An Intercepted Email Conversation

Sent: 28 December 2005 10:28 Subject:

Ah well, xmas has flown past my door once more, hoards of merchant trade whores bleeding my eyes dry, my mind being vacuumed by the vacuous advertisement that adorn every space on the skyline every pixel of each brand new spanking plasma screen, praise be the devil sins of corporations blinded by the hallowed shrines of Mother money and her screaming banshees of Babylon, the cold grit down blighted upon petal skin, the crisp sunshine reminds me of peace in a foreign sky, the warmth of love never leaves me as I know for sure that this western veneer of commercial gloop is only as temporary as the pleasure is gives, nothing can outlast love no philosophers can teach you happiness, no one can polish a turd, not even Christopher Offilli and his elephant metamorphosis poor dung painting props.
-JC

Sent: 28 December 2005 10:41
Subject: RE:

Commercialism for Christmas. A gift from Next to you. That was my present. Christmas presents. I was at the Cathedral. Receiving a gift of presence. A present of Absence. Christmas presence. A Non-commercial, Non- giftwrapped, Non-refundable. A non.
Anon.

Mihaly Babits: "The Book of Jonah"

During her last visit to Manchester our friend Eni, from Budapest, gave Tomoko and I The Book of Jonah by the Hungarian poet Mihaly Babits. I finally took the time to read the book through yesterday. It is not too long and has three distinct sections. The first section is the KJV text of the Book of Jonah. The second section is Babits' recitation of the book in verse and the third section is a considerably shorter poem entitled Jonah's Prayer, which is a poet's response to the first two sections.

Babits (1883-1941) was deeply concerned with the socio-political problems of his times. The Book of Jonah addresses the tensions in Post-Imperial Hungary and the rising tide of fascism and Communism in central Europe. The underlying question posed in Babits' book is "what role has the poet in their contemporary time?". For Babits, the poet of the 1920's is someone who sees the potential for terror and human suffering brought on by the advance of totalitariansim. Poetry is contingent and as such it is prophetic. This is why Babits turns his eye towards the prophets of the Old Testament and in particular towards Jonah, who is called by God to warn the city of Nineveh that it must change its ways or face destruction. A divine investment is placed on Jonah as he has the potential to affect the future. The poet too, is invested with a kinetic energy - with the possibility to raise awareness and change hearts and minds. But with this investment comes responsibility, and so the poet/prophet must choose to face this responsibility or abandon it. Jonah continually chooses indifference and attempts to flee from his call. In Babits' recitation Jonah says the following to a sailor as he is thrown into the sea:

And unto him said Jonah: "I'm a Jew,
'tis from the Lord of Heavens that I flew.
What have I got to do with this world's sin?
'Tis only peace my soul seeks pleasure in.
Let it be God's concern and never mine,
I answer not for other's pain and crime.
Let me hide in the bottom, for I think
that I would rather drown here when we sink.
But if you choose to put me ashore, it should
be on the fringe of some far lonely wood
where I could starve on acorns and fruits rotten,
yet live in peace and of the Lord forgotten."

But the responsibility cannot be so easily removed, as Jonah is later forced to face up to what he has fled. It is this tension between taking on responsibility for one's contemporary times and taking the much easier path of indifference that Babits expresses in the final section "Jonah's Prayer" where the poet contemplates Jonah and prays for a voice with which to protest against evil and abandon both agression and indifference in favour of forgiveness:


Now I who (just as Jonah him evaded)
first fled Him, Then (As Jonah in the whale did)
descended in the death and live and hot
darkness of all earthly torments, not
just for three days, but for three months or three
years or centuries - I wish I might see
(ere a still darker, eternal whale would
swallow me down its mighty throat for good)
my old voice come back! Then, having arrayed
my words in blameless ranks, I unafraid
could speak for Him with all my bad throat's might,
I'd never tire of it from morn till night,
As long as Powers in Nineveh and on High
would let me speak and would not bid me die.

Drifting

Have you ever noticed that to really understand the architecture of a city street you always have to look above eye level? The world that we move in, participate in, do business in and gaze at is enframed by a commercial surface layer. The ground floor of most buildings is the mundane and repetitive facade of the Tesco store front, or Boots, or HMV, or Starbucks or Tesco Metro. As you walk through the city our eyes are forced to gaze upward to get any real sense of the buildings that lie behind this superficial blur.

The first time I ever remember drifting was during the first overland trip I made on my own to Switzerland. I didn't know what drifting was at the time, nor that there was a term to describe the activity of aimlessly wandering through a cityspace. But there is a term - 'drifting' comes from the novelist Ian Sinclair, someone I have never read but still find a connection with.
I had caught a National Express coach from Manchester Airport to London Victoria and had eight hours to wait before my connecting coach to Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. For those eight hours I began to wander the area around the station. I entered cafes, leaving immediately if the atmosphere didn't seem 'right'. I looked in bookshops, then left, and then returned. I found myself on Buckingham Palace Road, and realised that if I was to take either right or left I had a chance of walking to Buckingham Palace. It was a 50/50 gamble. I took a left and started walking. The gamble paid off and I found the palace. It was incredibly boring so I turned back. It didn't matter, and I could find somewhere else to go.
The thing about drifting is that it has freedom at its heart. There is no set direction and no purpose or 'place to be'. It's not simply about discovering a new urban environment but also about soaking up its atmosphere - taking spaces in and observing the people in these places.
But it doesn't have to be somewhere new. I know Manchester city centre well and I often drift around there. Its a great city for this - its large enough to be able to always discover something new but also small enough to bump into an old friend.
You begin to notice subtle changes and subtle consistencies in places. A sandwich shop may change ownership so that the storefront and menu change logo and colour, and a slight variation in the product occurs. But people will eat there or not eat there just the same. Or there is this Italian cafe near Victoria Station in London which I used to vist every December and I could be certain that the 'tag' of the 2nd Battalion of the Southend Territorial Army "The Blue Bugles" would still be graffittied on the toilet wall.

An example of a change of attitude in relation to city space:

PRAGUE: Feb. 2002

One afternooon I went on a guided tour of Josefov - Prague's Jewosh quarter. The guide took us around the various synagouges and gave a history of the different buildings. He explained the meaning of certain street names and recited a version of the Golem legend. Near the end of the tour - it finished at the Kafka cafe - the guide had to maneouvre us around some construction workers who were rippng up the street pavement. He said to us with a beaming smile: "Prague is changing everyday".

PRAGUE: June 2005

One evening Tomoko and I drifted through the streets of the Old City. Well, I drifted and she followed (sorry Tomoko!). We reached the end of a narrow cobbled street which met with three other streets in a small square - or courtyard. We saw a man looking up into the sky so we looked too. "Oh!" said Tomoko with shock and I stared in facination. There overhanging a flat at the end of the street was a human figure suspended from a gallows. "It looks like someone hanging" I said. The sun had just set so we had to walk closer for a better look. It was a statue. The figure was dressed in a business suit but his face looked like Lenin's - at least in my mind it did. What does this unannounced sculpture of a businessman/Lenin being executed over the street mean?
I memorized the street name and when we returned to the hotel I asked the guy at the reception desk about the statue. But he was confused - "You mean the one of Kafka. It's a statue of Kafka". "No", I said "It's one of a guy being hung. He looks like Lenin in a suit. It's on S------ Street". He shrugged his shoulders and said in a completely disinterested tone, "There are a lot of things new in Prague. There is always something changing. I don't know". I got the sense that as most of the changes in Prague in the past few years were geared solely at tourists, the receptionist also put this intriguing work of art into this category too. That's why he was unconcerned. We were asking and we were tourists.

Bruce Cockburn at Christmas

That first Blog was more a moment of catharsis for me than anything else . . .

I listened to Bruce Cockburn's Christmas on the way to work today and also this evening when I was wrapping up the Christmas presents I have bought. Generally I really hate Christmas albums. Most often it is just a theme from which a famous artist can flog off another cd. Mariah Carey's or Garth Brooks' or even Frank Sinatra's albums are examples of the mediocre and distinctly passionless Christmas albums that get pulled out of storage in our house during the festive season. But this is what marks Bruce Cockburn's album off from the rest - it has passion. His haunting rendition of Iesus Ahatonnia/The Huron Carol (which is sung in Huron) and his impassioned version of It Came Upon A Midnight Clear are two of my favourites. Cockburn doesn't just pull out Christmas classics to pander to the masses, but draws from a pool of Christmas carols from all over the world. Mary Had a Baby is a carol from St. Helena which seems like a simple call and response song -

Who heard the singing? Oh Lord
Who heard the singing? Oh my Lord [...]
Shepherds heard the singing. Oh Lord
Shepherds heard the singing. Oh my Lord [...]

But each stanza finishes with the enigmatic line:

The people keep coming but the train has gone.

What exactly is that supposed to mean?
There is also one sixteenth century carol from Spain, Riu Riu Chiu (sung in Spanish). In the notes he writes that it contains the line:

"the one born today is actually his mother's father and the one who created her is said to be her son".

It speaks of the unique contradictions and absurdities that occur in the Christmas narrative. To me that's the path to understanding passion. Contradiction is its essence. Passion is the intermingling of Love and Suffering. It is Love with the knowledge of Suffering and Suffering with a knowledge of Love.

I've realised that Advent is a season which pulls us in two directions. It makes us look at the past - circa 2000 years ago when Christ was born, and towards the future - the second coming of Christ. And by being forced to look in two directions, the past and the future, we also look at our own time - the present. When we look at the present, and over the past two thousand years, notions like 'peace on earth, goodwill to men' and 'Alles Shlaeft; einsam Wacht' seem far removed to us. But that's the point. It doesn't make sense and we find ourselves exposed to the two thousand years of wrong that have passed since Christ's birth.

And yet we still maintain this vision of hope, brought to us by the Christmas story.

Blog 1

I've been sitting at this computer all day not knowing what to do. The thing is, I'm not meant to be doing anything. Except sell tickets to the Mick Rock exhibition at Urbis. The ones who enter enjoy it but the ones who enter are also few and far between. So I sit, not knowing exactly what to do.