Cryography

Well, a happy arbitrary point dividing two periods approximately corresponding to orbits of the Earth about the sun to all my readers, and I trust you all enjoyed yourselves in the appropriate, or at least appropriately inappropriate, manner. I returned from Skye on the second, to my treasured city; wife's loving arms; restless and neglected cat; white shirt turned lavender by careless lavendry, that is, ruined in the wash; two chapters of a book still to edit; and a postcard S. kindly sent me from Varanasi, bearing on it a rather painterly photograph of two riverside crematoria. On the drive home—eleven hours in the back seat of a car, followed by three and a half on a bus—I struggled to read Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, a book aiming for Oulipian wit and playfulness, and perhaps for a fragmentary approach to encyclopaedism, à la Perec, but in fact monumentally boring, mired in the enumeration of banal detail, à la Robbe-Grillet. My last creative act at the cottage in Skye was a stoking of the hearth fire, a process of fadging, progging, scraping, jiggling, variably-sized lumps of coal, sticks of wood, and firelighters, without burning my hands, though leaving my fingers black enough to require two bouts with the sink and soap. On December 31, as our cellphones beeped midnight, in the black wastes of the countryside, under constellations bright and enormous, a celestial scurf—not unknown to the Londoner, but at least utterly unfamiliar—we experimented with fireworks. What with the pyres, the Roubaud, the hearth, the rockets, one might think the dominant motif of the holiday was fire. But it was not.


It was the ice. O, the most marvelous ice you did see, friends. White and dark, in frost and hoar, on rocks and grasses, in tendrils and stars, razor-straight and sinuous, anfractuous, fragile tendons and crude unbreakable masses, whole and fragmentary: the ice of royal treasuries.


On the third day, after following the tourists up to the ruined Duntulm Castle on the northwest coast of Trotternish, and before joining the tourists again at the Kilt Rock waterfall, we drumbled upon a little lake secluded by low mountains and frozen over: it was not enough to walk on, and the sheets of ice were broken up at the shore (above), and littered with discarded wheels and engine parts, moulded and solidified into the surface. We cast rocks against and along the ice, and made the most remarkable sounds thereby, like pinball, or space invaders:

Early on in the trip we discovered the icicles hanging under a ridge by the road, hundreds of them, and, like FfRS, began to experiment with force and resistance, carving ice with rock, calving ice with ice. Eventually two of our number broke off specimens large enough to fence with. Gloves doffed, I took pictures as long as I could manage before my hands went numb and started to burn. It was so cold you could have pissed snow. At the end of our session the ridge resembled Shane MacGowan's mouth, and we sped off, the violence of youth expended harmlessly on Nature's most transient objects.

On the journey home we paused in the car on the mountains just above the clouds of mist obscuring a loch beneath, a floor of vapours burning spectrally in the naked sun. Then we drove down into the haze, through the forest at Achadhluachraich, all grey five metres from your face, and clambered down the slope on foot, to the lake, a ringed and perfect carpet of ice in three shades. (Fifth picture, above.) Alas, the surface was still too frail to walk upon, but we skimmed stones again, and watched them vanish, imperceptibly, from one grey into another, the ice into the water, or simply into the mist. Further still, out of the basin, in the highlands near Fort William, we found another frozen loch, and this one—finally—was deep and thick enough, several inches, at least at the lines of fracture between plates, to tread safely. On this we walked and slid out to the islands, and played with shadows in the clearer ice, and the sky was empty, a cold blue, and the car seemed a hundred miles away, and the dreadful voyage impending, forgotten; it was our last call of freedom, as our collective friendship, fissuring underneath, had begun to show its lines of stress at the surface, little kingdoms delineated translucently: unaided by sun or stamping feet above, we moved apart of our own accord.

And onward, into year four of the Varieties.

The Place's Name

Dullest of days, most brutally grey and dark and overcast. The rain relents, and then lents again. I take the opportunity for a walk in north London, to Highbury, to find, if I can, or even if not, the home of a childhood friend—long past, say twenty years—the interior of which I remember with apparent exactness, down to the sculpture on the kitchen table, of a carton pouring milk into a bowl: real bowl, real carton, disc and frozen column of milk in plaster. I remembered it to be near a park or green; I remembered the green to be immense, and rather fantastical. But when I arrived in Highbury Fields, I discovered the green to be rather small, though admittedly picturesque in its autumnal finery. The disappointment of age: a tableau.


It was still raining when I found the house, or what might have been, and so I continued my interrogation of the area. Highbury, it seems, is a place of architecture beset by vegetation. A dull block in the private enclave of Aberdeen Park, just to the east, is vandalised by a rather aggressive and brightly-fledged gang of creepers:


A nearby wall, meanwhile, has been shamelessly defaced by some reckless local greenfinger, tired of small canvases:


Just across the street from here is one Baalbec Road, the sudden apparition of whose name is so extraordinary to me that I am compelled to reproduce the signage as documentary evidence:


The street itself is very fine, a series of variations in terracotta and brick, each a slight shade different from the last, nothing supercelestial, but beautifully proportioned. 'Here is a raucous Cockney answer to the Georgian good manners of the [Highbury] Fields,' writes Simon Jenkins: 'an 1880s essay in what a firm chisel could do with red bricks, terracotta and a builder's pattern book. The small houses are covered in carved leaves, swags, dentils, every conceivable stylistic gimmick.' I can enjoy the description of a street as an 'essay': let us literarify our built environment, and let us do it without blue plaques. Jenkins adds, inexplicably: 'This is the London which tourists will want to see in a hundred years' time.'

The terracotta stone in the centre of this wall bears the letters 'AD', to match another bearing the date, 1889. But look at the stone: is its monogram not almost the same as that forming the signature of Albrecht Dürer?

The street is fine, but what of the name? Baalbec? The ancient city of Syria, now Lebanon, was built over centuries under the Roman yoke, and long considered the great ruin of the Near East—so great, in fact, that it was reputed to have been built by Solomon himself. After all, I Kings 9.17-18 tells us, 'Solomon built Gezer, and Bethhoron the nether, / And Baalath, and Tadmor in the wilderness, in the land'. Tadmor, we know, is Palmyra, which was usually twinned with Baalbek—and the name was, for some, too close to Baalath for chance. (Even as late as 1964 we find the identification accepted, by Ruth Nagle Watkins in an article on Baalbek for Art Journal.) Furthermore, Solomon invoked demons to lift and arrange the cyclopaean stones used in the city's temples. Thus in the 1425 History of Timur by Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi, we read:

This town is very famous, as well for the beauty of the walls, as for the height of its buildings; and it is believed to have been built by Solomon's order, by daemons and genii, over whom he had an absolute command.

This sort of folklore was soon common currency among the explorers of later centuries. When John Ray visited in the late seventeenth century, he described the same huge stones as Sharafuddin, noting one in particular that measured 66 feet long (28 cubits in the History). Daniel Fenning, who, in his New System of Geography (1778), calls Baalbek 'the boldest plan that appears to have been ever attempted in architecture', notes also that 'All the inhabitants of this country, both Christians, Jews, and Mahometans, confidently maintain, that both Balbec and Palmyra were built by Solomon.' A slightly later article in The Britannic Magazine labels the site ruins 'some of the most beautiful and best preserved of any in Asia', and remarks:

By what means could the ancients remove these enormous masses? This is doubtless a problem in mechanics difficult to resolve. The inhabitants of Balbec, however, have a very easy manner of explaining it, by supposing these edifices to have been constructed by djenoun, or genii, who obeyed the orders of King Solomon; adding, that the motives of such immense works was to conceal in subterraneous caverns vast treasures, which still remain there.

In good Enlightenment fashion, the moral is spelled out:

All tradition relative to high antiquity is as false among the Orientals as the Europeans. With them, as with us, facts which happened even 100 years before, when not preserved in writing, are altered, mutilated, or forgotten.

But a more modern use of the name, European rather than Oriental, even though preserved in writing, is shrouded in as great a mystery. It was chosen by Proust to designate an important location in his Recherche, contracted a little for delicate Parisian tastes, as Balbec. Most modern scholars, if not all, identify this with Proust's own beloved Cabourg, on the Normandy coast, although not too far from the resort, just east of Le Havre, is a town called Bolbec. Indeed, in an anonymous English novel of 1796, entitled Elvira; or, the World as it Goes, we find a reference or two to 'Balbec' near Le Havre:
I'm going to leave you in suspense about that head dress. Anyway, Proust's Balbec is just too spicy a comfit for the slavering critics waiting to get their teeth into the myriads of words in the Recherche. Let us listen to some plaintive and poignant voices. Here's David Ellison:

What is this strange split city of Balbec? What happens if we, like the young Marcel, pronounce its syllables and allow them to resonate with associations? Balbec sounds a lot like BAALBEK, the ancient city, now in Lebanon, whose name derives from the god Baal, the Phoenician sun god. The congruence of names is so obvious as to be blinding.

And here's Allan Pasco (truncatedly):

Proust's 'Balbec' comprises several of the interlocking patterns of allusive support. The homonymous Persian city, now in Lebanon, was named after the false god Baal, mentioned in the Bible, and thus joins the two biblical cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, found along the protagonist's way. Brichot, the author's pedantic professor who corrects many of the Curé de Combray's false etymologies, points out that –bec means stream in the Norman dialect. Brichot is not sure about Bal-. He suggests it is a corruption of 'Dalbec'. Proust may have chosen the first syllable of Balbec because of a belief that the Baal of the Persian city Baalbek meant 'sun'. It is also possible that he was aware that Bel- in many French place names derives from the Celtic sun god Belenus. His love of puns attests to an interest in the phonic texture. With this in mind, it is difficult to ignore the associations of the French word bal ('dancing, youth, mating,') and of the ornithological bec ('beak').

The phrasing is remarkable: 'What happens if we pronounce its syllables?', 'it is difficult to ignore the associations of—'. Let's just kick back and muck about with words. After all, Proust did. Is this any different from the practices of mediaevals, who identified Baalbek with Baalath? In a somewhat embarrassed footnote, Pasco winds up ransacking a bunch of dusty German philological lexicons, and tracing bal- to PIE *bhel ('white, shining'), which he can then affix to Albertine, whose name clearly derives from Latin albus, 'white'. (He even quotes the delightful kook Harold Bayley, whose linguistic speculations we last encountered here, also in Islington, and not too far from Baalbec Road.)

Best of all, though, is Marie-Magdeleine Chirol's L'Imaginaire de la Ruine. Nobody can do spiel like the French. After discussing a few references to antiquities in an early description of Balbec from Recherche ('De Balbec surtout, où déjà des hôtels se construisent, superposés au sol antique et charmant qu'ils n'alterènt pas, quel délice d'excursionner à deux pas dans ces régions primitives et si belles!'), she concludes:

One last sign points towards a Norman Balbec that is reminiscent of the ancient Baalbek: the presence 'of hotels' (in the modern sense) which, in an ancient context, may seem displaced, even anachronistic. However, if one should replace hotel with 'Temple-Palais' or with 'palais'—terms which the narrator uses to evoke the Grand-Hotel at Balbec—the desired spatio-temporal link seems to be re-established. The substitution would appear reasonable since, after all, when the narrator talks of the hotel at Balbec, he is surely always referring to the Grand-Hotel.

Here is a voice pleading for acceptance, especially in that last sentence. In all these works is the same exegesis of the world we find among the mediaevals, only made secular, and transferred to a world of words only. The study of literature is, as we have long known, the last refuge of the theologian.

*

But what about Baalbec Road? Why Baalbec? Perhaps in lieu of asking, 'Why was the road called Baalbec?', we might ask, 'What has it done to deserve the name?' Or even, What do we see in the road, and in its environs, that we should not see if it had a different name? Would it smell as sweet?

Baalbek itself, once magnificent, was taken over by nature, and became a ruin. Highbury, as we have seen, is also under threat from its flora, real, painted or carved in terracotta. The name itself becomes that bit more pregnant. Perhaps that is what Jenkins meant about the tourists of a hundred years hence. Before the creation of the road in 1889, London had a single nod to the Baalbek of antiquity. This was in the Temple of the Sun at Kew Gardens, built in 1761, in a Corinthian style inspired by the ornate columns of the ruinated Syrian city. Eighteenth-century letters and notices are full of proud and admiring references to this elegant structure, which has none of the sublimity of the original, preserving only a few flourishes and proportions. In 1916, a tree fell on the temple and it was demolished, not even leaving a ruin. For shame! Still, we have the ruins of Baalbec Road, Highbury. If they are not ruins yet, they contain all the omens of such. The city is like the mind: it never forgets. My old friend's kitchen, with its ridiculous sculpture, is still with me, perhaps altered and mutilated, but not forgotten. I did not want to mention the splendid effusion of autumn in Highbury Fields.

Update: Language Hat on H. W. Bailey, not to be confused with Harold Bayley.

Wer band dich in Schlummer so bang?

Today I went along to a little film-screening, courtesy of Owen Hatherley and his cinematophile chums, as part of an ongoing art exhibition called the Wharf Road Project. The walk from Angel took me through the back streets of Islington, under a precipitate artillery—the ideal landscape of a miserabilist London. I almost walked right past the front door. Inside I was greeted first by a uniformed security guard, then, beamingly, by one of the artists, who invited me to explore the four floors of art. And the four floors were full of the usual rubbish that passes for art today—abstract paintings, video-screens, the distended head of a cat with black gunk oozing from its eyes—the sort one sees shortlisted for the Turner Prize every year. It made no impression on me.

On the second floor two pretty girls were wiping walls and rails. They seemed to be cleaning, but the motions of their hands were so spectral and disembodied, or mechanical, they might have been droids, or apparitions. They evinced no desire to exercise any control upon their surroundings. This did make an impression on me. Perhaps it was a performance piece.

Hand-dryers were located in the corridors outside the toilet cubicles.

In one of the rooms on the third floor I found the films being set up. Another young woman in an attractive brown dress handed me a little pamphlet, bearing essays on the event's theme of apocalypse, clamouring with references to T. S. Eliot and Heidegger, Dasein and diegesis. One of them quotes an article by the Marxist economist Harry Cleaver:

Crises are not to be feared or "solved"; they should rather be embraced and their opportunities explored. We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us. Only those who benefit from these structures should fear such cracks.

Naomi Klein, clearly, disagrees. (Affidavit: this is the first and last reference to Klein that will ever appear on this site.) We sat in the dark silence, some of us, not me, slurping Red Stripe, others munching on chocolate bites. Owen sat in the middle, communicating little to the assembled crowd. We watched a Herzog documentary on a volcano that never erupted, ending rather inappropriately to Siegfried's Trauermusik, and then an odd made-for-TV drama about nuclear apocalypse in Sheffield. The beards and scarves slurped and munched in passive silence; the DVD broke, and they couldn't find a remote; the rain spat a bit outside; the conspirators were quiet but really very pleasant.

*

There is now so much emphasis on the revolutionary. I suppose the contribution of modernism, on which Hatherley has written a book, was to make revolution—aesthetic, and then political—the aim of art. The problem is that revolution runs itself into the ground very quickly. Revolutions in taste happened every year until Duchamp put urinals on display, and then there could be no more. Revolutions in literary technique happened every year until Finnegans Wake, and then writers could only go backwards. The same happened with atonalism, photorealism, brutalism. We are still in the abyss of modernism. Its finest results are all in the past: we cannot best them, and we refuse to be conventional—or rather, to accept the conventional, for there is really nothing more conventional than today's art. By refusing to accept convention we have become hollow, straining for empty revolution, which in artistic terms no longer has any meaning. This was brutally and hilariously clear in the Hirst pre-auction show I attended last month out of pure idle curiosity, a fadged-up array of sheikhly gewgaws entirely lacking in talent, ideas, beauty, originality, even shock for Christ's sake—but whose contents went on to fetch £111m.

Up the road from the gallery, on the south side of Noel Road, the interwar Hanover Primary School is heavy and powerful in the drizzle. An architecture that lumbers and speaks, grey and dark. The sky, too, is grey and dark, and the canal. I walk the mile to the Barbican. London can be so flat, so unremitting, lacking in love and romance, so unrevolutionary—and it is magnificent.

Lutus Lutetiae

Squit, squit, squit, all weekend. Ten times a day, or more. It was horrible. Must have been something I ate—bad salmon or prawns, maybe. At least I could read as I squote, a small consolation. Other consolations were denied me. Normally in this condition, one's cul is easily torché, so wet and dilute is the dung. But this time—oh! I had a rich macerate umber paint with every swab. This morning the smell of a regular session was enough to put me off my imminent pain au chocolat. My arse, in fact, was itself like a huge pain au chocolat, after a minute in the microwave. (Georges Perec taught Harry Mathews the expression, avoir le pain d'épice au bord des lèvres.) I clench; I suffer.

Dali, in his Passions, which I purchased last week at a bouquiniste opposite the Île de la Cité—a worthy addition to my burgeoning collection of Daliana—tells the story of the Caca Dauphin. 'In the presence of dignitaries and the best artists of the realm, the divine child freed his bowels. There were collected coppers, ochres, greens, browns, and the Court was clothed in the colours of the Dauphin-poop. I know nothing at once more traditional and more subversive, nothing more legitimate and more scandalous, nothing more nobly alive.' Dali, of course, loves shit, scybales, sir-reverence, ordure. And he adores the thick palette of Moreau (detail, right): 'Gustave Moreau, the most glorious of erotic and scatalogical painters, pursued only one aim, but that fanatically: to make gold appear at the end of his brush. It is with excremental colours, ochres, burnt umbers, that a good artist succeeds in suggesting the matter of gold. Gold, as with Moreau, is born of the shadows, of the abysses of dark matter, and this is why our civilization, lacking grandeur, is that of fresh, gay colours—that is to say, inhuman and indivine. See America.' Moreau's hues are, as Dali puts it, antibonbons.

I did not visit the Musée Moreau. I meant to. But I wound up beat from all the skiting. I barely got to the Louvre without passing out from the sun and the din of tourists not even trying to parlay frongsay. But I did get to the Louvre. It was a necessity. Unfortunately I was really only there to see the Italian Renaissance, and that meant wading through all the run-off from the Gioconda. It was all creaking floorboards and Ah, Botticelli! Oh, Giotto! More interested in the name-plates than the paintings. March swiftly through the Tuscan Trecento—'don't like this stuff'—Raphael, check; Titian, check. Snap snap snap at the Veronese Cana. Peer appreciatively at the speck of the Leonardo. 'It's a self-portrait, you know.' For some reason they didn't want to flow out the back of the room to see the Ingres Roger and the rest of the famous French rubbish. So I was stuck with them.

Clearly, the Trecento was the room for the Moreauiste. The Trecento is the excremental century par excellence, with its defecund gold and ochre, the superb and unromantic brutality of its figuration. Who can fail to enjoy the Master of the Rebel Angels with his tumbling nasties—


What image could be more stercorine? Let us allegorize the fall of Lucifer and his infernal host as an expulsion of congurgitated matter from the white celestial vaults of the buttocks. Likewise, we discover Christ recast as a dung-beetle, with a stylised carapace for a chest, wrapped in a torchecul, and mounted on iconic gold, a classic Catholic gilt complex:


Dali says of Catalonia: 'The passion of God, of gold, and an erotics of non-consummation go together in the mystical soul of my country.' But it is not only Catalonia, as this Tuscan crucifix testifies. No wonder all the American tourists, accustomed to their deodorised, puritanical pastels and primaries, fresh and gay, walk right past this stuff, their glazed bored eyes hiding an unconscious dread. The Trecento room also contains Quattrocento primitives, including a very fine little Sano di Pietro predella with a St. Jerome comic-strip.


We are in the same world as the St. Anthony I wrote about here: a St. Anthony tempted by gold, mysteriously vanished, or metamorphosed into the brown landscape. Here Jerome has cast off his cardinal's hat, to reveal the aureate radiance of a halo, among trees studded with gold; his excrement has been transformed into vipers and scorpions. The vermilion towns sketched in each top corner are gorgeously charming, aren't they?

*

Oh, enough of shit. I've had enough, believe me. My wife, as always so pharmaceutically astute, has just given me a couple of Imodium tablets, chewable, mint-flavoured, and literally nauseating. I don't think they have taken effect yet. I continue to suffer.

Strangely, there are some marvelous paintings in the Louvre of a wholly inexcremental nature. In the long corridor of Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento proper, it is Mantegna who really holds my interest, as he generally does. For instance, look at his astonishing treatment of marble as a decorative element in the magnificent Virgin of Victory (1496):


And contrast this, in terms of technical skill, to the treatment of marble by an earlier generation, for instance Castagno's very fine Last Supper of 1447:


In 1497-1505, Isabella d'Este commissioned a number of matching works for her first studiolo in the Castello di San Giorgio; Mantegna painted the first two, Perugino the third, and Lorenzo Costa the last two. Mantegna, again, creams the competition. In my post on Quattrocento painting, I showed a mysterious cipher-text from a 1453 manuscript attributed to Mantegna; and here, fifty years later, the old bastard is at it again. A long scroll is entwined around a dryad-like figure to the far left: the topmost involution has some Latin, but below it are two visible faces containing nonsense-scripts of a Voynich variety, the second rather resembling (but not, in fact, being, at least not entirely) square Hebrew forms.



This thrill of obscurity recurs on the Paris streets, in a very rare moment of mystery. Just south of the Seine, at the entrance to the Jussieu campus, currently under re-construction, one finds high thin twin walls of graffiti, or possibly art of a strange urban sort, utterly illegible and incomprehensible:


Greg Afinogenov, a jolly nice chap and fellow blogger whom I met over beer near the Bastille last week, thinks Paris a dead city, replete with bobos and lacking all remnants of authenticity. I am inclined to agree. The city fills me with a slight horror, and yet I can't put my finger on quite why. Perhaps it is the visual monotony, or else the surfeit of grand architectural statements begging to be photographed, just like the Gioconda. Paris hardly allows you to find out for yourself. Everywhere is known, or not worth knowing. In London, the most known is also ripe with opportunities for new knowledge. Walk down Tottenham Court Road, looking not at the electronics stores but at the rooftops. At Buckingham Palace, walk around the corner to Lugsmoor Lane and the back streets of Pall Mall. Head north off Oxford Street and stroll down pre-Regency ways still intact. But Paris is without respite: it retains the totalitarian aesthetic of Haussmann. Consequently, its only successes are in the monumental, and for me, only in the modern monumental, or in other words, the monumental not betrayed by endless ornamentation. Thus the crystal city of Les Halles:


Or the oppressive and hieratic interior of the Bibliothèque Nationale (the reason for my visit), which a friend of mine rightly compared to Karnak:


But very little of the quiet succeeds in this city. We read about, and so desire to retrouver for ourselves, the quiet and cloistral streets of Maldoror, of Eugène Sue, of the Surrealists. This is why I took, to read on the train, the Williams translation of Soupault's Last Nights of Paris. But it is no good; and even Soupault is dull in the light of day. Dali writes: 'My entire mental life is made up of the recording of visions, with a view to total orgasmic superposition. There is a stretch of the Rue de Rivoli that I find sublime, from the Hôtel Meurice to the Place Vendôme. And, well, I always make it 'come out' at the last moment.' But I ask you: is this, said stretch now, sublime?—


When I at last return home to my wife, only the second woman to whom I have ever remotely mattered, cut off from telephone or internet contact for six painful days, and two of raw squitting, the relief on both sides is palpable.

Thanum an Dhul

Roth revives! See how he rises!
Roth he rises from the dead,
Says, "Whirl your cava around like blazes"
"Thanum an Dhul, do you thunk I'm dead?"

Rumours of my death have been, well, somewhat exaggerated. I was sleeping is all. Or else off gallivanting with Epistemon amidst among the fallen. And it is has been as busy as a time as ever it will be—moving, disowning, appreciating, divagating, arguing, decorating, slicing and framing, lucubrating, rising early, failing, attending, listening, not hearing, preening, expanding, gorging, sneering, perusing, pontificating, and scribbling, but only sober words, and all without the benefit of this ambivalent sketchpad to console me.

In little Hornsey we manage, just, to replace each drunk bottle with another, gratis, by courtesy of guests, whose magnanimity we carefully gauge and record, by the splendour of the bottle they bring, its age, its size, the grandeur of its name. Now, Mr. Dodson warned me on these very pages that Freixenet would not be suitable for the celebration of my return. Thus, in turn, I admonished our guests not to bring Freixenet, under pain of sanction. For three months gladly have I welcomed visitors bearing various cuvées, a Cristal here, a Dom Pérignon there, and I had saved for some time a particularly fine Pol Roger for this very occasion, when two nights ago a brace of unwanted (though I dare to admit it, invited, albeit by Mrs. Roth) haplodytes descended upon us for dinner, demanding champagne for the birth of their two-bit nipper, and yet bearing with them, the damned cheek of it, not champagne, but only—


— Cava? We drank the Pol Roger. The wine was bitter in my mouth. Mrs. Roth abstained piously. I did not talk much at the table, only eyeing my bouteille diminuant with ever-growing pique. Their bottle, on the other hand, remained wrapped on the far counter. My friends, it is all I have left. I'm afraid, Mr. Dodson, that your only consolation is that it is not, after all, a Freixenet.

Le'chayim, then. Bastards.

*

With each slow stride, so low, the water rises slowly by my side, aswallow. And the flat sidereal rises of the moon looming, illumining, white with weight, tremulous, foaming and shiving in the weight of the vast sea. And from the sea, all ashiver with a vast cold, rising in lines of light, so slow, is the light of bells and spires, a spired city of candles and glasses, so low and so vast, and the colour of treasure, as the skin of my face rises down against the sweep of the skin of the sweep and stave of the sea, and the moon her weight and white eyes are beside me, and her bird is there in my hand to guide me.

I wrote that when I was about seventeen. It was part of a dream-sequence in my starter-novel, The Ark, the drafts of which I occasionally look over with an embarrassed amusement. It wasn't all in this style. But it was parts like these that most interested me at the time. I wanted to write prose aspiring to the condition of poetry—the most flawed of ambitions, and one I now wholly repudiate. Later I wrote a poem, Chalybea, which developed some of the imagery from The Ark, in an entirely different context, and to much better effect. (It has the further advantage of being actually a poem.) I still liked, and indeed still like, underwater cities, and along with them, underwater bells.

Bells. Echoes, from below, from the hollows
of the bowels of the earth, billowing up.

The poem's narrative was punctuated in places by the sound of a 'Flibberty-gibbety bell', wafting over the waves to the action onboard a ship. And towards the end of the story, a precious clock is tossed into the water:

In the end, they dismantled its gears
and threw it back, amid the vitreous chime
of sunlight staggering upon waves.

It is the height of bad manners to discuss one's own work as if it were that of another. I quote these passages simply to illustrate that for whatever reason, I have long associated the sea, and lower regions of the earth, with bells and clocks. Now, when writing both novel and poem, and for a long while after, I had no knowledge of the folklore of underwater bells. The Funk and Wagnall Folklore Dictionary claims that

Bells which have sunk to the bottom of ponds or lakes or have been buried underground (of which every European country traditionally has examples) also ring at solemn times, such as midnight on Christmas Eve. Such bells were generally engulfed as a punishment for some human impiety.

So, for instance, in Gervase of Tilbury's 1215 Otia Imperialia:

In Britain there is a forest, rich in many kinds of game, which looks down on the city of Carlisle. Roughly in the middle of this forest there is a valley surrounded by hills near a public highway. In this valley, I say, every day at seven in the morning a gently-sounding peal of bells [classicum campanarum dulce resonans] is heard; and so the locals have given that lonely place the name of 'Laikibrais' in the Welsh tongue.

I quote the translation of Banks and Binns (2002), though 'Welsh' [Wallico] is a rather tendentious editorial correction of 'French' [Gallico]. R. C. Cox, in his article on Laikibrais (or Laikibrait), mentions, like the Folklore Dictionary, and in very similar language, that 'The tradition of a body of water in which bells are engulfed and yet are heard to peal is a common folklore motif often associated with demonic forces or the punishment of some human impiety.' For Cox, Laikibrait is the 'lake that cries' [Old French lai ki brait], associated with the inundation of church bells at Tarn Wadling, in Inglewood Forest near Carlisle.

This, also, from Georgina Jackson's 1883 book on Shropshire Folk-Lore:

There is a Norfolk legend which brings out the connection between pools, bells, and the Under World very clearly. Tunstall Church in that county having been destroyed by a fire, which yet left the bells uninjured, the parson and churchwardens quarrelled for the possession of them, and meantime the Old Gentleman watched his opportunity and walked off with them. He was, however, found out and pursued by the parson, who began to exercise him in Latin. So in his hurry he made his way through the earth to his own abode taking his booty with him. The spot where he disappeared is now a boggy pool of water called Hell Hole, on the surface of which, in summer-time, bubbles are constantly appearing. These, the folk say, are caused by the continual sinking of the bells through the water on their endless journey to the bottomless pit.

And from Paul Sébillot's 1905 Le Folk-Lore de France, volume 2:

According to the traditions common to many standing bodies of water believed to conceal engulfed towns, the residents hear, at certain times of the year, and almost always on the occasion of great festivals, the sound of bells rising from their depths. It seems that the cities lie beneath the liquid layer, hardly overwhelmed and ruined, but almost in the state they were in at the moment they disappeared. One can even perceive them through the transparency of the waters, as those that the sea has buried; the churches remain at the bottom, and sometimes, just as our bells are singing out to announce Christian rituals, mysterious ringers set in motion the bells of the cursed cities.

and:

At Christmas two bells sound at full volume, under the Mare Rouge at Relans, to announce the midnight hour, and at the same moment can be heard the bells of Radenac (Morbihan) buried in a sort of quagmire, those of the Mare Sonnante at Balaiseaux (Haute-Saône), of the Vieux Bronze, and of the monastery of Fleres, engulfed beneath a lake as a punishment for the monks' impiety: only at this time, occupied with their pious soundings, can the damned obtain some respite from their torments.

Sébillot, like a good philosophe, is happy to provide the rationalist's explanation. He cites the Académicien, Thomas de Saint-Mars, claiming in 1780 that the bells he hears at the waterside are not those of the sunken Herbauge, but rather those of Nantes across the water:

One might add that these carillons are heard above all at two times of the year: between All Saints and Christmas, when the trees, shorn of their leaves, provide no obstacle to the propagation of the sound; and during the calm nights of the summer solstice.

We hear the same themes even in a Joanna Newsom lyric:

In the trough of the waves,
which are pawing like dogs,
pitch we, pale-faced and grave,
as I write in my log.

Then I hear a noise from the hull,
seven days out to sea. . .
and it is that damnable bell.

Newsom has claimed that she found her line about the 'damnable bell', after having penned it, in a fantasy novel (this one?) about the drowned city of Ys, and this accounts also for the title of the record from which this lyric comes: Ys. The story is that the Breton city was flooded and drowned after the king's daughter, Dahut, opened the dam-gates standing as its protection against the sea. Dahut is later transformed into a morverc'h (cf. Irish English merrow) or mermaid. The myth has some similarity, it seems to me, to the Greek legend of Nisus and Scylla. From the 1839 collection of Breton ballads known as the Barzaz Breiz:

Gwelous a ris ar morverc'h venn,
M'hle c'hlevis o kannan zoken
Klemvanus tonn ha kanaouenn.

I saw the wan mermaid,
I recall hearing her song
In the air, the anguish of lament.

The song of Dahut later becomes the peal of bells, lamenting, although the only literary treatment I can find online is a yucky bit of doggerel by the Canadian poet Bliss Carman, 'The Bells of Ys':

Still along that haunted coast men tell us
They can hear at times,
Then the tide is half asleep and musing,
The faint sound of unsubstantial chimes
Ringing through the world's tumultuous day-beat
From enchanted climes.

And they say those peals of fairy music
Are the city's bells,
Drowned long since with all their silver joyance,—
That a deathless rapture in them dwells,
Part forever of the surge of being
As it sinks and swells.

The bells do not have a sound of 'silver joyance' or 'deathless rapture', for the bells are not part of the 'surge of being': the bells of Ys, as of Laikibris, Tunstall, Fleres and Herbauge, are bells of memory and admonition. The chimes are an element left over from an age now lost, kept fast, and warning us not to forget. They remind us that our world is only one world: there is a lower, just as there is a higher. They are a mark of what cannot be assimilated, a Delphic epsilon, or as Freud would have put it, a return of the repressed.

*

Standing on Alexander Binnie's 1897 Hornsey Lane Bridge, or rather on Suicide Bridge, as it is affectionately known, overlooking the A1 in its incarnation as Archway Road, one has the sense, more than anywhere else in London, Greenwich included, of straddling two worlds. This really is one of the most remarkable locations in the city, and one entirely unknown to me until we moved to nearby Hornsey two months ago.


What happens is this: you begin in Crouch End, with Alexandra Palace just peeking up above the shop roofs, and work your way south, up a gentle slope, and with tall trees hanging overhead, past the large church. You turn right onto Hornsey Lane, with the council flats opposite, and further up the large social housing units and older interwar apartment blocks, also on a sizeable scale. The whole way you ascend almost imperceptibly, all the while nestled comfortably in roads of houses, protected: this is upmarket suburbia. Then at last you come to the bridge, you emerge, and all of a sudden, on both sides, you find this:


My American readers will not be remotely surprised by this: it is the sort of thing you see all over that dark continent. But in London it is most unusual. Ours is essentially a flat city, or at most a city of gradual rises. And so to me, this view represents a genuine shock of vertigo.

When I first trudged up this way, on the first sunday of Lent, on my own, in the blazing sunshine of a morning, I heard the chimes of bells wafting their way up to me from below. And there is a little world down there, too. On the bridge are wrought-iron lamp-posts, dolphins. They are the same as those seen on the banks of the Thames, world-renowned. The dolphin, not a fish, is king of the fish; hence his central place on the arms of the Worshipful Company of Fishermongers. He is king of the river. And the Archway Road is a river, too, the rush of its traffic warm and cold and calling as the currents of the Thames himself. So I descend like the celestial visitors at Clonmacnoise. You can make your way down by a snickleway beside the bridge, but I take another path, down a picturesque alley named Tile Kiln Lane, beside the reservoir to the west. I make my way down, and I begin to forget.

*

It is easy to forget when you have something to look at. The church at the bottom of Tile Kiln Lane and around the corner, on Archway Road underlooking the bridge, is quite striking.


It is St Augustine of Canterbury, first built in 1888 and variously rebuilt and retooled thereafter. It lies beneath the water, hardly overwhelmed and ruined, but almost in the state it was in at the moment it disappeared. The church is strangely caught out of time, like some sort of Neo-Gothic pagoda, prefigured by this ornament on the roof of the nearby Rokesly School:


As if to emphasize the timelessness of the place, a carved inscription above the entrance commemorates George Ratcliffe Woodward, who passed away, it says, 'Anno Domini MXCXXXIV'. Now Woodward was born in 1848, and did not live to a ripe old age of -724, which he would have done if he had indeed died in AD 1124, unless of course he had invented time-travel, which really would have put his various musical and apiaristical achievements to shame. What the carver really meant to grave was MCMXXXIV, 1934. But so it goes, and we ironise.


Below the Virgin and Child, between the two doors, we find a melancholy presence. It is either the graver scolding himself for a fudged date, or the very spirit of irony itself, worn out, worn down, tired, bored.

*

The world, she wants you to forget. When you forget, you are hers. And so she offers you cuvées and cigars, television, pop music, and now the internet—that ultimate engine of lotophagose oblivion. But London! London exists to make you remember! I have been trying to remember. M'hle c'hlevis o kannan zoken, klemvanus tonn ha kanaouenn. She leaves everything just lying around for you to stumble upon, like an unexplored attic, all in a mess. This is how provocative she is. This is how she shakes her hair at you, and grins wanly, out of the corner of her eye, all the while lamenting what she has lost: a considerable amount. The city and I are on the same side, against them, whoever they are. Certainly against her scheming servants, the knave and the fool, who would be her masters. Most irrelevant of the irrelevant are they! The only living stone is London herself, and we, of whom her walls are built. I will not listen to her servants, nor to the world with its hideous spectacle. In being hers I will become, I think, myself.

*

I have been trying to remember, no joke. I have been going to church. What, you thought I'd been wasting these months without you? We went to Easter Mass at St Paul's. Mrs. Roth did not come; but I cannot blame her, for it was so cold, and her back was in agony at the time. The sermon was rather lacklustre, and communion took forever, and the huge modern paintings were inauthentic, but all this was beside the point, because I felt like I was on safari. What was I doing there? I found myself mouthing the words to the hymns because I didn't know the music, and H., whose religiosity is perhaps a little more ambiguous than my own, mouthed along with me, because she didn't know the music either. I shook hands with perfect strangers and said Peace be with you. And where is the irony in that? How do the religious make sense of this beautiful ritual? The next week it was the same. A Dutch friend and I attended Sunday service at Austin Friars, the only Dutch church in the country, and the oldest Dutch-language Protestant church in the world, including Holland. And there the alienation was heightened: I could revel in it. Not only was I the only person in the room not to know the music—I was the only person there who couldn't understand a damned thing that was being said! The sermon went blaach blaach T. S. Eliot blaach blaach blaach The Waste Land blaach blaach Shackleton blaach blaach Emmaus, and although on reflection I could deduce the subject, the vast majority of it remained, well, double dutch. Which is not to say it lacked a fine strange music. Then we stood around the altar in a circle and looked conscientiously at the floor as the prayers were recited. Afterwards they were all terribly friendly and I felt like an ass; but my companion was delighted to be able to speak her own language, and that did please me a great deal.


I force myself into these uncomfortable scenarios not from any turn towards religion, nor out of scorn for those who believe, but because of an uneasy suspicion that I have forgotten something, an art older than irony. It is as if I want the city and her ways to conquer me a little. London exists more in her church services than in her church façades. This I know; but I am trying to understand it, also. In my ears are the bells. I strain myself, for I cannot hear Herbauge—only Nantes.

Stone, Water, Angel

In Rome not a stone was looked at that wasn't shaped. Form had driven out all interest in matter. Now a crystal formation is becoming important again, and a shapeless stone is something. Thus does human nature cast about for help when there is no help left.

— Goethe, The Italian Journey, 1788.

There's a restaurant in Catalonia called El Bulli, which has just been voted the best in the world for the second time running. Its chef, Ferran Adrià, is in the habit of taking classic European dishes, and fissioning them out of familiarity. Here, for instance, is how he makes a Spanish omelette, courtesy of the Guardian: 'First, he reduces the old-fashioned tortilla to its three component parts: eggs, potatoes and onions. Then he cooks each separately. The finished product, the deconstructed outcome, is one-part potato foam, one-part onion purée, one-part egg-white sabayon. One isolated component is served on top of the other in layers, and topped with crumbs of deep-fried potatoes. The dish, minuscule, comes inside a sherry glass.'

Peter Ackroyd, in his magnopustical biography of London, does something similar to the city. His first two chapters are entitled 'The sea!' and 'The stones', treating the very fabric of London as essential parts of its history: the city is served as layered foams in a sherry glass. The ploy is a bold one, and pays rich dividends. 'The waters have not wholly departed, even yet, and there is evidence of their life in the weathered stones of London.' It is difficult to write about London after Ackroyd, so grand is his scope, so minute his detail. One can hope only to add footnotes, graft a few new connections, find a little corner of the canvas spare to fill in with a dash of colour. And so, my mind echoing with the waters and the weathered stones of London—plastic force and brute matter—I take a trip north, up to Angel, in the heart of Islington.

*

You can see a map of Angel. I have marked out the places of significance with coloured squares—pink for Stonefield Street, just north of Cloudesley Square, Street, Place; blue for the reservoir on Claremont Square; red for the New River Head by Sadler's Wells. On an early afternoon, Sunday, gelid and bright, with the trace of a cloud, suspent water, the place is crawling with all sorts, like most, not looking up or even straight ahead, but happy to shop nonetheless, and especially in such a hub of stereotyped and Americanesque commerce, with all their mates or bellamies, young or old, most white, but not all, and likely to find enough small and trinketlike items, enough bibelots and grockle, to tide over the family for another year. Pest'red roads. Out of sight, almost, the canal still flows, and by the towpaths the locals drink without talking; in the near-empty Prince of Wales, with its bad imitation-Asian food, a greying suit sings knowledgeably along to the latest Top 40 hit on the pub radio, embarrassing only myself.


The two-hour walk is not a fluid motion followed through, not a speech of thundering eloquence, but a series of confused jabs, turns, stops, in all directions, radiating from the station, seen in the middle of the map. My first little bummel takes me north for ten minutes, past the mall with its great ugly silver wings, bastard literalism, up to the back streets of Liverpool Road.


I confess from the start, I have come up here mostly because of Harold Bayley, who mused, in his charming 1935 The Lost Language of London, on the origins of Cloudesley Road:

It is happily possible at times to counter-check conclusions by what are seemingly synonymous terms; for example Cloudesley Road at Islington. Being aware that the origin of the word cloud was clude, an ancient and obsolete term for a mass or conglomeration of rocks,—

(I advert the reader to the OED on the word 'cloud':

In the sense 'rock, hill' OE. had clúd m., early ME. clūd, later cloud; and this also occurs in ME. in the sense 'clod'. The current sense is found first in end of 13th c. and is app. the same word, applied to a 'cumulus' in the sky. OE. clúd was on OTeut. type *klûdo-z (pre-Teut. type *glūto-) f. same root as CLOD, the original sense being 'mass formed by agglomeration, cumulus'.)

and back to Bayley:

—it seemed possible that Cloudesley Place marked a lea, meadow, or lieu, where at one time there stood a clude or mass of rock. To my subsequent satisfaction I found that into Cloudesley Square there leads a Stonefield Street, the inference being obvious that Stonefield alias Cloudesley was a field-name. This inference was later verified by the discovery that in 1516 a Richard Cloudesley who resided here bequeathed funds for the repair of a causeway, i.e. a stone-paved road, leading from his house to Islington Church. . . It is quite certain that the Richard Cloudesley of 1516 derived his surname from a somewhere existing Cloudesley probably from the very Cloudesley on which the family was then settled, for I am unable to trace any village or town so named.

Notice the strange acommatism of that last sentence, attributable or not to John Cowan's 'Idiot Copy-Editor God'—the lack of pause before 'probably' lends Bayley's prose an unexpected breathlessness. The whole, however, is enough to start investing these streets, pleasant if not spectacular, with the charm of history. Bayley is not ashamed of the subjective quality of his conclusions; he speaks the language of personal adventure ('satisfaction', 'discovery') that is so inviting, and virtually absent from serious scholarship.


So, the cloud brings together stone (clude) and water. But the water is south and east of here: in the streets around Cloudesley are only stone, plaster, and brick. And sand. The area is restricted to cars, which can enter only from Cloudesley Road to the west; this gives the streets a hermetic sort of privacy and quiet. It is a theological quiet. On Cloudesley Street is the sinister Grubb Institute, 'an applied research foundation working globally to mobilise values, faiths and beliefs as a resource for the transformation, healing and repair of organisations, people and society', founded in 1957.


The Institute features two Bazalgettes on its staff—presumably descendants of the great Bazalgette, chief engineer of London's sewers. Outside the entrance sits a car with a smashed window; apparently charity and 'wholeness' are not enough to curb street crime. Who would have thought? But at the end of the road, squat in the middle of Cloudesley Square, is the area's real theological stronghold, the Celestial Church of Christ. (Here's an old engraving, rather moiréd on the screen, of its original 1829 incarnation, Holy Trinity Church.)


The gauze protecting the two spires is sky-blue, making the stone melt into the firmament, liquidly, or nebulously, what you will. It is a church in the process of celestial translation, or else it is crumbling to bits, slowly, out of a neglect now bandaged by Lottery money, perhaps not too late.

If the Grubb Institute is sinister, then the Celestial Church is even sinisterer. A worldwide organization, it was founded in 1947, in Porto Novo, Benin; proposed seating-arrangements for the church were 'revealed through a Prophetess who under the influence of the Holy Spirit in the wilderness on Friday 5th of October, 1947, sketched the seating arrangement using oranges'. A senior minister, David Adeniyi, 'likened the church to the rock, as no one can break the rock with his foot, no one can have power over the church'. In 2004 the Nigerian minister of the Cloudesley Square church, Adeniran Magbagbeola, was arrested for conducting sham weddings under its roof, though he was spared gaol-time for ill health. None of this did I know when I walked through its doors.


Parts of the interior are in states of extreme disrepair, lending the hall a Romantic Gothic-horror atmosphere. Most of the stained glass, on the other hand, is intact. Coloured balloons litter the floor, and a plate of fruit has been set before the altar. This is probably the only church I've ever seen with a) a fluorescent cross, and b) a sandpit strewn with bibles:


The church's motto is 'A city built on a hill cannot be hidden', Matthew 5:14. (The next verse is, 'Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house'. Evidently men also light electric crosses and put them on sandpits.) London was not built on a hill; thus it can be hidden—hidden down quiet back-streets, and in occult churches and institutes, in stones, even in books.

*

South of Angel, south of the inextant Peacock Inn, just south of Sadler's Wells, is a little private enclosure containing a number of handsome buildings. This site is the old New River Head, the terminus of the New River entering London from Hertfordshire to the north. The New River, which, as every modern sign or website will eagerly inform you, is neither new nor a river, is instead a sophisticated canal constructed in the early 17th century, and financed by Sir Hugh Myddelton, Welsh entrepreneur and jeweller to the king.


In 1913, the site was purchased from the New River Company by the Metropolitan Water Board, suppliers of water to the capital between 1903 and 1974. One of the old Engine Rooms was destroyed, the Round Pond, into which flowed the River, was stopped up, the pipes excavated, and the new buildings, headquarters for the Board, erected. In 1946 the last filter beds were disassembled, and the river head was removed to nearby Stoke Newington. Thus, the Board developed its central operations as it obliterated the New River; water swelled and ebbed. The pentagonal edifice at the bottom of this picture was the Board's main office, built by Henry Austen Hall and completed in 1920, while the curvilinear shape at the top left is the Laboratory Building, put up in 1936-1938 by John Murray Easton (who also designed Aberconway House, Mayfair, currently on sale for a mere 25 million)—both have now been converted into apartments for the wealthy.


The Laboratory, solid and Decoish, with a smashing line and grand glasswork, is the resistance piece. A 1953 history of the Water Board has this to say of the building: 'The curved form adopted by the architect has several advantages. It has the effect of linking up with the existing Head Office building (the quadrant would, if produced, strike the end of these at right angles). It also provides some 30 feet more window space for the laboratories, all of which face the north light, and this is a distinct advantage.' The large plaster arms, high on the wall looking over the fountain, are of added interest (and you begin to see the even shadow creeping five minutes up the base of the arms):


These are the arms of the Water Board, granted in 1931. The motto reads Et plui super unam civitatem, 'And I rained over one city'; the words are from Amos 4:7 in the Vulgate translation. The supporters are Hygeia with her medicinal snake (sinister), representing sanitation, and Aquarius (dexter), representing water-supply—the two functions of the Board. And we can read a 'blazon' or description of the arms in the 1953 Board history: 'Argent on a Pile vert a dexter Hand Or issuing from a Cloud in chief proper and scattering eight Gouttes d'eau in base three Bars wavy Azure on a Chief nebuly of the first a Cross of Saint George charged with a Lion of England, And for the Crest on a Wreath of the Colours a Roundel charged with a Hand issuing from a Cloud and scattering Gouttes as in the Arms.' The book, drawn up by the Board itself as a thirty-year retrospective, goes on to discuss the reasons for its graphic choices. The 'pile vert' or green wedge derives from the arms of Sir Hugh Myddelton, who substituted that shape for his family's 'bend vert' in 1622. The central motif—the hand of God issuing rain—derives from a seal commissioned by the New River Company from the engraver William Hole in 1619; this 'depicts a Hand issuing out of the clouds throwing down rain upon the City of London. The seal also shows St. John's Gate and Old St. Paul's without the wooden steeple, which was burnt down in 1561 and never re-erected.' The machicolated line ('Chief nebuly') towards the top of the shield 'is heraldically supposed to represent the edges of clouds as drawn by medieval artists'. The Lion of England at the top, together with the azure bars at the bottom, recall the arms of the LCC, granted in 1914. The eight gouttes or drops stand for the eight water-companies that constituted the Board upon its foundation in 1903. Likewise, the supporters also derive from the arms of those companies: Hygeia from the Grand Junction Waterworks Company, and Aquarius from the East London Company, the Chelsea Company, the Lambeth Company, and the West Middlesex Company. (When the Metropolitan Water Board of New South Wales came to draw up their contract and arms (right) in 1965, they largely copied those of London.) The Board's arms can be found elsewhere in the environs of the city. In the historic pumping station at Kempton Park, still functioning, can be found the arms rendered in fine bright hues high on an interior wall (taken from here):


And the same arms are found in concrete, out in Crayford, in Bexley, the farthest reaches of what might reasonably be called 'London', catalogued here by the Public Monument and Sculpture Association, rather amateurishly ('the woman is on the left and seems to have a serpent around her arm'), as #BE003:


The most curious aspect of this design is clearly the central motif of the hand from the clouds; it is elaborated in a relief-sculpture nearby. Around the back of the site, past the Shakespeare's Head, in Myddelton Passage, on the front of a terraced row of flats, Worthington House and Benyon House, for no clear reason, I found this curiosity, twice:


When I first looked at this, it struck me that the distant church vaguely resembled Old St. Paul's; now, having read the 1953 history, it is clear to me that this is a copy of Hole's seal of 1619, with St. John's Gate in the foreground. The cloud, meanwhile, is fluffy and rounded enough to be a clude or heap of rocks. The seal is repeated in the atrium corridor of the old MWB offices, beside other roundels of Hygeia and Aquarius (the latter refashioned as the reclining river-god from Marcantonio's 1515 Judgement of Paris); the first picture I took was with a flash, and before I could get a better one the concierge shooed me away—


I wanted to determine some sort of provenance for this image of the pluvious hand, but turned up little. Filippo Picinelli's 1694 Mundus Symbolicus, a standard reference, contains nothing relevant. None of the emblems in the modern Henkel-Schöne Emblemata, meanwhile, possesses more than a very approximate similarity. Here, God's hand pours water from a jug on a heart beset by snakes, with the legend Invidentes egent, or 'The envious are wanting':


Another image, taken in turn from Théodore de Bèze's 1580 Icones (# 9), illustrates a quatrain beginning 'Pinge globum tenui quem libratum undique filo / Sustineat summi numinis alta manus', with God's hand supporting a city with a beam from above:


Thus my iconographical labours are in vain. (If only I had been Professor of Symbology at Harvard!) Still, it is a beautiful image, suggestive, if not fully sensical. It has value as a true emblem or impresa, where word and picture exist in uneasy tension. One of the chief rules for the impresa, at least according to Samuel Daniel, is 'that the figure without the mot, or the mot without the figure signifie nothing'. In other words, the emblem's text and image should be individually obscure, but mutually illuminating. Remember, the pluvious hand was originally designed for a river company: the fit is a little ill. Why not have the image of a river or waterway? Biblical quotations would have been easy enough: 'He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water' (John 7.38) could have been stripped down as 'flumina de ventre eius fluent aquae vivae', or something like that.

The relation of rain to river (or canal) is a complex one, mediated by stone, clude and cloud. It is from cloud that the hand emerges, and it is to stone that the rain returns. The whole is circled, on the seal, and on the roundel or Hurt atop the Board's escutcheon, which 'may also be regarded as representing the Firmament'. The verse from Amos reads, in full,

And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon [compluta], and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.

London is not the city built on a hill, but it is a city upon which rain has been allowed to fall, if not in such torrents as elsewhere. It has not withered. God chides the city for not acknowledging his providence. Are we being chided?

*

London has been so photographed, and so articulated; we know its monuments by sight and in prose. We know those works—the great and the grand. But there is room, also, for the lesser—for objects without shape or articulation. I need not show you the fine stone fountain of Nautilus Gardens, in the heart of the New River Head; nor Regent's Canal which runs east out of Angel; nor the stone Sadler's well, preserved under glass inside the theatre. We want to picture not just the forgotten and neglected, the lost nooks; but the unpicturable, as a quiet provocation. We picture them dark and bleak, half-obscured, dull, barely discernible, traces of form emerging from plain natural matter. The sky is white because it is not there, merely a mounting for the myriad earths.


I stumble down Pentonville Road, towards the Library, my commonest haunt, in the gathered near-twilight, with barely any interest in Pentonville Road, contemplating only the outline of a plot not quite sketched. I come upon Claremont Square and its reservoir. Sarah Jackson, for the London Gardens Trust, has roughed out the bones of square's history:

Claremont Square was developed between 1821 and 1828 around the old Upper Pond of the New River Company, built in 1709. The reservoir was covered and turfed in 1852 following the Metropolis Water Act which outlawed open areas of standing water in London. This covered storage reservoir is still owned and in use by Thames Water. The square has its original 19th-century railings.

The reservoir is thus inaccessible, a guarded tumulus of Victorian industry. By no means is the hill impressive, but its dullness recommends it as the object of portrayal, for London is dull, like a great city, brilliantly dull, like the half-rubbed-out canvas of an Old Master, or the Bacons half-visible behind frosted glass in Love is the Devil. London's beauty lies not in its vistas and façades, but in its supercilious brows, what it hints, just out of sight. This is the beauty of formless—or near formless—matter. Even Google Earth preserves the mystery:


Here the square, top-down, is reduced to geometric form; the north slope mars the symmetry just enough. A low wall runs around the green, and beyond that, eight round stubs of unknown function, like double-breasted buttons. The godsview only compounds the curiosity of the site: we see some but not much, and can get no closer without pixellation. Even if we could walk upon the hill, the true object, under the turf, would remain unknown. We want to peer inside; we want some sense of how London works, inside; this will be withheld. London is not a city built on a hill; it remains, perpetually, somewhat hidden.


Monochrome makes filigree of the trees. Consider standing water, how it nourishes the soil and the roots. Here we stand to the east, looking west; this castellar structure can be seen to the right of the green from the air. The river is left in the names. From this point you can look down Mylne Street towards Myddelton Square and St. Mark's; around the corner is ultra-chic Amwell Street, as well as Chadwell and River Streets. Here again we have the last vestiges of the New River—its arch-instigator, and its sources, Amwell and Chadwell, and Mylne after Robert and his son William Chadwell, the River's chief Victorian engineers. 'London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London', wrote Thomas Platter in 1599.

Lack of distraction returns the eye to the forbidden mound: one circles and circles, scouting for a way up, and there are steps, and a gate, but it is locked, and the heart sinks, but is also glad, that exploration is frustrate, and the mystery is retained. One projects instead. One interprets what few shapes are there to be interpreted: curve of the brow, steel rails, stub cylinder, low wall, as if ruined. Leafmeal. In such a context photography has the potential for expression, in and of itself.


Strait-laced types pass me on the street, having made their purchases at the local cheese-shop, or perhaps with handmade clocks, ticking, and all wrapped up warm with wools or tweels, eyeing me as I hold leather glove (left) in my teeth and juggle algidly with the camera. Why is he snapping that ugly old thing? The doors around the square are framed with crude crabbed fluted quarter-columns, and in places the plaster has been left to craze. Here (number 4, west side) lived Edward Irving, credited by the plaque as 'Founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church', though Wikipedia disputes the attribution. Tu es Petrus, the rock of ages; and no one can break the rock with his foot—no one can have power over the church. Only water can erode stone.


On the way down Pentonville Road I see this sculpture by the side of the road. It is like stylised water, mem, made into stone, a flow, petrified. It seems a fitting colophon for my journey.