More impressionistic stuff

Take me out and shoot me. But anyway, there is a phrase I keep coming back to (which is to say, plagiarising) from The Riddle of the Sands. It doesn't have to do with the book's actual subject, being instead one of many evocative but glancing descriptions of the maritime setting: 'stars above and stars below'. I don't know, something just does it for me. It refers to the night sky reflected in a still sea, but I often think of it when looking at city lights.

So, something arisen from the insane and unhealthy hours I am keeping for some reason, combined with a wanton and uncontollable habit of cycle-trips.

Observatory

Blackford Hill:
A little after midnight, a little south of the midnight sun,
It's night above my head and dawn on the horizon.
The observatory's idle, the sky empty but for bird-song;
But a starry night rolls out below my feet
With myths picked out in white and yellow lights,
With a milky ribbon of its own,
And distant galaxies beyond.

Meanwhile, back in the 1800s

After a long period of firing off fragmentary and impressionistic things brought on by what I thought about that day (and, yes, an almost equally long period of complete bunking off) I'm feeling once again the urge to write novelistically. And so I've followed my instincts and dived back into the 19^th century, which is packed already with stories that would hardly be believable if not for being true. In the best traditions of 19^th century writing, I have only the vaguest idea where this serial is going, but here goes.

Prologue: The Berezina-song

The endless sky of Russia was dirty grey that winter's day - except for a red stain on the eastern horizon, made by the campfires of the cossacks.

Unsupported by the mountains of home, it weighed heavy and cold on the forests and marshes; on the fields, the shallow scratches of human habitation that had to be reclaimed from the wilderness year on year; and on the town of Borisov, a wretched place in that year 1812, abandoned by its whole population – well, almost – and yet, for a few short desperate days, more crowded than it had ever been or would ever be again.

Such was the prospect that greeted the 4^th Line Regiment of the Kingdom of Italy, such as were left, when they arrived in the early evening. They trudged down the road with a tired, mechanical gait. At their head a tattered standard fluttered sadly in the snow; below it, his face telling the same story of wounded but still living pride, Captain Giacomo Balducci was carried between two of his men, slung on a musket that had been wrapped in rags to prevent it from freezing to his skin. In spite of the cold he still wore only his uniform - where the soldiers who tramped behind him were a grim carnival of warm ladies' pelisses and bejewelled Orthodox vestments rescued by theft from the fire at Moscow. His absurd little glasses magnified his deep blue eyes.

Such was the prospect; and then the river Berezina, laughing derisively, splashing white with foam and jagged lumps of ice; and beyond, on the far steep bank, a single cossack, silhouetted against the snow like one of the charcoal-sketches that filled the captain's diary. He sat in the saddle so motionless that snow was piling up on his cap, staring thoughtfully at the river as if he had put it there, painted it onto the broad white canvas, and was now wondering if he had placed it quite right.

The 4^th Line Regiment had been on the deathly field of Borodino, had seen the Russian cavalry flooding downhill with oddly high-pitched whoops, as if their whirling sabres were slicing up the very air. But all that was not so terrible as this single silent sentry.

-

Captain Balducci did indeed make a sketch of the scene before he died.

He spent his last hours wrapped in a shroud of those same pelisses and vestments, tucked on the ledge above the stove in what had been someone's pleasant townhouse. His rank hardly entitled him to such a spot, of course, and he would never have consented to it, or to the blanket his men had made him from their warm clothes, if he had had the strength to object. But he was no longer altogether conscious, and had smiled vacantly as his men chased out a band of fat Swiss, looking like Englishmen in their shiny red coats, and installed him in their commander's place.

So there he lay with two soldiers for company, delegates of the men he had dismissed downstairs to eat their miserable supper and catch a proper sleep. They were the two who he, a naturally quiet man, had most often talked to: Antonio Farina, the Florentine pasta-maker who could write; and Neri Burroni, the young peasant whose village had appointed him philosopher and herdsman due to his habit of staring protractedly at nothing much, which the captain shared.

Balducci sketched the scene until his hand failed, and then dictated to Farina his final testament. Then he lay still, except for the hand that kept rubbing his wounded leg. The two men peered out of the window. In the last light of the day, the lone cossack picket rode away.

'Do you remember, Neri, in Poland, when Mattia told us we were going to march through Russia and invade England?,' said Farina with a faint smile.

'I do, sergeant. I think, sergeant, that he had England and India mixed up.'

'Some difference it makes now.'

'Yes, sergeant.'

'I wonder what there is, though, beyond Russia. Besides more poxy Russia.'

'Home, sergeant, the way we're going.'

'Good answer. Good bloody answer to a stupid question. I was a happy man when I kept myself to wondering what was over the mountains and not finding out.'

'Yes, sergeant.'

Then there was a long silence, which was broken after a time by the strains of a badly-played accordion, and a sharp young tenor rising from the yard where the defeated Swiss had made their camp:

Unser Leben gleicht der Reise
Eines Wandrers in der Nacht;
Jeder hat in seinem Gleise
Etwas, das ihm Kummer macht...

For reasons he never understood any better than he understood German, which was not at all, the melody stayed with Farina for the remainder of his life. No doubt it had something to do with the noise which followed the end of the song, which was the mewling of an infant from the room across the hall.

The men glanced at each-other. Farina had heard stories like this one from other regiments. Nobody knew where the children came from; whether they had been forgotten by the fleeing Russians, or born in a rolling wagon to one of the canteen-women and left behind in the hope that somebody would stumble across them. And so people did. A few were now trundling along with the retreating arm in those same suttlers' carts, learning their first words in the Grand Army's language of violent blasphemy from across half Europe; others were not. An Italian officer who was on a general's staff had confessed to Farina one night under the stars, blind drunk, that he had drowned triplets that had kept him awake in Smolensk, breaking the ice on a barrel of water with his own hands. He had seemed particularly upset about that ice. Farina had tentatively assured him that if they were to have grown up as little soldiers and marched with the Grand Army on another such campaign, then it made as much difference as England and India. And he had gotten to half-believing it, but... well, in the morning he would see if there was space on a cart. He nodded to Burroni and stood up.

'Bring the child in here, would you please?,' said the cracked voice of Balducci. The two men stared, although for Burroni this involved only a change of direction. The captain had pushed himself up on one arm with the feeble struggling motion of an upturned beetle.

'...Yes sir!,' said Farina, and hurried out.

He found the boy in a lady's bedroom, nestled in covers pulled from the plump-looking bed. The room had been well-appointed once but now showed the signs of a hasty ransacking. In any other circumstances Farina would have put it down to looters from one army or another, or the Jews; but some latent romantic inclination, a kind of substitute compassion in a world intolerant of the real thing, made him imagine a Polish princess tearing out her drawers in search of prized possessions, hurrying away at the last moment as the first shots sounded...

It was a naked screaming child; it could have been Polish; it could have been a prince. Who knew? So he made it one with a thought, a promisory note for the warmth and safety he couldn't give.

He presented him to his captain with trembling hands – his working man's fear of the delicate, his father's panic at holding a child, his soldier's terror of manhandling a superior's ill-understood possessions all combined. Balducci shook his head. 'I couldn't hold him, Antonio. Put him by the stove. Give him one of the blankets. Give him all the blankets. I don't need them, Antonio. I'll die in my uniform.'

'I thought,' he continued as Farina busied himself, 'When I put it on, that this was a shameful uniform, covered in the braid of kings and paid for by plunder. I'm proud to wear it now. You men have made me proud to wear it as you do.'

The soldiers said nothing; neither Farina, nor Burroni, nor the others, roused by the baby's crying, who filed quietly into the room.

'I regret,' said Balducci, his old lecturing-voice – none too loud, but with an odd penetrating quality that demanded to be heard – somehow returning under his wheezy breath, 'That the campaign has unfolded as it has, and I feel sorry for the poor people in Poland, and in France, who are undoubtedly going to be put under the tsar and the cossacks-'

There was a stir in the hot, muggy air enclosed by the crowding soldiers; Mattia's cry of denial and defiance died on his tongue.

'-But more than that I regret that we fought it at all, in the way we did, against and not for the wretched people in this country, which has surely given rise to our defeat. And I would very much have preferred to have died for the freedom and independence of our Italy,' he went on, his bemused tone of voice and his turn of phrase just as when he had told them, long ago in Poland, that he would very much prefer them not to use foul language.

'Most of all I regret the part I've had, however small, in leading you all into this really frightful war, and how I'm now leaving you to get out of it without whatever help I might have given you. I regret a good many things. But I think I'm just coming to realise that if Destiny doesn't equip us to make large and historic gestures then we should attach as much importance to the small ones that are in our power, and so I should say that in the end I've not made the worst use of my life.'

Silence again, of a new and less restful kind: not a blank like the snowy fields, but an awful hole like the captain's wound.

'I don't subscribe to the beliefs of the priests, or of Russians, Jews, Turks, or Englishmen, however I know some of you will take comfort in praying for me and for my part I will be glad to have my comrades thoughts rest on me for a little while. After long consideration, however, I think there is probably a governing power in this republic of our universe, and even if there isn't then that is no excuse to retreat from my responsibility to do good works and to try and mend my bad ones so that I will have been a little force for bettering humanity. I'd like you, Antonio, to take a letter which is on my person to the addressee in Italy, and to look after the child and take it to her as well.'

'...Yes, sir,' said Farina for the final time, and Balducci nodded and died. The silence, this time, was as loud as all the emperor's artillery, and the tsar's too.

'We could put the boy on the sutlers' carts,' said Mattia eventually.

'The captain was very clear,' said Burroni. 'But since we all need to eat, and I'm younger and littler than the sergeant, I think it should be me who looks after the child. When we get home I will come and visit him to find out about the adress and take the child there. After all he has a family and a trade. I've got nothing to come back to. And anyway it would only be good to visit eachother after we get home.'

They all thought for a moment of Moscow, of the jewels they had taken from dressing-tables, and of how they had laughed at the men who had stuffed their sacks with rye-flour and searched high and low for a frying-pan; and then, led by Farina, they gave a murmured consent.

'I wonder what being dead is like,' said Mattia.

'Don't,' said Farina.

-

From that moment on, Farina's memories of Russia dissolved like frightening dreams, and only a few clear images remained – many of them irrelevant and bathetic. Only one scene need come to our attention.

There are the guns roaring on the heights, and their ragged, hoarse, explosive cry is echoed by the 'Ura!' of the Russian infantry. There are the fat Swiss, food for the cannons just like the thinner men. There are the soldiers of the 4^th scrambling up from they had been finishing their crusts of bread, taking their places in the column, losing themselves to a greater moving mass as if climbing aboard a vehicle. There is Mattia throwing off the lady's fur coat which he had claimed was for a mistress and which everybody knew he meant to sell, declaring that he'll die like a soldier of the emperor's army. There he is, promptly getting his wish. There is the red blood on Burroni's shirt – all too vivid, Farina feels: he has after all seen plenty of blood on the campaign, some of it his, and by now he thinks he knows its ugly brown colour. But now it blooms like roses on the linen, the snow, the paling skin. And there is the boy crying in the dead man's knapsack.

Writing about music

They are making a movie of Les Mis - that is, a film of the show of the book, not a film of the book. Russell Crowe is in it. I don't care what anyone says, this is a positive development for the revolution. If we English-speaking peoples can only write good political songs if they're being sung by fictitious French people who are immediately shot for their trouble, oh well, we have to get them from somewhere.

I speak facetiously, mind: there are lots of good political songs even in English; and besides them so many, in all languages and some more, which are not 'political' in the narrow sense but which get at the basic facts of human life, the final issue in political struggles. I sometimes feel, as someone who feels compelled to try and fumble towards the outlines of this stuff in writing, that what I do is as pigeon-shit to their monument.  Did somebody not say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? Ah well, worth a shot.

Writing about music

Where we puzzled for hours

Over theories and figures, seeking our answer,

They scrawled an equation in the margin

That answered answers and questioned questions.

Where we pinned the world down

Like a butterfly, with carefully chosen words,

They plucked it alive from the air

And let it go again.

Edinburgh again

Driech and haary; theatre doing Gulliver's Travels in the original Romanian; no trams. Edinburgh much as I left it.

Having left it, I could count its flaws and failings all along my fingers and end up on my toes, of course. But most of what I dislike about Edinburgh as against Glasgow - things as diverse as quotation marks around Scots words in pub-signage, the lack of buskers not playing the pipes in full-kilt, the brazen hypocrisy of all those 'saunas' and 'massage salons' ranked up alongside the Temples of High Culture, the circle of outlying schemes kept away from the centre like the tarnish around a brass tap - springs from pretence and concealment. That, or a sense of privacy inflated to take in whole grand dead-ends sheltering behind their 'Keep out!' signs.

But there are things about Edinburgh, as my home-town, which can be neither concealed nor fenced off.


I never missed home.
Why miss what's waiting, just as you left it?
I fit into old memories as if into old gloves
Stored safely in some bottom-drawer of the mind.

'Home, where the air smells like air and the sky's the right height...'
The sky hangs low and damp on crags and hills.
The air smells of suggested rain, never quite falling but
Filling the air, tickling my cheek;
Of trees, and of the history of things.

Night-time

I stand by the quiet canal,

Dug out by humans hands,

Under the eerie street-lamps,

Devised by human minds.

In the water dance the orange lights.

In the distance roar the cars, constant as the sea.

In the night, the tower-blocks light up:

Illuminated stairwells mark them out,

For concrete blends with sky,

And flats – who’s up this late?! – out-shine the stars.

Behind me steals a stealthy night-time ghost.

He shivers up my spine: as if to say

The world of Newton, Marx, and Einstein he will share

Until the dawn – and while I stay awake. 

It being 2012...

...the end of the world. We're a mite stuck on it, I noticed in conversation this evening. So I thought to myself: how does a Marxist write about the end of the world?  

The answer is that he does a year of English and History at Glasgow University and, by the end of it, Donne and his round Earth's imagined corners have gotten mixed up with Hobsbawm and his history that never 'reaches the turning point and fails to turn', it just turns in unexpected or undesired directions. And then he writes a poem, yo.

The end of the world (as we know it)

We’re terribly fond of the end of the world.

We didn’t need a theory of tectonics

To set the mountains crumbling with our words;

We didn’t need a Hubble telescope

To watch the stars explode, or tumble down;

And we saw seas of blood in feverish dreams

Before we ever woke to find them true.

The end of the world has troubled our sleep

From the beginning.

But where do ends begin, beginnings end?

They’re like that Nordic serpent who devours

His tail – until, hoho!, he ends the world;

But afterwards the world begins again.

Until another god has has his day:

Another final battle, another new world born,

Another war is fought to end all war.

Perhaps the end has come and gone?

Perhaps a mountain that will crumble

Has been eaten through by worms?

Perhaps the stars will only tumble

When their lights have all but burned?

Perhaps the end will come and go?

And when brazen trumpets have sounded,

And when mountains and stars are gone,

Perhaps the world ends in the silence

That lets thought echo loud and long?

Arise! Arise! At the round Earth’s imagined corners – turn.

More magic and Marxism

Further miscellanious fragments of my Terribly Serious Story; still no names!


The day, which later on turned out to have been Memorable in History, dawned much as others did: in a flood of white light over the horizon, over the crests of the grey waves.

Much, indeed, seemed familiar on this day of change in the world: the salt-edged wind; the raucous cawing of sea-birds; the whole prospect of his native shore, the white beach, the villages, fields, and house-trees looking tiny and impermanent in the shadow of heath, forest, and mountain; all these things were painfully familiar. And the word 'memorable' is surely meaningless, applied to things that, try as we might, we can't forget?

What he remembered were the ships. His own people built ships, of course, and sailed them and were buried in them; and in doing this they hacked a a rough beauty out of oak trunks. But nothing like these ships: in his life up to that point, he had seen nothing so huge made by human hands; and so he half-thought to himself that these things must come finished into the world, in that great graceful shape, gliding along without oars under those huge spreads of canvas - so utterly white, like the foam on the bows! The illusion lasted until three ant-sized sailors dropped from the rigging and died.

Two drowned - a good many of the sailors on such magnificent vessels, he found out, could not swim - and one hit the deck and broke his neck. They'd fallen in their hurry not to be the last down as the shore-muster was called, for which they would have flogged with tarred and knotted ropes. He found this out by insistent questioning of the ship's officers: people become very frank, when they wish to end a subject so awkward that it's keeping them from dinner.

He solemnly acted on his resolve to remember things, and remembered this, in a crude and methodical pencilled hand. He could not help marvelling at his new power of creating words, even such words as these.

[Our protagonist takes leave of his old country and illiteracy.]


Impressions careened along like the horses themselves, wild and unstoppable. Sounds: the whoops of the troopers, bizarrely high, sounding like predatory birds; the rhythmic pounding of hooves, which made his ears search vainly for rhythm in the sounds of gunfire and cannon-shot. And sights!

Swords, everywhere, whirled overhead so that they could hardly be seen until the sun caught their sharpness; horses shot out from under their riders, tumbling to the ground with no slowing of forward motion; men crushed under horses, and unhorsed men rolling to their feet and carrying on with inhuman speed, barely distinguishable from those they pursued, their sabres looking suddenly far too large for them. And the fleeing men; the lances sticking out of their backs at perfect right-angles; the astonishment on the faces of those who had been shot and staggered for a moment, unable to realise quite what had happened as blood spread over their shirts; and those overtaken and hacked down, throwing up their hands in their last moments and clutching despairingly at their bloodied heads, in resignation, or pathetic self-defence, or to keep them on.

[This cavalry-charge paragraph happened by itself, in an attempt to get across the horrible messiness and unreality I've seen communicated by a few good films, and which can get lost under the temptation to chivalrise. But a story like this needs some big ghastly battles so in it goes. This stuff is all sketches anyway.]


In the end he fall on the dusty floor and slept there, in his clogs and rough woollen cap. He slept the incomparable sleep of the profoundly exhausted; and at last he was left alone by dreams. They left him there, deterred from waking him by a mixture of fear and sympathy - although some kind soul cleaned and righted his glasses.