The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  Bungay, ‘a famous necromancer of the 15th century, whose story is much overlaid with legend’, had the ability to raise mists and vapours on the occasions of important battles to confuse the enemy, and was known to have gained extensive work experience under the Franciscan monk, scientist and scholar Roger Bacon (?1214–92), who was first in devising lenses to correct vision, according to Collins English Dictionary. Gerund is the eponymous anti-hero of a satirical romance by Jose Isla (1703–81), ‘ridiculing the contemporary pulpit oratory of Spain; it is full of quips and cranks, tricks, and startling monstrosities’. John, a prominent Rabeliasian character, was able to gabble his matins and vigils faster than any of his fraternity, and often ‘swore lustily’. Which brings us to Tuck, ‘pudgy, paunchy, humorous, self-indulgent, and combative clerical Falstaff’, surely a prototype of Billy Bunter in Frank Richards’ Greyfriars School, where Harry Wharton is Robin Hood, and Bob Cherry Little John. These schoolboys maintain a decent English code of honour throughout their japes and escapades, resembling the jolly-well-met-fellows of the labyrinthine Forest, whose mazy paths and shades and dappled glades were re-imagined by us children in Belfast in the 1950s in the willowy scrub-land which we called The Jungle, adjoining a bank of the Owenvarragh river a long few hundred yards or so south of our new, small, speculatively built suburb of semi-detached houses made of ‘rustic brick’, a concept I confused then with ‘rusty’, since its building-blocks seemed to have been corroded and pitted by coarse ochre-orange and deep red iron oxides, interspersed with grits of black and purple.

  Now I can smell the newly plastered walls of the pristine house in Mooreland Drive our family moved into from the Lower Falls, our new-found voices echoing within its empty rooms, floating up its wooden staircase acoustic, as our footsteps rang on the bare pine boards of the floor, sounding out its underlying hollow of dimension, where an IRA man could be concealed when on the run, reclining like a temporary mummy in his ideal otherworld of imminent republic. We thought it possible, then, that we might discover trapdoors leading to the narrative ballad of Sherwood, where the Merry Band had dug camouflaged pit-falls into which the Sheriff’s samurai, encumbered by their beetle-case elaborate armour, were encouraged to stumble, never to get out except when given a sporting hand by Robin of Lockesley and his band of key cronies – Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Allen-a-Dale, George-a-Greene, and Maid Marian – whereupon the agents of the Empire would immediately throw in their gauntleted hands with the rebels of Sylvania, convinced, by these hoods’ demeanour, of the justness of their cause. So the English language was born of this unauthorized liaison, as Anglo-Saxon cohabitated with Norman French.

  I see them as double agents lying parallel under the floorboards, or hidden in an attic, fugitive idealists like Johnny McQueen of Carol Reed’s film Odd Man Out, who are lost in its Belfast Caravaggio interiors of noir. The axis of the name ‘Belfast’, in all its ambiguity, occupies a momentary rushlight clarity.

  1 Both Dinneen and Mc Cionnaith were Jesuit priests, and their training in dialectical oratory and moral taxonomy must have stood them in good stead in the field of lexicography.

  2 Another clergyman, the Rev. Cobham Brewer, Ll. D., though of what denomination I do not know, but from a reading of other entries, notably that for ‘Catholic Church’, I would strongly suspect him to be High Church of England.

  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY REDEEMER

  If Odd Man Out suggests that Belfast is a universal city, I cannot help but see bits of Belfast everywhere. Berlin, Warsaw, Tallinn, New York, to name some, have Belfast aspects; and recently, in Paris for the first time, I picked up this book of photographs that I want to explore, since its various grisailles remind me of the light of Belfast, or rather, a remembered light, since the bulk of the images date from the period 1947–51.

  The photographs, by Willy Ronis, are of the Belleville-Ménilmontant district. Beautifully composed and contemplated, they simultaneously reveal and withhold. No. 41, Devant l’église Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, place de Ménilmontant, for example, is a baroque conundrum, signalled initially by that preposition ‘devant’ (in front of). Devant: yet more than half of the picture is taken up by what looks like a side-chapel of the main church, whose tower and the first stage of its spire make up the background; either that, or two churches coexist in an unlikely contiguity. I look at it again; perhaps there are two different establishments. The texture of the light suggests an intervening space, as it parallels the buttresses and window-columns, fading in defined verticals back from the viewer or the lens, till the dimmed tower and spire seem to hover in another recessed realm.

  Below this architectural enigma is a horizontal frieze formed by the back-yard wall of a shop or dwelling whose gable end is the left-hand frame; poised against the wall, in various conversational clichés, a minor Bayeux of characters; the rest of the foreground is occupied by a big black motor-vehicle resembling a limousine or bus, or hearse. Its roof is covered in flowers: the scene, it would appear, is of a wedding and a funeral, the wedding confirmed by the sunlit presence of a woman wearing brilliant white among the small throng of guests. She has a white jacket on, chaplet, veil, just-below-the-knee-length skirt, white, sling-backed, wedge-heeled shoes. She cradles a bouquet of white flowers in her left arm.

  Although I must have stared into this photograph for some hours, off and on, it is only now that I’ve been able to resolve the problematic Rorschach blot draped against the flowers on the roof of the vehicle. One could interpret it as a black flag, or shroud; but it is, in fact, a man, his rump strained towards us and his head invisible, as he stoops to attend to the wreaths. Momentarily confused by this Charon phenomenon, I started, paradoxically, to doubt the hearse; perhaps it was, all the time, a wedding limousine, and the wreaths were bouquets; but no – through a side window of the car, now, I can detect the barely shimmering fringes of a pall. Squinting at it, I am led to see another detail not glimpsed before, where, at the bottom right edge of the frame, a trouser-leg and shoe have just entered the ambiguous moment.

  Ronis finds such happy accidents in other locations: in Rue de Belleville/Rue de Rampal, for instance, the crush of shoppers milling at this corner of junk shops is elaborated by the strident blur of a woman who has just entered from stage right. His Rue de Solitaires shows a distressed milliner’s, the hats displayed on stands or faceless dummies’ heads; the shop is nameless, yet the street has two signs, the same name repeated in different typo graphy below a skewed ornamental bracket which throws a gnomon shadow across an iron window-grille. This is a temporal pointer which resembles its other, the perfect isosceles triangle which has crept in on the lower left-hand foreground, a shadow thrown by an invisible presence, indicating the precision of the time-frame, and guiding us beyond it.

  The enigmatic Passage Plat takes this technique to a beautiful extreme. Here, everything is guideline, poised against a huge misty canvas sky of photograph. On the left, a soaring elongated tree is bursting into sparse leaf. The focal point is a man with his back turned towards us. He seems to contemplate the distance, having climbed the last five steps of a supposed long stairway and arrived at an eminence or plateau. The blurred nave of a church lies just below him, and its Gothic spire balances the tree.

  The same church is seen from different angles in some six or seven other photographs; as I compare them, I realize it is no other than Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, and that the photograph I first described is, most likely, of one church. In Rue des Couronnes/rue Henri-Chevreau, it is viewed from the interior of a café framed in a window of its ornamental doors; another window shows two figures – a woman holding the hand of a little girl, both wearing transparent, fold-up plastic mackintoshes, gone all crinkly with the drizzle that they hurry into, towards the blurred church of the imminent horizon. You can almost hear them trot across the shiny, scallop-patterned pavé.

  In Cour rue de Retrait, the print is nearly all pavé, those versions of the granite setts of Belfast, mostly now all torn up.
It is full of different weights and textures of bumpy oblong embedded light. Off to one side, a child is about to run away from us into a garden.

  Returning to Devant l’église Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, I remind myself of why it first attracted me, the accident that its rose window resembles that of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, more commonly known as Clonard, from the district it inhabits. Clonard is from the Irish cluain ard, high water-meadow, and is bounded on the north by the Farset River, from whence it declines towards the Clowney Water (cluaineach, water-meadowy) in the west. I went back to Clonard yesterday. As I opened one of its heavy, brass-lined vestibule doors, a near-audible pneumatic rush of church aroma crossed the threshold: wax, terrazzo flooring, incense, polished oak, ghosts of sodden coats, and altar-flowers, the black serge smell of confessionals. A beeswax odour lingers, despite the fact that the votive candles have gone electric, and are operated by a bank of individual switches, so that lighting the candle of your choice among the near-gross on display requires some minor computational skill; but electricity has rendered defunct the traditional aesthetics of candle placement. Wax is a consumptive, dying medium; electricity, in its incandescence, never wanes, but must be switched off. It is odourless. Drip-free. Guaranteed not to gutter. Here, the definition offered by the Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary is relevant:

  CANDLES, VOTIVE are lighted by the Faithful and set up to burn before the Blessed Sacrament, relics, shrines or images. The origin of the custom is obscure, but from the earliest times a symbolism attached to use of candles – notably in the case of the paschal candle. As the incense which sent up its cloud of fragrance was a symbol of prayer, so the candle consuming itself was a type of sacrifice. In the Middle Ages it was common for grateful clients to ‘measure themselves’ to a particular saint; i.e., a candle was set up of the same height or weight of the person who had received or desired some favour.

  This self-immolation by proxy, it seems to me, is procedurally difficult when given electricity. Wax is a process; electricity, in its on-or-offness, is digital. One cannot know how many prayers are terminated by a power-cut. And the electric candle goes against the rubric grain of prayer-time, which, though formulaic, is flexible. I know of no research conducted in this region, but it is imagineable that no two wax candles, lit simultaneously, will expire precisely at the same moment; each has its own specific gravity, and will bear the fingerprints and DNA of individuals. Yet it is also part of a wider community: lighting a candle in a votive shrine, one applies its virgin wick to that of an already-burning other, in an efflorescent act which owes its being to someone else’s prayer, and we enter a realm where all the lights of the shrine could trace their geneaology to one primordial flame; one’s candle, placed within that constellation of prayer, takes on a serially compounded significance, another asterisk within the cataracted narrative. Marathons of Olympian time are implicated.

  Pondering these issues, I wandered off the nave into a transept. It was getting dusk. A verger or a sacristan appeared. I watched him pace slowly up to the shrine, and switch the candles off in sequence, leaving one still lit at the apex of a triangle, like a Christmas star.

  ELECTRIC STREET

  Every night, on retiring, I would tent the bedclothes over my head to make an underwater grotto, whose interior of furls and crumples was thrown into chiaroscuro by the beam of the annual torch I got in my Christmas stocking. I was practically unaware of my body, since it formed part of the structure – supporting columns of the knees, flying buttresses of elbows – and my breathing was a rhythm of the coral tide. In this context, the torch was a one-man submarine, in which the bulb behind the window-lens was me.

  Then I would return it to its primary function, relishing the snick of its off-on switch, the clunky weight of batteries slotted end to end within its grooved tin tube. Cocooned in its light, I’d open a book I’d dog-eared the night before. Black clichés hummed and buzzed on the yellowed pages, dissolving them in an expanding O of flame, charred edges eating the words from inside out, revealing the eye of the story, in which I became its simultaneous hero and observer.

  I am a British agent parachuted into enemy Bohemia, my mission to spring the German anti-Nazi physicist, whose calculations, scrawled in chalky symbols on a blackboard, and then wiped clean, resided only in the convolutions of his brain. The Schloss in which he is imprisoned is an Elsinore of winding clockwise stairs, lancet turret windows overlooking crenellated parapets, and passageways within walls, complicated as the ventilation system of an ocean liner. Crawling through it like a travelling rat, I find a monocular eyelet in an arras high above the banqueting hall, and spy the SS in their perfect, tight-fit, silver-braided, black uniforms, as they communicate impeccably in Nazi English. They quaff fine wines poured from cobwebbed bottles into cut-glass goblets, and I am tempted to shoot the ash from the end of their leader’s Havana corona.

  Then I remember with the tip of my tongue the tiny suicidal pebble of cyanide embedded in a molar, and imagine its purported scent of bitter almonds, cyanide from Greek for blue, from the blued lips of the victim, I would like to think, but possibly it is integrally blue – who knows, since we only glean these things from books, words of vitriol and strychnine, ratsbane, arsenic, Agent Orange, datura, hemlock, Paraquat, nicotine and acrimony: an aura of country houses, the weekend permeated by the waft of blue cigar-smoke and red herrings, a seething plethora of motives. It’s time, I think, to get Poirot on the job, or Holmes, whose London reminds me of Belfast in its teeming narrative dimensions and its atmospheric genre fogs:

  Back in the fifties, I’d look forward to October or November, when, every other day, smog would permeate and cloak the still-dark morning streets with various murks of yellow: Outspan orange, saffron, Coleman’s mustard, burnt Sienna, honey, jaundice, lentil, nicotine. Snug in the lull between waking and getting up, I’d massage the cold tip of my nose, thinking of it being pressed against the opaque window-pane. Outside, the habitual metronome of the blind man’s cane was dulled and thickened by the intervening blanket as he made his way to work in the Basket Factory. His ticks were tocks. Zigs became confused with zags, and I would savour, with a slow advance deliberation, the prospect of my being lost on the way to school.

  After breakfast, muffled in my overcoat and balaclava, I would step into the incandescent wall of coalsmoke smog. I’d inhale its acrid aura through my woollen mouthpiece. Launching tentatively into it, I’d feel my way with fingertips: doors and hyphenated window-sills; verticals and horizontals; the untouchable gloom at the end of a gable wall. From here I’d take a right up Milton Street and reach the blurred oasis of a still-lit gas-lamp. The thoroughfare ahead was heralded by muted parps of car-horns, as if a traffic-light had stuck at amber.

  As I come on to the Falls Road, I try to visualize its shop-front sequence: Angelone’s Ice Saloon; Muldoon’s the Barbers; McPeake’s ‘Wallpaper, Radio and Drugs’; Kavanagh’s the Butcher’s; O’Kane’s Funeral Parlour; Smyth’s the Tobacconist’s; the haberdashery whose name I can’t remember. I can’t find it in the Street Directory for 1948 I’ve just perused, with its advertisements for defunct traders: John S. Brown, ‘Manufacturers of the celebrated “Shamrock” Linens and Hand Painted “Raytone” Double Damask Table Cloths and Napkins’; Wilson, McBrinn and Co., ‘Wholesale Manufacturer of Men’s, Youths’ and Boys’ Garments, Sole Manufacturers of the famous “Sunshine” Flannels; also the “Captain”, “Middy” and “Sailor” Serges in all garments’; and A.W. Hamilton, ‘Ship Repairers, Boiler Makers, Sole Ulster Representative of the Schori Metallising Process, Manufacturers of Gates and Railings, Milk Bottle Crates, etc.’

  It reminds me of those freezing February days when, perversely, the marble season would begin and your knuckles are skinned and raw, chapped blue and purple from squinting and shooting ‘marlies’ in their complicated planetary rituals and ricocheting paths. Or two of us are sent out into an opalescent fog to skid and skate across the black bottle-glass rink of the granite yard.
We are the milk-collectors. The galvanized iron crate burns frostily into our palms and fingers. It clinks and tingles as we teeter back, the pair of us like out-of-synch zinc buckets on a milkmaid’s swaying yoke.

  I step into the sudden fug of the classroom radiator-warmth. When we take the bottles out they’re frozen solid half-way down their half-pint length. We rack and clunk them up like snowman soldiers on the regimental cast-iron pipes. Gradually, a sour-sweet thaw will blend its milk-aroma with the other fug ingredients: chalk-dust, pencil-shavings, Plasticine, sweaty socks, damp raincoats, schoolbag leather, ink, lino, blotting paper, oak and varnish, the interiors of pencil-boxes, the exhalation of our breath against the De la Salle Brother’s blackboard-black soutane. Snow, too, is in the air; it will soon snow down like algebra. We will watch it crowd the window, then settle down to write in red and blue lined exercise books.

  We dip our steel-nibbed pens repeatedly into the speckly delph wells, until our fingers become cramped and inked with blue. We copy out the alphabet, following the Brother’s chalky copperplate. Years later, we would graduate to fountain pens: Parker, Conway Stewart, Waterman. They had gold nibs and thick Bakelite casings of Fabergé-like mock tortoiseshell and pearloid themed in various mosaics of blue or green or red: ruby, garnet, ochre, carmine, solferino; olive, loden, beryl, avocado, Paris green; sapphire, cobalt, peacock, hyacinthine, Oxford blue. Meanwhile, all the motor cars were black. The last trams on the Shankill Road were blue as the Gallaher’s Blues cigarette packet, and their trolleys emitted ink-blot stars in the grey December afternoons. Buses were fire-engine, doppelgänger red.