RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  To me, he became another creature too. Looking out over the lake where he fell to earth, Newton sees his desert planet and his family walking through endless dunes where the sea had been but was no more. He dreams of aerial oceans, and in a sequence which I only registered subliminally then, he and his Anthean wife spin around one another in a fluid cybersexual space while we hear snatches of whale song and ‘oceanic sounds’ supplied, as the credits now reveal, by Woods Hole Oceanographic Centre, Cape Cod, and recorded by Frank Watlington.

  During the nineteen-fifties, Watlington had been working for a secret American base on Bermuda, where he devised an underwater microphone to listen for Russian submarines, in much the same way that astronomers would listen for signs of extraterrestrial life. Having lowered his hydrophone fifteen hundred feet into the Atlantic, he recorded the songs of humpback whales for the first time. Watlington had kept his discovery secret for fear it would be used by whale-hunters. But in 1967 he drew it to the attention of a biologist, Roger Payne, and his wife Kathy, who together with the scientist Scott McVay realised there was a repeating pattern to the strange noises off the island that had inspired The Tempest. The Paynes began to record the songs for themselves from their yacht, Twilight. ‘Far from land, with a faint breeze and a full moon, we heard these lovely sounds pouring out of the sea.’

  In 1970, Roger Payne released Songs of the Humpback Whale. The future had been announced – not from beyond the earth, but beneath its seas. The blue-toned album cover, showing a whale breaching out of the ocean, echoed another soundtrack – 2001: A Space Odyssey, released two years earlier, displaying a spacecraft shooting from its mother ship like a slender cetacean. Payne’s hydrophone recorded an animal out of time and space. We were looking for aliens beyond our galaxy, when all the while they were living in our oceans. Even their binomial, Megaptera novaeangliae – big-winged New Englanders – invoked a new age. We’d seen our blue planet from outer space and realised that there was nothing we could do. When Newton tells Bryce, ‘Our word for your planet means “planet of water”,’ he is citing Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001, who thought the Earth would be better named the Ocean.

  In 1972, an atomic-orange poster for a concert to save the whales showed the starman as a space-age Ariel astride a grenade harpoon, superseding its barbaric cruelty with his lamé and lurex. Around the same time, I saw my first whale: a stolen animal in an inland pool, the same graphic orca that would leap out of my notebook. It too was a sign, although I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t until 2001, shortly before the aeroplanes dropped out of the sky, that I saw another whale, launching itself off Cape Cod like the rockets which had blasted off from Cape Canaveral in the seventies, sending probes spinning into the solar system – lonely voyagers loaded with whale song on golden discs for aliens to hear, just as John Dee used his golden disc to communicate with angels, and just as Kubrick’s film hums with another alien sound, emitted from a mysterious black monolith. Like The Tempest, 2001 is filled with classical references and performed in formal language as a masque, a ritual moving languidly from the dawn of man, via titanium-white spaceships, to the end of time.

  It is also, as Andrew Delbanco observes, a very Melvillean film. The astronaut, David Bowman – his name oddly close to that of the performer who would be inspired by the film to write a song that set him adrift – resembles a beautiful version of an American football player as he lies under a sunlamp in his white shorts. Space pods float like bathyscaphes; they might as well be sinking in the benthic ocean, crewed by deep-sea divers. Later, Bowman’s mate, the orange-suited Frank Poole, is lost in fathomless space, spinning into infinity.

  Bowman, strangely distanced from the drama into which he is plunged, is a twenty-first-century Ishmael caught up in an unknown mission; not for a white whale, but for a black slab. Indeed, a generation before, just before I was born, John Huston had come to Britain to film Moby-Dick, his nineteen-fifties version of Melville’s science-fiction search for a grand hooded phantom swimming in a black ocean, spanning time and space, tugging Ahab out of his boat and into the infinite sea.

  All these things seem so fated, from this distance and this close, that I’m not surprised to find that all three alien creations – black monolith, fallen angel, white whale – were filmed in the same studios outside London, born in a sort of suburbia, out of imaginations contained behind tree-lined avenues.

  I first saw Kubrick’s film in a small cinema in Southampton’s nineteen-seventies high street, barely recovered from its wartime blitz. The narrow building, more accustomed to showing Swedish porn, was slotted between a shoe shop and a bank; a secret place down a dark lobby, more like a nightclub.

  I entered as if I knew I were doing wrong.

  Two hours later I emerged dazed from the hallucinogenic ending – the astronaut’s blue eyes staring and shaking as they witnessed the making and unmaking of worlds, blinking in a white room like a giant microscopic slide where he lay as an old man, wondering if that was the way to die, only to become a star-child in a caul, floating far above the earth.

  What remained with me, and still does, is the deepness of these worlds – the spaceship, the alien, the whale – only waiting to confirm our future. Whiteness was its aesthetic, an appalling pallor, a plastic dystopia fabricated from petrochemical products that were already starting to poison us. Now, fifteen years after the passing of the year it commemorated, the slowness of Kubrick’s film and its sparse words seem more Jacobean drama than modern movie; a Cinerama version of Prospero’s story, with its Caliban apes (led by Dan Richter, a Provincetowner), its computerised Ariel, Hal, and its brave new world. These moving images barely move at all; continually showing in a loop in some decrepit cinema since I first saw them, they are mechanical, needing and creating light, dreams burned into and out of their celluloid.

  How small the past looks from the future; even yesterday seems old-fashioned compared to tomorrow, and the day after that. In my Provincetown attic, as the sun sets over the bay, I re-view Roeg’s film, which I first saw forty years ago, watching it on my white computer, which might have been made by World Enterprises. Newton, wearing a suit of long underwear and a grey buckled corset to keep his bird bones intact, sits in front of a bank of televisions. This is the way he has learned about the earth back on his planet, picking up the incontinent transmissions of the human race as they leak out into space, sampling images to be watched by aliens as if through compound eyes. It was the same way I’d learned about the world, too, from the TV in the corner of our front room. Then, machines were the future. Now, the space station slides across our suburban skies, night after night.

  Each flickering cathode-ray tube, tuning in and out of Newton’s array, broadcasts its own footage: an Elvis movie, lions mating, a NASA rocket launch. But in a cut-up worthy of Burroughs or Paolozzi, there’s one black-and-white scene that causes me to pause the film, something I could once have done only in my head. It’s as though the director-magician has inserted it retrospectively for my attention. With the dark sea roaring outside, it seems to have been conjured up out of my wishful thinking.

  For a moment I wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing. I rerun it, rerunning time, and watch it again.

  In snatched clips we see a young Terence Stamp, an Adonis with bleached blond hair playing Billy Budd, the Handsome Sailor, in a sequence taken from the 1962 film of Melville’s novella. (The director cannot say why, he later tells me in a London basement.) Betrayed by Claggart, the punitive master-at-arms whom he has accidentally killed, the angelic Billy is about to die. Captain Vere declares solemnly, ‘If you have nothing to say, the sentence of the court will be carried out’ – and we see the sailor with the rope around his neck crying, ‘God bless Captain Vere.’ As Billy’s body is about to be consigned to the deep, the crazy images collide and Newton responds in panic as if he’d seen his own future, ‘Get out of my mind, all of you!’

  That summer of 1976, I left school. The days extended, ever hotter, fa
lling on their knees. Southern England became a landscape devoid of water. The port city where I lived registered the highest temperature in the country. The grass burned and the earth baked, great cracks opening up as if to swallow me. If I’d thought about my future at all, I would have felt sorry for the boy I was rather than the person I would become. I wore my sunglasses and my jumble-sale clothes as a collage of all the people I wanted to be, gathered from the dead of a generation whose belongings were being disposed of in scout halls. I felt the texture of the past, recycling history that had never happened to me, looking forward to a foreshortened future. I lived in another time, another place. I don’t suppose it occurred to me that the national emergency – when the rain failed to fall, reservoirs dried up, fires raged over heaths and crops withered – was a sign of things to come. We waited for some change in the weather. Newton’s dry planet was my own. Water had acquired a new meaning, but I had no idea. I couldn’t swim.

  At the beginning of the year I’d stood on a railway platform dressed in white school shirt, salvaged black evening waistcoat, trousers with satin seams and cracked patent shoes, my hair slicked back and sprayed gold, waiting to be conducted to a pitch-black arena where Kraftwerk’s crackling ‘Radioactivity’ and the brutality of Un Chien Andalou, in which an eye is sliced open with a razor, gave way to the sound of a relentless engine and the sight of the man himself, improbably teleported to an earthly stage, sunken-cheeked, too thin to be contained by the fluorescent cage of striplights thrown around him.

  He’d arrived from Dover in a slam-door train, to be driven from the station in an open-top car like someone to rule us. In a bankrupt, blacked-out country with the power cut off and insurrection threatening, the whiteness of 2001 seemed far away. I felt I had been summoned to his presence, to the future. He was in a new incarnation, a self-portrait seen in a dark glass. There he was, dressed in black and white, a pack of Gitanes in his waistcoat pocket, a Prospero throwing darts in lovers’ eyes as he quoted from The Tempest, singing of the stuff from which dreams are woven; bending sound, dredging the ocean, lost in his circle. I was alone with him in the darkness, overlooking that ocean. The cavernous auditorium in which he performed his apocalyptic cabaret was built as a swimming pool for the 1934 British Empire Games, two years before other games were conducted in another European capital – cities connected by that same railway, that same past and future, that same deathly glamour. I had no idea that his opening song was inspired not by trains but by the Stations of the Cross; although I always noticed the two crucifixes around his neck.

  We were separated by the sea: the Pacific he overlooked from his room and the Atlantic he crossed in white liners; New York and California, Hockney’s pools and Max’s Kansas City; white boys in peg-top trousers and dyed hair and chic black girls with peroxide crops. Stranded on a south-coast estuary, mine was a world of wood-trimmed trains and slow-moving cars and suburban streets which still seemed to operate under the shadow of rationing. He gave me a dark glittering world, his monochrome figure held against the moonlight, mime-walking as if caught in a loop, marking time. We’d come from the same place; I was physically like him; yet in that flashlit year of transition he had been transformed anew, by the same alchemical process which had burned his hair.

  Gods require us to believe in them; they wouldn’t exist otherwise. Seeing him in the flesh was as disconcerting as the killer whale in a suburban pool. I needed to close that distance. I wanted to feel the high collar of his white shirt against my neck; the tailoring of his waistcoat around my ribs; to look normal, like him, and yet utterly different, like him. I came out that evening carrying the tour programme, ISOLAR, a cross between a newspaper and a secret manual, its cover with his back turned on us like a priest. I looked for every coded detail in its pin-ups set alongside inexplicable radioactive images of his forefinger and a crucifix and a photograph of him in dark clothes daubed in diagonal stripes of white paint from his slash-necked top to his rolled-up trousers (taken in at the waist to fit his shrunken frame) down to his socks. He stands straight, arms by his side, looking to the horizon, disturbing it like a dazzle ship, moving in and out of register like a mistuned television. Even in yellowing newsprint he’s still performing, stripped down to a DIY aesthetic, as if he was a teenager like me, dressing up in front of his bedroom mirror.

  And as my first year of adulthood began with witnessing him on stage, it ended with seeing him on film, more remote as he became more intimate. In the sex scenes, his hairless body is both elegant and awkward; he appears hermaphroditic, both animal and disembodied, as if his lower half had always belonged to a dog or a deer. His pale face was his fate, and mine.

  Now living by the lake where he first appeared, Newton comes to Bryce one evening, appearing at the end of a jetty: an ashen, hooded doppelganger in a duffel coat, looming out of the darkness like a ghostly monk.

  ‘Don’t be suspicious, Dr Bryce,’ he says, before disappearing back into the night.

  In the chapter in Tevis’s book which inspired this scene, Bryce walks around the lake towards his employer’s house, a white nineteenth-century clapboard mansion, and stops to stare at the water. ‘He felt momentarily like Henry Thoreau, and smiled at himself for the feeling. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Bryce sees Newton walking towards him, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and grey slacks. As he draws steadily nearer, the alien’s otherness is made manifest. ‘There was an indefinable strangeness about his way of walking, a quality that reminded Bryce of the first homosexual he had ever seen, back when he had been too young to know what a homosexual was. Newton did not walk like that; but then he walked like no one else; light and heavy at the same time.’ He seems to move as if through water.

  The two men sit and drink wine. Bryce wonders whether Newton is from Mars or Massachusetts, and he thinks of the migration of birds, ‘following old, old pathways to ancient homes and new deaths’. He’s worried that the spaceship he is helping Newton construct may be a weapon. Newton asks Bryce if nuclear war, which caused his own planet’s devastation, is imminent (Tevis’s book was published in 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis). All the while, as the film makes clear, dark forces are marshalling against the stranger in a country once settled by visitors but which now sees them as a threat. ‘This is modern America,’ they murmur, ‘and we’re going to keep it that way.’

  Bryce returns to his house drunk, and peers at a reproduction of The Fall of Icarus on his kitchen wall (Sylvia Plath had the same picture hanging in her apartment). He sees ‘the sky-fallen boy’ who ‘burned and drowned’, and wonders if Daedalus’ invention was where it all went wrong. In the film, Newton stands by a blue light on his jetty overlooking the lake, his incandescent locks and pale profile held against the water, later to reappear on another nuclear-orange cover. He’s an Ishmael or a Gatsby, sensitised to psychic disturbances in the way that Scott Fitzgerald’s mysteriously wealthy anti-hero is ‘related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away’.

  And in a sequence which plays and replays over and over in my head, Newton is being driven through the backwoods when he sees a group of early settlers in sepia, as if his vision had become doglike, as if he were seeing through a filmy continuum. He looks out; they look back, amazed to see, not a boy falling from the sky, but a car driving past. And we see it all in the way we see scenes from a train, as Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again’.

  ‘I’m not a scientist,’ Newton tells Bryce. ‘But I know all things begin and end in eternity.’ It was another reference, as Roeg would reveal, to William Blake, who saw angelic figures walking among the haymakers in Peckham Rye and trees filled with angels as if caught in the branches, and wrote, ‘Eternity exists, and all things in eternity Independent of Creation which was an act of Mercy.’ An
d I think of Blake’s image of another Newton: the alchemist-scientist sitting at the bottom of the sea, futilely measuring out infinity. Centuries before – although it might have been hundreds of years ahead – another magician, Prospero, asked Miranda, ‘What seest thou else | In the dark backward and abysm of time?’ That year, recording in a French château, the star asked his producer what a particular piece of studio hardware was for. He was told, ‘It fucks with the fabric of time.’

  He scared and excited me. I wanted to be him, not to have him. He represented freedom and danger. He was absolute artifice, but utterly feral too: nothing could be so exciting or so challenging. He had only to walk into an Amsterdam hotel to appear completely otherworldly; wherever he appeared, he was the focus of disruption, a disturbance in the ether. He was my dark star. He had summoned me to the city. A year which began for me watching the television in the suburbs – the same screen through which I first saw him, posturing as a corrupt, tinselled Nijinsky, pawing at his guitarist like some predatory animal – ended in my descent into a real nightclub. I slammed the train door and crossed the river, a brown god by day, a black serpent by night, and walked down a dark street surrounded by empty-eyed warehouses to stand in a queue where a boy in a biker jacket with spiky bleached hair asked me for a light.

  As the flame sparked in his face he became another Ariel. We were children of a man stealing time who told us that nothing could help us and who, having visited an oceanarium, as his friend dimly recalls, wished he could swim like a dolphin, like the dolphin he would have tattooed on his skin.

  When Songs of the Humpback Whale was released, some people believed they were listening to the voices of aliens. In Walter Tevis’s novel, the description of the recording of Newton reading his poetry in Anthean might as well be an account of whale song, ‘sad, liquid, long-vowelled, rising and falling strangely in pitch, completely unintelligible’. In the book, Newton – who, it is now clear, came to rescue humanity from nuclear and environmental destruction – is blinded by the inept scientific examinations of the authorities, ‘certainly not the first means of possible salvation to get the official treatment’. The alien admits to being afraid of ‘this monstrous, beautiful, terrifying planet with all its strange creatures and its abundant water, and all of its human people’. In the film, Newton is released by the mysterious agency from his apartment-prison, with its rococo wallpaper depicting those same uncanny beasts. In the last scene, set in some future Christmas, we see him – his herringbone coat over his shoulders, his burnt-out eyes shielded by sunglasses, his flaming hair held under a fedora like the ghost of Christmas past and yet to come – drinking in an outdoor bar.