Tuesday 14 June 2011

Silently and Very Fast


I'm not sure why, but one of the best and better-known poems by W.H. Auden has been on my mind recently. It may be because it's so easy to identify with that unimportant clerk (presumably pronounced the American way) scrawling on official forms, but it's that unimprovable final stanza that's been insisting on making itself felt. "Altogether elsewhere..."


The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H. Auden



9 comments:

struan said...

One of the concepts I vaguely grope at with my photographs of wilder places is the comfort that can be had from the idea of a human-free wilderness. It's not just the usual sappy nature lovers' cutesiness, but more a sense of release from responsibility - freedom through insignificance. 'Lord Jim' explores the idea thoroughly.

Auden's 'Hammerfest' is interesting as a coda - what happens when you finally come face to face with a sustaining myth.

The only thing to do is to head up to North Norway and see for yourself. It *is* a place of magic.

Mike C. said...

Struan,

Ah, yes, " Here was a place we had yet to disappoint..."

We used to know a guy, back in our college days, whose treasured vision was of a world without people. I used to think he was a head-case, a lonely, embittered sort of person, but now I see he was part of an emerging sensibility, prefigured here by Auden, in which "colonial guilt" is transmuted into a deep-green "species guilt".

I don't feel it myself, though a release from responsibility would be very welcome.

Do you know the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper, particularly his "world's edge / Atlantic basin" series? Somehow it seems a relevant sensibility.

Mike

struan said...

I have only seen Thomas Joshua Cooper's work online. I've enjoyed what I've seen, but it is also the sort of work I unpredictably, but actively, dislike when I meet it face to face.

Some of the backstory seems a little forced. There's an odd mix of the amateur LF lauding of effort and difficulty, along with a high conceptuality which adds essentially irrelevant data (the extremal points).

There are no untouched places. Conceptually and physically, we have covered all points of the compass in exhaustive detail. If nothing else, radioactive fallout and PCBs now lie as a marker layer in sediments, tree rings and peat bogs across the globe. It's one reason I draw inspiration from the odd little weeds which go on doing their thing right under our noses.

I don't dream of a people-free world. I do hope some of our descendants will be clued up enough to indict us for carelessly throwing away so much of what we inherited.

Mike C. said...

Struan,

Do you mean you've seen Cooper's prints, and not liked them? I find that hard to imagine -- he makes the most sensual monochrome prints I've ever seen, dark and richly selenium toned and beautifully accented with highlights.

I agree that the large-format heavy breathing is offputting, as well as the "one camera, one lens, one picture" schtick. I have yet to meet a major artist who wasn't in love with his/her own mythology, though.

I'm sure you don't dream of a people-free world (having kids would be a poor strategy), but there are increasing numbers of people who do -- the "animal rights" activists who kill and maim people seem often to be of that view.

I do dream of a world with far fewer people -- one where it would be a pleasure to meet a stranger. Mind you, one looks at the population stats of, say, Elizabethan London and marvels that the Black Death didn't turn Britain into a wilderness...

Mike

struan said...

I mean that I like what I've seen, but I have never seen a real print. I have radically revised my opinions of other photographers I have first met online after encountering their prints or books in the flesh, so the jury's out for now.

The judgement can go both ways. I was strangely unmoved by a set of Arnold Newman portraits, despite having admired them for years online. I loved a well-paced set of Francesca Woodman prints, despite finding her work too twee and self-absorbed when viewed en-masse on the web.

Cooper's is the sort of work that I love, *if* the mix of formal and tonal relationships clicks into place. I hope, for example, that there is more highlight detail than most of the scans I've seen in my browser. Your comments give me hope :-)

I try not to be a nimby. I am more easily depressed by how little people know of their own area. There's a prevelant tourist mentality - driving to known beauty spots and never stopping anywhere between - that precludes anything but a greatest-hits relationship with the landscape. The more people there are, the more they regress to the mean.

Mike C. said...

Struan,

Remind me never to let you see any of my prints...

As you know, I'm with you 100% on the need for "locality". I was appalled when I eavesdropped today on a coffee-time conversation about beach holidays in The Gambia! Surely soon we must impose the true costs of air travel and tourism on these airheads...

Mike

struan said...

I think you're pretty safe Mike.

Here's an nice link:

http://nrk.no/hurtigruten/?lang=en

Live broadcase (and an archive) from a complete run of the Hurtigruten coastal ferry from South to North. The sublime bits (Fjordland, Lofoten to come) are good, but even the less obviously spectacular Finnmark has a lot to offer.

You notice things when you're new in a place which you overlook once you have settled in. So I don't dislike tourist photography per se. But it does seem like deliberately cultivated ignorance to not deepen and refine those impressions if you have the chance.

Mike C. said...

Struan,

That's amazing -- truly one for the "slow time" people.

There should be more such services: the ride I used to take on the 38 bus from Dalston to Bloomsbury would be a good candidate -- similar sort of journey time ...

Mike

Mike C. said...

Struan,

Can you get BBC iPlayer in Sweden? If you can, there's a really interesting programme available at the moment about the American conception of wilderness, and the foundation of the Yellowstone National Park (and how its indian and vulpine inhabitants were cleared out to make the place safe for tourists, thus wrecking the ecosystem). Look on Thurs 16th June for "Unnatural Histories. 2".

Talking of BBC4, I've also been watching the Swedish Wallander series (with English subtitles), and will soon be fluent in phatic Swedish. Hej!

Mike