I don’t try to compare the Olympic experience in Beijing directly with what is happening in Lea Valley. But it’s a general problem of the world, this commercial use of landscape. I witnessed the destruction of history in Beijing. History and classical Chinese culture have been totally covered over and destroyed by so-called globalization, by ugly buildings. That is a new way to cut our memories, to root them out.
Lea Valley is being destroyed all the time. It is always being destroyed: by old industries, football grounds. They transform everything. The authorities have tried their best to convert the marshland, the original view, to a more commercial use.
As poets, we know that we have become important. Only by our deep experience, our studies, can we keep the soul of the landscape. We can remember the original creative power we gain from the land. I am now a British citizen, but, when my stranger’s eyes look on Lea Valley, I recognize how rich are the links between the depths of the local and my experience of other places. I deeply hope the London Olympics are not only for commercial gain, but for the discovery of this other spirit. The invisible link between this land and mine.
The key word, not only for Lea Valley, but all other matters, is awareness. Poetry is the best way to show understanding and awareness. Lea Valley must be a base of spirit, not only a base of sport. The government and the commercial bodies don’t know that vision or have that understanding. They think of Lea Valley as a place of nothing. They don’t have a vision of real development, the development of the mind. They only see more buildings. We, the poets, need to tell them, or at least to write down, that awareness is our poetry. I hope to suggest that Hackney does something based around the fact that there are so many writers in Lea Valley. The council should think about Lea Valley and literature. Festivals are the real Olympics, the Olympics of the spirit.
When I walk in London, I love those so-called canals. They’re beautiful. London is pretty low-lying, a lot of marshland. Chelsea was originally marshland. Now of course it has the most expensive buildings. Luckily, we have a small piece of marshland that has been left, here in Hackney. When I walk through these marshes it is hard to believe I am almost in the centre of London. It is both wild and alive. It reminds me of the wild geese, crying as they cross the sky. In Chinese characters the flying shape is exactly the character for ‘human’. It is the sign or symbol for ‘homesickness’.
In Lea Valley context, this homesickness is not only for China, but for man. For the original life of the land. Those wild geese remind me of this, otherwise I would be cut off. If we lose awareness, we can become so poor, so boring.
Beijing has changed more in the last thirty years than in the previous thousand. It’s a huge change. Remembering Communist times, the Cultural Revolution, when people were living in extremely poor conditions, I’m not totally against that. You find that the classical will almost always be destroyed. The serious culture, the intellectual culture, is very different today. All those changes, including the introduction of a measure of democracy, are important. I’m happy to see people talking about democracy and not just mouthing hollow slogans.
For the last fifty years, or even more, what happened in China was a kind of disaster. Based on unawareness. Based on huge emotion: all the way back to the Opium War, Japanese War, Civil War. The Chinese people have not undertaken a clear introspection. They have not built up a good understanding of their own cultural traditions. Therefore, they don’t know what were the good things in that tradition. For quite a long time they tried to abandon everything. But no one can abandon a tradition, since the language is inside the people. Tradition controlled everyone. Secretly, subconsciously, we were unaware. The young men, idealists, found themselves joining the power game and ending up as bigger or smaller dictators.
That’s why we have a place now called China. A place that I totally refuse to recognize as the classical China. I always say that contemporary China is hanging between two cliffs. The classical is one cliff, the Western or international world is the other. We have to make, in a good way, a bridge. A bridge which is creative and transcendent. But which, in its bad way, is so shallow and so rude.
London has always been a base for exchange between the very high culture of China and England. You tell me that Arthur Waley loved the River Lea? Lea Valley has a link with classical Chinese landscape. The water, the waves: it has a classical Chinese melancholy beauty. I’m totally not surprised by Waley’s love for this place. The moon in the river. Huge clouds. The skies are so dramatic.
So, to come back to where we start: human beings are always inspired by nature and the discovery of nature in themselves. You have a link between man and his discovery of nature and roots in locality. Then you find you have a link with all great classical poets in all languages: Goethe, Homer, Dante, Li Po, Du Fu. Everyone. This is the key: we translate everyone into ourselves.
If we think of the new Olympic structures in Lea Valley as being like Beijing, we should understand that in China the Games were run as a dictatorship toy. A part of the propaganda of Communism. The apparent links between the two Olympics are so shameful. It would be shameful for London to think that the Olympics would only be done for commercial reasons.
The only deep energy that happens inside these epochal cultural transformations, in China and in Britain too, is the poetry or the eyes of poetry. Then we could say, there is a link, and a very great link.
The landscape is inspiration, I think. The external landscape is an inspiration in front of our eyes. But, finally, poetry builds up the inner landscape, inside our hearts and minds. Inner knowledge also includes all the spiritual understanding in the idea of forms and in discovery of landscape. This is what brought the human soul to connect with the Olympics in Greece. The transformation of external landscape into inner landscape, that is the power of spirit. I don’t know how, but if somebody can see this point, then anything is possible.
We must do our own projects, not only for an audience but for ourselves: deep discoveries, between poets, and therefore between two languages, two cultures. Image by image, sentence by sentence, inside of the form. We don’t understand the language of the other – but our understanding through poetry, like bolts of lightning, leads us forward. We see how language moves, and that is such a beautiful experience. Both languages are so interesting.
The deep dialogue between Chinese and English is like a dialogue between time and space. The Chinese language has been transformed from 3,000 years ago until today. And the transformation, good and bad, is proved by thousands of great masterpieces. There must be something unique inside that language.
The English language is the language which covers the biggest space in the world. Very different colours to the same language. How to judge the poetry? This was the real meeting point between China and England. Real discussions about what is the meaning of global, what is the meaning of a cultural exchange today. I come back to the idea of the international within the local. That has to be the dialogue, between the depth of the different roots. We can have a real internationalism, not just a commercial level of internationalism, causing us to fall into emptiness. Which would be a great pity and a disaster.
Lian’s loved and recognized reed beds, the Walthamstow Marshes, acted as a reflective mirror between his own flat, with its accumulation of memory-objects, and the home, on the far side of the river, of one of his translators, Pascale Petit. They would meet and discuss the progress of the work in a borderland café. ‘To Lian’s eyes,’ Petit said, ‘the café walls are banded Mesozoic rock where Li Bai and Du Fu’s shadows pass, each drunk on their own solitude.’
This is the loss we fear most: the contemplative solitude of the water margin, its accumulation of voices. Rivers and canals are stitched into our sides, changing and not changing, showing the rays of the rising sun and the transit of clouds. I came to Hackney by tracking the towpath out of Camden to the mysterious expanse of Victoria Park. I made my compromises with the life of the place by establishing a way o
ut, up the Lea Valley: which was scarred, revived, inscribed along every inch of its urban-pastoral beauty. The Lea solaced Izaak Walton, Arthur Waley and, in our own time, the photographer Stephen Gill. The explanations of its power are always different. Whether it offers a willow-shaded fishing spot or edge-of-city grounds for wandering and cycling, the attraction lies in its accessible obscurity. The knowledge that nothing is explained or morally improving, overwhelmed by great publics schemes.
Water is memory. Erasure, inspiration. Without these canals, navigations, buried streams, the urban narrative clogs and chokes. If the Lea Valley were lost, I would walk away. There are other rivers, other stories. In which, like Yang Lian, to swim blind, to search for myself.
An afterthought troubled me. When the police who raided the flat in Stoke Newington wrote up their notes, how did they know how to spell Anna Mendelssohn’s fictive surname, Pye? It might have been Pie. I remembered, quite fondly, a cartoon strip in a Dublin evening newspaper which we used to read as students, the adventures of a certain Professor Pi. This bumbling eccentric had a fondness for afternoon cinemas and his mythology was soon confused with that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was much discussed in pubs and even sampled as text by a few show-offs. Wittgenstein was one of us, he had an Irish period.
There was also the Hitchcock connection, another enthusiasm of the Dublin years. The politics of the great-bellied Buddha director were even more dubious than my own. They were a politics of control, a benevolent dictatorship of German-inspired taste, obsessive preparation, malign fate: he recognized the bomb that went off in a bus in Sabotage, his reworking of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, as a technical flaw, a sin against the laws of suspense. The boilerplated head of Hitchcock in the interior courtyard of the flats built on the site of the Gainsborough Studios gave him the look of Chairman Mao, an enigmatic master-dictator with absolute command of the laws of space and time. And an assembly line of robotic ice-maidens available to perform at his whim.
Politically, Topaz in 1969 was the nadir: a film that might have been produced by the CIA, an anti-Castro folly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Torn Curtain, out of its time, playing on stereotypes and prettily fraudulent backdrops, in an East Germany out of Hitchcock’s pre-war espionage thriller period, was more appealing. The good Germans around Leipzig belong to an underground organization dedicated to passing scientific information, about bigger and better bombs, to American agents. They have a symbol that they sometimes scratch in the dirt: the sixteenth letter in the Greek alphabet, the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi. A symbol with the resonance of a Chinese character painted on a scroll. A shape that reminded me of the mushroom-hats of the Hasidic men in the rain.
Anna Mendelssohn’s final booklet consisted of twenty-seven acrostic pieces based on the word ‘poetry’. Its title was Py.
Privateland
Crisis
The identity-dissolving spread of water shimmers and shifts, its channels clearly demarcated, favoured by birds I fail to recognize: it covers the world. There is no solid ground left in my dreaming. Close to where the shore must once have been, oil-fed cormorants skulk on rotting wooden tripods, made from the ribs of sunken ships. Sea swallows river.
London has been, and will again be, obliterated; its vanity, its pride. Crocodile-dissidents, myself included, take pleasure in the Old Testament finality of eco-disaster: woe, woe. Disaster for who exactly? Not ecology. Ecology is indifferent. Ecology is pragmatic. The creaking and crumbling of icebergs, the melting of the polar caps, the opening of the mythical northwest passage, all of this is good news for doomsday professionals: the failed presidential candidates with their blockbuster movies, the corporate entities funding good works while despoiling the planet. And the usual reflex artists rounded up to sign petitions, mournfully accepting air-mile gigs in endangered places. Queue here to book passage on the latest ship of fools heading for Greenland to respond to the obvious with inflated metaphors.
During my brief interlude as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute, after Chobham Farm and other industrial episodes in the marginal lands, I found myself returning, obsessively, to the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. I was on borrowed time, a married man with a young daughter, no prospects, no funds. And about enough proficiency in French to follow a rugby report in a sports tabloid, or to nod over subtitles in a Godard movie. My immersion, by slide show, in Cézanne and the contentious beginnings of cubism, was racing towards banishment, tactical withdrawal. In another life, I could have spent a fruitful year with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. They were excellent company, those bone-carved ladies of the south. A chorus of voices, parrot-shrill or Gitane-husky, I could never begin to translate. The African masks, the brothel setting, the fierce distortions: they were the cover story for my trips to the ethnographic museum. The galleries were cool and quiet, little-visited. The morality of storing and displaying tribal fetishes, shamanistic drums, carved tusks, grave goods, didn’t trouble me, not then. They were an important element in my London mythology. They were so nakedly themselves: a goad towards the kind of poetry I wanted to write.
Walking through these dimmed rooms, I thought about how cubism affected my reading of the labyrinth of Whitechapel streets; how crimes splintered, beginning everywhere at once, unresolved, re-enacted by those who could not break their compulsion to reach the last page. To see the past as an ongoing conspiracy. Yang Lian described the Lea Valley in a present tense that included both traditional forms and future imaginings: all one, earth, water, cloud, held within the envelope of his physical being. Starting with the sound of my footsteps on the polished floor, the inspection of Peruvian pottery, jugs like the ones my great-grandfather brought back to Scotland, I projected rafts of work for the years ahead. I would try to break London down into scraps of forgotten books, postcards, accidental discoveries – and, above all these, unreadable and overwhelming, the fact of the Thames. Skin without body. Body without skin. The dark passage: out.
It hurt, coming back, to find the museum cancelled, captured: an annexe of the Royal Academy. The pharmaceutical giants, Glaxo-SmithKline, were sponsoring a show entitled ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’. In keeping with the Anish Kapoor event, on the other side of the Burlington Arcade, this eco-extravaganza focused on the rude colonization of a classically proportioned public space. Kapoor’s paint guns and trundling clay-block railways exorcized any lingering piety left in these solemn, high-ceilinged chambers, with their dainty cornices and established hierarchies of value. Meanwhile, in the former Museum of Mankind, glass-fronted cabinets were exposed in their nakedness, like political prisoners awaiting interrogation. The death-of-the-planet message was visible in expensive HD panels, or minimalist interventions published on an epic scale. Where there was truth, there was poetry, free of dogma and relatively unpolluted by patronage: Cornelia Parker’s hanging, fire-blackened forest, conceived as a response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (by way of the chemically defoliated jungles of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). Tacita Dean, a favourite of J. G. Ballard, exhibited blow-ups of Slavic disaster postcards with handwritten director’s notes. Downbeat endings, she revealed, were contrived by Danish film-makers, for export to Russia; Europe and America preferred a lover’s embrace, a smiling child.
The piece that hit me hardest hung like a vertical river, a thin waterfall, a scratchy torrent of pulsing light. A strip of film playing without camera or projector, self-exposed, on a loop which never returns to its starting point. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, operating as Semiconductor, composed Black Rain: ‘from raw visual data recorded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a pair of satellites that track interplanetary solar winds and coronal mass ejections heading towards Earth.’ You need to be that far out to get the picture. Privileged bleating doesn’t mitigate original sin. The ultimate condition of everything is river: light, mass, form. Torrents of cosmic dust and the post-
human shrieks of all sounds since the dawn of time rushing backwards into a forgotten echo. Successive ice ages are coded blips on the surge of a crystal-particle tide.
The formal columns of the pseudo-classical building cannot support this troubled energy field. Overcoated figures, shaking off the rain, step into the darkened room, pause contemplatively, before moving on, up the stairs, to where Antony Gormley is giving an interview about his Amazonian Field for a British Council website. And where Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are explaining why they brought home 700 acorns from Joseph Beuys’s oak plantation in Kessel: only for 400 saplings to wither and die. Or be devoured by English squirrels.
Poets, long before the days of drug-company patronage, researched, debated and confronted the anguish of the planet. In the summer of 1967, at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, the Cambridge anthropologist Gregory Bateson spoke about melting polar ice caps. The listening poets fell on the metaphor. ‘The end of the world?’ said Allen Ginsberg, ‘I’m worried about my windows in New York. Peter Orlovsky’s sanity. He flipped out and they put him in Bellevue.’ Twelve years earlier, in October 1955, Ginsberg launched ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery, a converted auto-repair shop in San Francisco. ‘ Howl’ is apocalypse, self-evidently; a long-breath chant intoxicated by entropy, dying cities with hard-cocked messenger angels, state madhouses and Russian endings that don’t end. The ecstatic repetitions, the biblical groans and sticky clusters, carry the poet down to the black water where all human narratives dissolve. ‘Shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open’.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 17