laptop, handouts, and books. The volunteer organisers chatted to me as I set up. The first told me about a historical talk she’d been to see in Cambridge at the weekend, and how it had parallels with some of the things we’d been talking about in class. “Great!”, I thought: I’m finally connecting with them! Then her husband, the other organiser, told me about a radio programme where they explained the fine points distinguishing deism and theism — wonderful! If there was a pointed challenge in the way he said to me, “of course you’d know all about that”, I let it pass. At last, the work I’ve done is making sense to them in the wider world. But there was something under the surface that clearly had to come out. And it came out.

I asked about this interesting-sounding lecture the organiser had been to in Cambridge. She described a retired academic relating a long view of history, and the various political upheavals of the seventeenth century. She told me that naturally the topic of “brexit” came up in this lecture, and she took great pleasure in telling me that this retired don, with all his accumulated years of appreciation of the nuances of political and historical movements, concluded triumphantly that we must simply “Get brexit Done!”

Bloody Hell, I thought. Maybe I’ll have better luck talking to her husband about this radio programme. So I did. He returned with a few words about “deism”, but he had something else to get this off his chest: the way that people pronounce “deity”. Now, I will confess that I tend to pronounce it “day-itty”, even though I know that many experts prefer “dee-itty”. I had previously checked the pronunciation in my dictionary and felt sure that I wasn’t committing a dreadful faux pas. Not so to this man: “of course it should be pronounced ‘dee-itty’,” he confidently told me while I wrestled with my laptop cable. He continued, “it’s another one of these corrupted pronunciations that’s come over from America…” His wife, arranging chairs further down the room, ears pricked up, loudly interjected: “VIA IRELAND!”

At that unanswerable declaration, I finished setting up my laptop while my hosts went and sat down with their copy of The Times. As they absorbed what Rupert Murdoch wanted us to think about the election, they spoke, perhaps for my benefit: “young people don’t remember Stalin and the Gulags”, and I wondered if they really believed that a Corbyn-led government would see labour-camps for Tories in the UK. What a depressing brain-rot the UK news media is. To these gentle, retired adult-education volunteers, I must have represented the spectre of repressive Corbynism in action, even if I never mentioned his name. Looking back four years later, it’s hard for me to recall the exact moment when I decided, fuck these wankers: from now on, I’ll turn up five minutes before my scheduled start time, and get the Hell out as soon as I’ve finished my bit.

Leaving aside their personal criticism of my style, and their latent neo-Nazi tendencies, with the additional years of teaching experience that I have now, I would probably be able to respond to the class’s needs much better than I could then. There were a few people in the group who showed me kindness, much to my gratitude, but my final impression was one of sadness. Whether they were bored, offended, deaf, or ideologically opposed to my (hardly contentious) presence (I mean, I dress smartly and basically speak with an RP accent), I felt that — whatever my limitations as a tutor at the time — they simply weren’t prepared to meet me half way. Repressed Nazism aside, my abiding memory is of one of them, after a discussion of Dionysos and Euripides’ Bacchae, delightedly saying to his friend in the “tea break” (there was no tea), “I’ve not thought about this stuff since I was at school!” I’d transported this man back sixty years or so, re-awoken memories of something he’d loved and lost, and he seemed to resent me for it. Resent me for taking his beloved out of his hands, recontextualising it, offering a variety of different interpretations. The world was moving on without him, and he wasn’t hip any more. But he had his stupid fucking brexit.

Dead bee on the keyboard

This morning, as the slow gears of my home-working-motivational-engine ground painfully towards my goal of answering at least one email, a dead bee landed on my laptop keyboard.

I’m sorry: I didn’t photograph it. The Instagrammation of life hasn’t co-opted my brain yet. I didn’t think “here is a moment to treasure”. I did wonder where it came from. I looked up: the lampshade was gently swaying, so I thought. I looked ahead: the window was open a crack. Neither seemed a likely place for a bee to spend its final hours before its (dried and long-dead, by the looks of things) carcass plummets to interrupt a world-class procrastinator.

I wondered if it was a message from Virgil? The Aeneid famously repurposes a Homeric simile about bees. Aeneas sees the building work at Carthage, and the poet imagines bees. Here, in Dryden’s couplets:

Such is their Toyl, and such their busy Pains,
As exercise the Bees in flow’ry Plains;
When Winter past, and Summer scarce begun,
Invites them forth to labour in the Sun;
Some lead their Youth abroad, while some condense
Their liquid Store, and some in Cells dispence.
Some at the Gate stand ready to receive
The Golden burthen, and their Friends relieve.
All with united Force, combine to drive
The lazy Drones from the laborious Hive;
With envy stung, they view each others Deeds;
The fragrant Work with Diligence proceeds.

John Dryden, Virgil’s Æneis (1697), I.598-609

The Aeneid is in my thoughts at the moment, as I’m due to teach a course on it shortly. It follows on from very satisfactory courses on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in a year of epic poems. So this was a synchronous message I received on my keyboard. “You are like a dead bee!” the universe is telling me. Or, “This dead bee has produced more on this keyboard than you have today!” Suitably chastised, I cast the bee to the winds.

As a younger man, I was suspicious of rhyming translations, and especially wary of rhyming couplets. Dryden’s image of the bees, though, is a beautiful rebuke to my former prejudice. And I am with envy stung by the bees, spurred to resume my work with diligence, fragrant or otherwise.

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Still from the short film “Listening to bees buzzing around their holes in the earth under the bush roots”, July 2021.

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This blog also needs stinging into life. I did a bit of work on it last year (2022), namely: changing the domain name, activating some new pages, and adding a new header image. I changed the domain (from cloneguilt.wordpress.com to ecstaticterror.wordpress.com) because I didn’t really understand what the old name meant anymore. The new pages are to direct anyone who’s interested to my teaching, academic work and music.

Meanwhile, over the last year or so, I’ve been doing stuff on other blogs: keeping the pages for the University of Essex Centre for Myth Studies up to date; advertising my Adult Education courses on my main teaching site; and writing at possibly exhausting length about the first year of the group The Fall.

New Course at Mary Ward Centre

The Urban Wanderer

The Urban Wanderer course returns to the Mary Ward Centre after Easter 2023.

The content of the course will be much the same as previous versions. The first five weeks will be focused on the formative texts and authors of ‘psychogeography’ (Poe, Baudelaire, Debord, Sinclair, etc.). The remainder of the course explores the numerous other directions we can take the idea of literary walks.

This will also be the final opportunity to take the course in the dérive-friendly surroundings of Queen Square in Bloomsbury, as the Mary Ward Centre will be moving to Stratford later in the year.

A look around this website will give you a sense of the style of the course, but for any specific queries, please contact me at: ben.pestell@marywardcentre.ac.uk.

Course details:

Thursday evenings, 6:30-8:30 pm
27 April to 29 June 2023 (no session on 1 June)
42 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AQ
Enrol…

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Course review

I wrote up a reflection on my course that just finished at Mary Ward Centre. It was a course on literary walks, in which the concept of “psychogeography” was established, discussed, chewed up and transubstantiated into an enriching combination of theory and praxis.

The Urban Wanderer

The Urban Wanderer course, online with the Mary Ward Centre, finished a fortnight ago. When I originally planned this course in February 2019, I’d imagined that I’d punctuate the classes with rambles around London. The Mary Ward Centre is based on Queen Square in Bloomsbury: an excellent location to begin a pedestrian exploration of London: Bloomsbury itself, or north over Euston Road to Somers Town or Barnsbury, east to the City of London, south to Aldwych and the river or Soho or Westminster, west to Fitzrovia and Marylebone. The thought of holding classes online was completely alien to me at that point, yet, as the full course ran over Zoom in summer 2021, it worked remarkably well: the city streets alive in the writers’ and readers’ imaginations.

Next year, the Mary Ward Centre is moving to Stratford: a less glamorous starting point, but still full of rich material for a

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nospace

I deleted my “Myspace” account last month. This totally irrelevant action was part of a general cleanup of online accounts that dredged up this decayed and illegible detritus from the early years of ‘social media’.

‘Myspace’ was the first online ‘social medium’ I used. People used it for all sorts of reasons, but music was the real revelation for me. All my music-making friends were there, it seemed, and loads of underground, borderline-unlistenable sounds could flourish. Then it got bought by Murdoch, then sold by him, then it got hollowed out as all the pictures, songs, blogs, and personal messages got deleted. It’s a good lesson to keep back-ups of everything. (Reminds me I should back-up this blog…)

Every now and then over the last decade, I’d take a look at it to see what could be salvaged (nothing), and to see what was going on there (nothing that I could understand). It was like returning to a town centre after a few years’ absence and finding that the parade of small shops has been demolished and replaced by a town square with no seating but an enormous screen showing 24-hour news. (A site I have seen.)

I couldn’t understand the point… why would anyone log in anymore? Where is the money coming from? Who is making money from this? I read an article a couple of years ago about the Myspace-diehards who seem to enjoy the under-the-radar feeling of the website. I suppose it’s a bit like blogs, which (anecdotally) have declined in recent years.

The gentrified ghost-town aesthetic of Myspace is a great mystery to me, it’s like the ‘notopias‘ of the neoliberal city: a place full of gloss and money, and no night life. No life at all. But I have fond memories of Myspace circa 2006, despite its cluttered design. There was never any suggestion that it might play a role in, say, political censorship and swinging elections, as social media does today.

To visit old Myspace accounts now is to be stranded in a cavern of dead links, names of songs which no longer work, unloadable jpegs, and a baffling horizontally-scrolling interface. The memories of long-deleted conversations, daft forums, conspiratorial blogposts, and muddy 128kbps mp3s fill the gaps for me, but in the future, there will only be the gaps, with no first-hand memory to contextualise it. The papyri fragments of Sappho are better preserved than this archive of the ‘noughties’.

In the absence of any record, these are my top three memories of myspace:

1. The time an underground / free-music musician recognised my sample from Pasolini’s I Racconti di Canterbury leading to, well, nothing really, but a pleasant random exchange. This casual form of conversation has been replaced by Twitter, I guess, but everything there is more quick and ephemeral. The sample was, of course, Ninetto Davoli’s recitation of the folk song ‘The Ould Piper’. The original recording by Frank McPeake, which plays over the title credits, is from the LP series Folk Songs of Britain (collected by Alan Lomax et al.).
2. When, after a gig by Red Atlas (for whom I played bass) at the Cross Keys on York Way (don’t look for it, it’s not there any more), the group got a message from one of the other bands on that night, where they said “Your bass player was incredible. One of the best I’ve seen in a while”. Naturally, this exchange led to nothing, but I took it as a validation of my approach of splatting my completely inappropriate goth bass lines over the nice country rock melodies that Red Atlas was otherwise expert in.
3. A photo from a gig by The Beale (for whom I played “second keyboard”), under which the person who played “first keyboard” posted a long, idiosyncratic, slightly deranged and ultimately self-aggrandising comment about the quality of my jumper. It was a good jumper.

“The Urban Wanderer” – new course in April 2021

The Urban Wanderer

I’m very pleased to say that the course “The Urban Wanderer” will be revived next month.

It was originally run as a six-week course at the Mary Ward Centre in London, beginning in February 2020, but it was abruptly terminated after two or three weeks with the first Lockdown.

This website served to host some material from the course, and to allow the enrolled students to share some stories and information.

Since then, as classes moved to Zoom, I’ve become quite at home with online teaching. It cannot compete with the social element of meeting in person, but I’m proud to say that students have frequently remarked on the convivial atmosphere that my courses have: they transcend the distance of the webcam.

The new course is much expanded: it’s twice as long, in fact: twelve weeks instead of six, allowing us more time to spend on some crucial early texts…

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