our free online supplement to

LIGHTHOUSE
ISSUE 1
lighthouse
ISSUE 1
SPRING 2013
A Journal of New Writing
Issue 8
Spring 2015
Online Supplement
Contents
Editorial 3
Prose and Poetry 6
Catherine Ayres, Michael Brown, Mel Cole, Oliver Comins, Teona Galgotiu,
Linda Kemp, Hannah Jane Walker, JDA Winslow
Features 25
Madeleine Campbell, Dan Richards
GATEHOUSE PRESS
Editors: Scott Dahlie, Andrew McDonnell, Meirion Jordan, Zoe Kingsley, Philip Langeskov,
Iain Robinson, Angus Sinclair, Jo Surzyn, Anna De Vaul, Julia Webb, Lynsey White
LIGHTHOUSE
featuring: Lorem Ipsum, Sed erat, Etiam vitae, Donec Hendrerit and more
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Special thanks to Lee Seaman and James Higham
Editorial
Meirion Jordan& Zoe Kingsley
Collaboration is / collusion / the element of conspiracy underlying
collaboration, the practice of two or more bodies — intellects plotting,
scheming and conversing. That twitching anxiety running throughout the
process of collaboration, its hint at duplicity, unnerving the collaborator as
much as the audience. (Self-) deception is vital to a collaboration working.
Collaboration is / the point represented by a cartilage plate between
femur and shin / terraces of slush-filled bags stiffened to a meta-membrane
itself stretched over ligaments / every historic symbiosis or paleo-engulfed
mitochondrial strand you’ve inherited can be the enemy / it’s as old as our
eukaryotic idea of change through divisive replication / it isn’t you within but
some body.
Collaboration is / a poke at the unacknowledged idea that friendship
is a dangerous thing. It can take form organically within coterie / the
collaborators foremost friends before framing themselves as creative partners
and players. It can seem closed as much as it is open in its potential: a folding
within the coterie’s fold. Private jokes and references come easily through
collaborative friendships / why collaborative efforts so often take the form
of hoax — take Ern Malley for example, arguably the greatest modernist poet
from the Australian literary tradition who (n)ever existed. A figure fabricated
by two poets, designed to mockingly embody the European modernist
sensibility detested by the collaborators. A poet whose literary legacy and
contribution outlives his creators, who both have subsequently faded into the
backwaters / see, this is the double-edge of collaboration, not knowing who
comes out better in the end: the collaborator or the collaboration.
Collaboration is/ your name misspelled in comic sans, email signatures
disclaiming everything / you taste the air in corporate anterooms from which
the lights buzz out at night, look carefully at the noticeboard to see if any of
these detachable paper strips mean anything to you at all / you scroll quickly
through webpages during work hours looking for Tesla’s dream of presence in
the cosmos’ electromagnetic bonds / and you interpret / handshake / smell
burnt toner and traces of china clay spooling from the copier again.
Collaboration is / indeterminate, nothing is stable: the idea and
the players are always shifting in relation to each other. It is a game where a
schema of sorts is drawn and followed, but it is also a form precariously built
3
on the notion that ‘everything is game’, even the rules themselves. It is a
tricky and tricksy thing.
Collaboration is / rejecting the deterministic individual / filling
Wordsworth’s stolen boat with imaginary friends / like all premodern objects
these things are subject to the statistical tendency toward mutation / a means
of conjuring others, as with ichneumon wasps — if you feel that something is
ever laying eggs in your brain just remember — you won’t fill up that Dunbar
number by yourself / that may or may not be yourself /
Collaboration is /play. ‘Will you play with me?’ Who asks this? One
future collaborator to another or several others? The text to the reader? Both
so earnest. And that is why /
Collaboration is / twin-stick shooters as you lean into the bright red
plastic to find the point where the microswitch clicks into ‘fire’ / splitting the
controls on a DDR machine to get out of the hot sun / as in every closeddown arcade you remember how you / watch the little lines of ships dance and
intersect, aware that you’ve only got two lives remaining, the smooth bakelite
in your hand picking up heat from the last person to roll pound coins down
the slot.
Collaboration is /risk. Risk of exposure between the players (one
finding out about the other: ‘Ha, I knew you were just as much of a fraud as
me!’) and exposure to the audience, of what collaboration does / of its very
open process and performance. Are you convinced? Did we deceive well? Did
the risk pay off?
Collaboration is / Risk / neither co-op nor coin-op / hamming
your way across Azeroth unfamiliar with the social dynamics and the complex
interaction of class-based play / the taste of another person’s sincerity.
Collaboration is / diffusion. Diffusion of voice. Take this editorial
for example; can you detect who is speaking?
Collaboration is / saying no / no / no / not yet / yes. Returning to
no as a desired end-state.
Collaboration is / an acknowledgment of the text, the creation
being a thing in itself. Through the diffusion of voice, there is an implicit
redundancy made of it, except for the ‘voice’ of the ‘text’ . The work defies a
stable and essentilised authorship. It splinters. It has no origin. Where does
the conception of the collaboration come? Who expelled the grit of the idea?
‘Who’ and ‘where’ cannot be determined.
Collaboration is/ knowing how many ways a thing can be made —
knowing that you do not have to choose between them.
Collaboration is / a bastard, in many senses of the word, acknowledged
or unacknowledged, depending on the social policy of its collaborators. Some
will deceive, dress it up, smooth out the ridges of its labour, claim parentage
4
and present it to the audience as the product of a successful and destined
coupling. The truth is fidelity throughout conception and performance of the
collaboration isn’t guaranteed between collaborators — we’re an unfaithful
and flaky bunch. Nothing is intentional; everything is accidental.
Collaboration is / refusing the palimpsest tradition . Balancing overwriting with underwriting.
Collaboration is / potential. A potential always beckoning toward
the concept or performance. Potential is an optimist’s idea of risk.
Collaboration is / the two poles of a collapsed giant oscillating
under gravity’s pressure. Mass being drawn in also from elsewhere. Formation
is likely under a nova condition, or, as in the binary situation, longstanding
forces altering rotation periods to create tide-locked facing partnerships,
crater lakes, comet-catching surfaces of all kinds / at night the twin radio
beams light up telescopes situated on only that angelic pinpoint, goldilocks.
Collaboration is / a form of ego-escapism, or an attempt at such
a thing. We all need an Ern Malley to transfer our narcissism and selfloathing onto.
Collaboration does / what the creative process only scavenges for. Its
own built-in audience, the desire to be less creative than your neighbourhood.
It’s the rejection of the fantasy of inspiration, as when you look at this page
and try to separate its voices in the belief that its particles encode some kind
of structure. Well, um, not.
Collaboration does / what the creative process is. It’s the externalization
of inspiration bouncing between the players. It is a performance — private
and public — of the processual, the productive and unproductive, the time
wastage and failures experienced before reaching The Collaboration, which
runs ahead, and leaves the players and spectators chasing after it. Have you
caught up yet?
5
Prose
and
Poetry
Catherine Ayres
The patience of small objects
The urchin fossilised next to my bed has forgotten the sea;
it splays across its own weight, spines flowering over stone.
The paperweights on the windowsill hold down nothing but
shadows; they swallow weak light, let it soften their lurid hearts.
And the snow globe you gave me still remembers Paris; finds
its voice upside down, the Eiffel Tower glittering in the dark.
7
Oliver Comins
Kitchenware
I
A leg-bone consommé, stripped of fat,
promotes clarity, leaving us with more
options for the next course. Bon viveurs
might also be pleased with a gentle start,
wanting more than ritual meat and veg.
II
This was not intended for a fridge magnet,
nor was it designed with such a graphic
flourish in mind. Words have shapes —
may become cherished motifs or ornaments
whose subtle knots adapt continuously.
8
9
Hannah Jane Walker
I remember when the pub was full of old men
That comic Trebor shift
absolute stress.
I have this old fashioned phone until June
that is what I was clumsily trying to say, lets just
take this idea and really run with it, these days a kindle,
an average man on an island, they don’t know what they want to
achieve
face it, things that attack people.
When I was going to go to university 1981,
a well thought of college Jesuit,
I didn’t know anyone from my cohort.
Did you ever teach, day it was
and hard to get divorced, nowadays,
so many factors. So many after school programmes,
yes I understand, my wife being an alcoholic.
That’s just the way it is.
Social services, not not very good
Ive got a long way to go down
I didn’t sleep for an hour.
Right, right, she went to France
worked for a legal firm and now she’s not teaching French
and I really respect her.
If he steps out of line I think fair enough.
Most kids his age. I come back to that.
It’s a hard way of saying the facts,
your point of view, is chasing a hard arse with kids.
I’m going to give up my job and get my pension paid.
My youngest daughter is a teacher, a temporary job
in this sophisticated society, we love with the causes we’ve got.
Reason No. 27
10
Linda Kemp
From Archival Suite
Archive of the Archive
Footage properly generating space inaugurates palimpsest evidence
of tributaries
loosely associated contrasts contrive to bend
this interdisciplinary
collation of positive images
into
curation of potlatch & Special Brew
immediate survivors consume sad & lonely
reminiscence strategic processions
remain fetishistic a tribute to
& confident enough
standing committees proceed like the collector
need not compilation
driving
everything else is just
words &
whatnot gathering
yields further evidence & the detective
s/he walks
episodic &
imagination. A last crutch hidden in
family wardrobes & pacing it out through the go-slow to no-go.
Watch out on that watch.
11
Archive of Achievement
Ectopic filing is melodramatic
identities fragmenting & scattering as though
ever yielding evidence
traces & truth believe to die to search
a corner of identity blossoming beyond the public dream
detail declares everything as words. It’s never been so silent
saliency offers in the end
declares video-footage void & street smart
s/he steps forward into futurology
a defunct myth floundering like ethnography
beneath a leaky pen or RSI. Specificities languish
together warding declarations
O provisional facets and metadata files certification.
you.
If I could rubber-stamp
12
how this moment
Michael Brown
O Mistress Mine
And round about then
how he might have looked
more closely at her
too much she had talked
and at length
taught him at the Walker
of the shade in things
what he hadn’t known
was there.
How her hair was more
than a blackness then
and there were words
and outside the sheer
exhilaration of rain
and then the cold music
of her scent, its fingerprints
of tempera, amber
reliquary.
13
JDA Winslow
Parallelogram
‘I am no longer able to find skinny, blonde, neurotic, American girls who
smoke attractive,’ thought the protagonist, as the skinny, blonde, neurotic
American girl went outside to smoke, in a manner she had copied from her
(my) on screen heroes.
She announces to me, in a proud and forthright manner, that she is going
to smoke, as if asserting, ‘I am an adult, I can do what I like.’ Her tone is
reminiscent of that of a child who has just mastered the fine art of shitting in
toilets.
She sits down next to me. I have never found skinny, blonde, neurotic
American girls who smoke attractive. I feel a certain obligation to, though.
The words CULTUR E INDUSTRY flash up in my visual cortex as I carry
out a fidelity-favouring comparison between her tits and my girlfriend’s.
Extrapolating from the slight rise of her dress, I would posit her as a dead
coral skeleton in my (sea)bed compared to my partner’s soft sea slug. I have,
however, felt remarkably at ease since Burt #2 sat down next to me.
I am calling her Burt because gender is a construct. I am calling her
Burt #2 because Burt is how we are going to refer to the skinny, blonde,
neurotic, American girl who smoked, had bigger tits, and jumped out of a
window. I suppose we could examine defenestration as the ultimate act of
deterritorialization. We are all very intellectual.
Gothic Nun, Burt #2’s companion for the evening, will later confess to me
that she feels oddly friendly with me, due to my resemblance to one of her
other friends. Burt #2 is eating seafood. Her friend is, too. Everyone at the
table is eating seafood apart from us. I bring up the intelligence of octopodes
and our protagonist relates it to the table:
‘They’re actually as intelligent as your average pet dog.’
‘What?’
14
‘Octopus.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeh, really, I read an article about it.’
‘Hummmph.’
No one is really that keen to talk because they are all too busy eating what now
appears to our protagonist as small, many-tailed puppies, battered. I try and
reassure our protagonist by envisaging within the visual cortex a scenario in
which we team up with a research group, creating a popular online-only series
entitled ‘Your New Best Friends’, in which octopodes gracefully navigate
mazes, segregate tastefully-coloured balls into aesthetically stimulating
patterns and retrieve locally-sourced snacks from carefully scrubbed perspex
corners. The whole thing, I say softly, would be shot with deadpan camerawork
and ambient electronica, each tonal shift correlating with the visual bourdon
of a slowly spinning sphere.
Burt #2 offers me seafood repeatedly. I decline then tell her I am vegetarian.
This happens a number of times. The final time I think it really sinks in
because:
‘My brother, he’s like really into raw. You know raw? It’s like vegan but
nothing’s cooked, right? And like we went to this raw vegan restaurant in New
York and I mean the food was good but I mean by the end of the meal, jesus
we all needed to fucking shit. Like you know, it’s basically just nuts, they go
straight fucking through you.’
Burt #2 will repeatedly express to us that she needs to write something down.
She will repeatedly show our protagonist her notebook and say that it is full,
and that she hasn’t got a pen, and that she meant to bring her other one,
but, she brought this one! Because! Well, it has her list of Italian Phrases in
it that Marco taught her. There is a close-up shot of ciao, hi, grazie, thank
you. She closes her book. She enacts a smile that has been air-freighted into
her face. Burt would do a similar smile, or at least, at that moment, with Burt
#2’s teeth bared, it seems like something Burt could have done. Certainly
there is something similar in the later hang-dog face, like they were both
underexposed to emotions during their childhood and had to learn them,
endless video clips of how to interact properly. Video tutorials on how to feel
sad, or happy.
15
‘This fucking bitch, this fucking bitch…’
says Burt #2 to Gothic Nun, ‘this fucking bitch.’
We don’t know if they are joking, but, overall, this is nothing new, and certainly
not something unique to us. Gothic Nun confides with our protagonist that:
‘Lately, you know, lately, we’ve been fighting.’
Our protagonist nods sagely because we are a little drunk and we are walking
over a bridge and the city is beautiful at night.
‘We’ve just known each other for so long.’
I nod sagely.
Before this, in a bar, they were fighting. Gothic Nun is allowed to be sad (we
are all entitled to our emotions). Her friend fell off a building. She enters
story-telling mode, giving us a little flourish with a de-olived stick from her
drink, slowing her voice down, vowels dragging out:
‘I meeaan, theere wee weere god knoows whyyy wee’d gone. We weere both,
no not her, someone else, we weere both in thiis beautifull apaartment and
these two goorgeouus gaay guys came in, and they, I mean theey just did thiis
peerfoormance annd god, it was goood. And aafterwaaards I just weent up
and I told him and....’
‘I remember,’ says Burt #2, staking her claim to the anecdote. She leans onto
the table and waves her own tobacco-filled baton. ‘It was when you were in
New York. You were staying with me. I remember you saying to me once you’d
got back how good it was.’
‘Oh yeh,’ fending her off with the sharpened stick. ‘Yeh, I remember. Weeell,
anyway, that was when I met him. And then the other day I saw that he’d
fallen out of a building.’
‘Deliberately?’
‘No, no, not deliberately, I mean I don’t know what happened. I think it was
an accident.’
‘That happened to my friend. But I mean, they did it deliberately.’ Burt #2
says it quietly, like she knows she’s stolen my line, words smuggled out from
16
behind the cigarette. I don’t think anyone hears it apart from me. I don’t
know what to do. I pull my phone out and draft some tweets.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Depressipice: brink of depression
Best friends bringing up argument
Talking about your childhood experiences that involve no one else
‘Almost transcendental’
Talk us through your next performance piece
‘hot daddy is q guy’
6 year old daughter of hot daddy
Burt #2:
‘Hot Daddy.’
‘She calls him Hot Daddy because he’s got a six year old daughter.’
‘Yeh, she had sex with this guy, hot daddy, and she did it with...’
‘No! Shut up.’
‘What? I don’t know why you’re like this? I think you should be proud. I
wanna do it.’
I’m conspiratorial with Burt #2. She assures me she will tell me later. I feel
like the revelation could be the crux of the story. My guess is strap-on or
hooker.
‘I really don’t know why you’re being like this. I mean anyway, I am a great
wingman for her . Like the other night, you remember, right?
‘Yeh.’
‘Like, it was kind of funny because she was all like, having to pretend to be
like into this other guy.’
‘And she was like, I really like this guy.’
‘Yeh, that’s right, like, you were supposed to be my fucking wingman. Bitch.’
‘I know, but I mean, it just happened.’
17
‘Yeh, so then I had to like cosy up to this fucking creep so she could get laid...
and then I pretended I was a lesbian and that she was my girlfriend, so I was
like crying, and pretending I was upset that she was getting with this guy, and
then he was trying to comfort me, and like being all like, let’s go back to my
place, you can sleep there it’ll be ok so like I went back and I got into his bed
and he kept touching me and I was like fuck off stop touching me, I’m not
going to have sex with you.’
‘That was another time though, wasn’t it?’
‘What? Yeh, I don’t know. It was a different time.’
‘Yeh, that was like, before we were here, yeh?’
‘Yeh, so like anyway, I mean Gothic got laid, and she’d been moody the
whole trip. What? Come on! Don’t give me that look, you needed it. The next
morning was fun, I mean come on, he was a nice guy. Yeh, they were both
like, t-shirt designers so we both stole like three t-shirts, and then like...’
T-shirt designers are definitely a sign of our cultural malaise.
‘Yeh, like, afterwards the guy came out and was like, do you want a t-shirt?
and we were like yeh...’
‘Yeh, so we both left wearing these t-shirts with like another three in our
bags.’
When I attempt to recall this I struggle to separate Burt #1 and Burt
# 2, although I am, objectively speaking, aware of a number of statistical
differences.
1.
An age gap of six years (in terms of the difference in age that would
be present if Burt #1 were still alive).
2. An undetermined number of cup sizes.
3. A geographical distance of around two thousand miles (childhood
homes)
4. A geographical distance of one thousand, three hundred and sixty
nine miles (the distance from the city in which our protagonist meets
Burt #2 to the city in whose environs I believe Burt#1 to be buried.
(Her parents did not wish for me to be at her funeral. I envisage
the line that passes from the central cavity of Burt #1’s skull to the
central cavity of Burt #2’s skull. I imagine her skull is still there,
18
unless she was cremated, but I seem to remember seeing a photo of
the headstone on Facebook)).
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously
holding two or more conflicting cognitions, for example sex outside marriage
as a sinful thing versus sex anywhere as an enjoyable thing. I assumed Burt’s
virgin mary was ironic.
We are walking through the city in the beautiful night.
Gothic Nun: ‘We’ve just known each other for so long.’
‘Yeh,’
‘We’re becoming like sisters.’
‘Yeh.’
‘I mean, you know how it is...’
‘Yeh.’
‘...with best friends. Sometimes you know, you’re just not on the same page,
like now.’ Her hand flaps at the slender silhouette of Burt #2, who is walking
with all the sombre grace of a heron. ‘But I mean, that’s good, like it gives
you the opportunity to check in, to make sure you haven’t lost touch with who
you really are...’
We remind our protagonist that our mind is a swinging door. The best policy
is just to watch them. We make a note of what passes. On our return journey
the group is slowly fragmenting. I still need to find the crux of the story. I
allow the rest of the group to drift gently into the night and keep pace with
our inebriated wader, hoping to find out more about Gothic Nun and Hot
Daddy. Burt #2, though, is speaking in a circuitous manner, words stuck in
orbit around some unguessed-at emotional centre, until:
‘So like, what’s your thing? You said you’re like studying art? So you like,
make art?’
Thinks I: It doesn’t I think matter what I tell her. She won’t remember. I
decide to be honest.
19
‘I write.’
‘Really? Cool, cool.’
‘Yeh.’
‘That’s cool.’
‘I dunno.’
‘Excuse me, sorry, do you know where we are? We’re looking for this hotel.’
The newcomer hands me a piece of paper. The hotel is behind us, in the same
direction the group has appeared from, their alleyway running at a slight
angle to ours before this convergence.
‘Yeh, it’s back there, I think.’
‘How far?’
‘I don’t know, I mean I guess five or ten minutes. I don’t really know where
it is.’
‘Well, do you know where we can get a taxi?’
‘I mean there’s a vaporetto stop that way, just by Rialto.’
‘No, they want a water taxi. Don’t you? They mean a water taxi.’
‘Yeh, no, just like a regular taxi.’
‘Like, I don’t know. I guess there’s water taxis near Rialto. I don’t know.
They’re really expensive, though.’
‘No, we just want a taxi, like a regular taxi.’
Me and Burt #2 look at each other. I feel like I am announcing a death:
‘You can’t get a taxi. There’s no cars here.’
‘What?’
20
The group performs a loose, frustrated dance, shaking their backpacks at
each other. Our protagonists hustle them down the alleyway, and into the
square, and indicate one of many signs showing the route to Rialto Bridge.
Once they are across the square and down the cut we laugh. We continue to
laugh. The conversation we have for the rest of the walk is a joyful, superior
post-mortem of the Canadian tourists’ ignorance.
‘Like, you were just like, there’s no cars here and then they all just like,
moaned, like collectively’
‘Haha, yeh, I know, I felt bad.’
‘Oh my god! No don’t feel bad! But I like, I mean I felt sorry for them. One
of them like, while you were giving directions like, one of them was saying
they got off at the wrong train station. Like, they got off at the one on the
mainland. Oh my god. That was so funny.’
‘Haha, yeh, yeh, it was funny.’
We round a corner. Gothic Nun is waiting there, along with the other
characters. They are talking. As we approach Burt #2 explains what happened.
Once we are assimilated into the group we all begin to say goodbye to
each other.
‘Bye Jonny. Bye. Oh Jonny, we’re never going to see each other again.’
21
22
Rosie Breese
Damp
Our flat was always damp,
pre-soaked with some coming flood.
Mushrooms poked up between the tiles.
Their domes were closed eyelids.
Their gills were matted lashes.
Mould became our constellation.
Mould on the ceiling, mould in the folds
of the shower curtain, in the folds
of our skin: marks
that at first we couldn’t read.
23
Teona Galgotiu
,
blow out
i can hear a woman singing
i climbed on my window
tried to record it
it’s a poor recording
some men joined her
loud men
the inability of doing something to get closer to her
is maddening
i could go out on the street
searching for them
i’m afraid of something don’t know what
i don’t want to find out they are not real
it’s almost certain they exist
i can feel them close
the loud men sing an unusual happy birthday
i checked my head for a contusion
i want to blow out candles
24
Features
Madeleine Campbell
Chanting the Absent One: Mohammed Dib’s ‘La danseuse bleue’
Paradoxically, although literary translation can be intensely solitary, it is also
in constant dialogue. Through my work I have asked countless questions of a
writer I have never met, the Algerian Francophone poet Mohammed Dib. My
conversations with Dib draw in a multitude of other interlocutors: the poet’s
friends and contemporaries, the authors he liked to read, literary critics,
historians, philosophers. Some are silent, others are responsive, the extent
of their presence or absence determined by their distance in time, space,
or language.
Sometimes my queries are rewarded with a more material presence,
as with Habib Tengour, who knew Dib well and posthumously curated his
poetry collections. I met Habib at the Café de l’Institut on a balmy spring day in
2011, a stone’s throw from the river Seine and across from the Institut du Monde
Arabe. There, Habib led me through the landscape of Dib’s poetics, patiently
explaining references that had eluded me as I began to make sense of Dib’s
work and the long shadows cast on it by his Maghrebi heritage.
I learned, for example, of the significance of the Aurès Mountains,
a symbol of resistance against the French colonists, in Dib’s first poetry
collection Ombre Gardienne (Guardian Shadow, 1961); I learned that though
his first language was Arabic, Dib had always written in French. His verse
sometimes turned to the Arabic heritage of pre-Islamic poetry, sometimes
to the medieval Arabo-Andalusian Sufism of his native Tlemcen in NorthWestern Algeria. Dib spoke English and acted as interpreter for the Americans
in Algeria during WW II; when I remarked on the parallels in style between
To the Lighthouse and Dib’s early short story Le Talisman, published in 1966,
Habib confirmed that Dib ‘was very fond of Virginia Woolf ’ and found ‘Le
monde Anglo-Saxon’ of great interest.
Habib later helped source the Arabic translation of Dib’s 1996
poetry collection L’Aube Ismaël (Dawn Ismaël). In the Preface to Dib’s Œuvres
Complètes (Complete Works, 2007), Habib elucidates Dib’s exploration of the story
of Ismaël:
The intimate mixes with political reality; it is about the
Palestinian Intifada, with a clear engagement from the author.
26
However, instead of focusing on the dramatic events of the
Palestinian uprising, —above all the children, facing bullets
with rocks—, the poet scales back to the mythical origins of
the conflict: the abandonment of Hagar and her son Ismaël in
the desert. (my translation)
I initially took up this invitation to, in Habib’s words, ‘rememorate’ a story
remote in time, place and culture in May 2013 at The Hunterian in Glasgow
with the installation Ha‫ج‬ar and the An‫ج‬el. This was a multimodal translation
of Dawn Ismaël’s opening poem ‘Hagar aux cris’ (Ha‫ج‬ar Awakens), developed in
collaboration with sonic artists Bethan Parkes and sculptor Birthe Jørgensen.
Initially, we wanted to convey the overwhelming sense of ‘desert-ness’ in
Dib’s poetics, but also to give a strong sense of location and engagement.
Birthe’s sculpture created a semi-transparent, floating wall around a low
platform, isolating the viewer from the rest of the gallery space but facing
an oil painting by Scottish artist John Runciman, titled Hagar and the Angel
(c. 1766). Bethan recorded the sounds of a hailstorm on the Isle of Arran and
mixed these granular textures with recordings of the poem in Scottish, Arabic
and French voices into an atmospheric soundscape. This created a fragmented
experience of the poem, shaped by shifting ‘sound dunes’ emanating from
speakers arranged at the four corners of the 3m x 3m platform. The resulting
effect was that the poem was perceptible intermittently and accessible only
through the language(s) of the listener.
Through the juxtaposition of Dib’s poem and Runciman’s painting,
separated from each other by over 200 years but inspired by the same biblical
tale, we wanted viewers to create their own narrative experience in the context
of a contemporary gallery space. It was also a means of engaging with a poet
whose oeuvre has been described by his publishers Albin Michel as ‘a hymn to
cultural exchange’.
At the time of developing this installation I was also helping to
organise the UK launch at the CCA in Glasgow of the University of California
Book of North African Literature, for which I had translated several poems from
Mohammed Dib’s Ombre Gardienne. The book’s editors Pierre Joris and Habib
Tengour were scheduled to speak at the launch of Ha‫ج‬ar and the An‫ج‬el. Pierre
had travelled from the USA, but as an Algerian national Habib required a
visa to visit the UK. Though the application had been submitted months in
advance, the British Consular Services in Paris didn’t come through in time.
Pierre spoke for both in his introduction:
In Habib’s work the term ‘exile’ is already mentioned often
and if that was translated into Arabic it would probably come
to the term that is central here, Hagar, the name. I myself
27
published a book called h.j.r., which is the trilateral of the
word, the root of the word that gives the word exile. I also have
it [tattooed] here on my arm and it is of course that first word
in Habib’s book Exile is my Trade and it is the first word, with
a vowel insert, of the poem Hagar so that means the [term]
Hagar means the one who goes into the desert, the one lost,
the one exiled, and so on, so it is a very strong word that really
moves a lot of materials mentally, psychically, spiritually, and
it is that sense of being on the way, being in Sufi stations or, as
the poet Emir [Abdelkader] just said, being on whatever way
you want to deal with your travels.
‘h.j.r., Ha‫ج‬ar, hejira’… I had used the isolated Arabic character ‫( ج‬variously
transliterated as jeem, jīm or jiim) to indicate the Standard Arabic pronunciation
of the ‘g’ sound in ‘Hagar’, which is comparable to the ‘g’ in ‘Angel’ and
differs from its pronunciation in French and English. But listening to Pierre
outline the genealogy of the name, the sense in the sounds enriched my
understanding of the poem. Hagar as single mother, Ismaël as fatherless son,
stand for every person who is displaced, in exile or migration, on a journey or
hejira. Hagar is the exiled, her son Ismaël is the ‘SNP’ (‘sans nom patronymique’)
in Dib’s Simorgh (2003), the fatherless son Omar in Dib’s early novel La Grande
Maison (1952) who questions the notion of fatherland, a recurring theme in
Dib’s work.
I had originally asked Habib to read Dib’s poem ‘Hagar aux cris’ in
French and Arabic, to be followed by my reading in English. The delay in
obtaining his visa was ironic in the context of the theme of the poem and
installation, which confront questions of fear, distrust and ‘othering’. In
the event we were extremely fortunate that multidisciplinary artist Nicole
Peyrafitte, who runs Cabaret Hérétique in New York, was available following
her performance with Pierre at the CCA launch.
Nicole kindly accepted my invitation to make a guest appearance and
I felt sure her participation would counteract the hirtherto solitary nature of
my translation project. With only a couple of hours before the launch, we sat
down in the lobby of their B&B, the sun shining on us through the trees on
the Great Western Road, and set to developing a loose score for an impromptu
performance. We barely had time for one read-through, but Nicole turned to
me at the end of it and said: ‘C’est une pièce’ (we have a performance [score]).
I have limited experience of reading my translations in public, but her
enthusiasm and confidence were infectious.
Together we decided on a joint performance of the third of four
‘movements’ in the collection (as Habib describes the structure of Dawn Ismaël),
entitled ‘La danseuse bleue’ (The Blue Dancer). We wanted to give a sense of
28
the alternately fluid and jarring rhythm of the original poem, the contrasting
styles and changes of register, the sounds and internal rhyme of his free verse,
while making the English version accessible to what was primarily an Englishspeaking audience. As we tried out varying combinations of spoken and sung
fragments for the performance score, the distinction between ‘source’ and
‘target’ languages became more fluid.
We hadn’t rehearsed Nicole’s vocalizations, nor the use of the
platform — we originally thought we’d perform at the lectern where the
speeches were made for the launch. At the last minute Nicole suggested: what
if we were to take this onto the stage of the installation? It was an unexpected,
almost uncomfortable jolt; but it was an apposite reflection of the poem and
installation’s sense of being on a journey or hejira. So after the speeches and
drinks, we invited the audience to join this journey. The viewers arranged
themselves around the platform. Many ended up behind the semi-transparent
walls and could only make out our silhouettes (I only became fully aware of
this later, when Pierre showed us a video he had taken through the dustsheets,
slowly circling with his hand-held iPhone lens round and round the
outside perimeter).
The performance opened with Nicole improvising in song the first
nine tercets in French. Using her voice as an instrument, in the manner of
John Cage’s 1958 ‘Aria’, she sang a capella over the granular texture of the
soundscape. Rather like the aesthetic that dictated the juxtaposition of Merce
Cunningham’s choreographic compositions with John Cage’s music at the
moment of performance, Nicole’s voice found a further juxtaposition with the
installation, forming a sort of multi-sensory collage. It was a haunting singsong, alternately melodious or clipped, stretching assonances and catching
alliterations — as in the following tercet where, addressing a bird (mon oiseau),
her voice scaled abruptly up and down in a bird-like vocalization, stressing the
vowel sounds:
Mon nuage, mon oiseau
Vois comme d’un seul envol
Tu m’as tout volé.
The sudden imperative to improvise through movement as well as voice
changed my perspective of the poem in unexpected ways. For the time being,
however, uncertain of where to stand or what to do on the platform, I hesitated
for a moment, then followed with my spoken recitation of the same tercets in
English. It felt natural to keep walking, slowly, and together we fell into a
sort of pacing motion, weaving in and out of each other’s space within the
virtual boundaries of the platform.
We then started to play on the many sound and sense relations between
29
French and English, layering words and lines by speaking them simultaneously:
‘nord’/North, ‘sud’/South, ‘est’/East, ‘ouest’/West, ‘couleurs’/colours, ‘cris’/
cries, ‘fête’/feast, ‘Danse’/Dance, as in the following fragment. Nicole’s
(French) voice is marked in bold font on the performance score:
Source Text:
Je me fais perchoir
À oiseaux : il en vient
Du nord comme du sud,
De l’ouest comme de l’est
Et battement d’ailes suis
Et ne suis que couleurs,
Fête, ne vis
Que de cris.
Danse,
Je ne danse que pour toi,
Garçon à l’odeur de figuier.
Performance Score:
I become a resting post
For the birds: they fly in
nord
sud
From the North and the South
est
ouest
From the East and the West
And I am lost in the beat of the wings
couleurs
And I am all colour,
Fête
Feast, you shall feed
cris
Only on cries.
Danse
Dance
Danse
I dance for you alone,
Boy with the scent of the fig tree.
30
Dib’s poetry is a mix of voices, with abrupt changes in tone and perspective,
a dialogic style I find difficult to translate without labouring its aesthetic
quality. I thought the next stanza, for example, would bring us closer to his
poetics if I perceived it as a bilingual chorus: in the following Nicole spoke the
first unit in French, I spoke the next in English, providing alternation without
translation except for the words ‘Rossignol / lui’ in the two penultimate lines,
which were spoken simultaneously in English and French (this sequence can
be followed by zigzagging between the English and French versions below,
following the bold font).
A conventional approach to the translation might leave the proper
noun Rossignol untranslated, and the subsequent object pronoun ‘lui’ (an
abrupt change in perspective) would be more elegant as ‘he’ than ‘him’ in
English; the performance licensed us to both voice the translated noun
‘Nightingale’ and retain the othering form of the pronoun ‘lui’ as ‘him’,
foregrounded by changes in tone and slight caesurae (marked by vertical lines)
on either side.
Performance Score:
Ce que rouge rougeoyant,
Piquée pas sa mère
Je n’ai pu attraper,
Ce qui tête de serpent
Ne pique pas,
Ce qui meule sur meule
Ne moud pas.
Ce qu’emporte le vent.
Ce qui vieillard chenu
Se plaint quand Rossignol
|Lui,| meurt en chantant.
That which red erubescent,
Stung by her mother
I could not catch,
That which head of a serpent
Does not sting,
That which millstone upon millstone
Does not mill.
That which the wind carries off.
That which, hoar-ridden elder
Whines even as Nightingale,
|Him,| sings his last breath.
I spoke the next two stanzas in English. Nicole insistently repeated in French
the words in bold, her jarring interruptions reflecting the upheaval, loss and
questioning that arise from enforced exile: the homing pigeon (‘pigeon’) who
transforms into a raven (‘corbeau’), the past that is beyond reach, like the
country left behind (‘passé’, ‘pays’), the bittersweet ambivalence and dangerous
lure, perhaps, of newfound freedoms (blazing (face)/‘(visage de) brasier’,
burn/‘brûle’), the loss inherent in any gain (found/‘trouvé’, lost/‘perdu’).
31
Source Text:
Ce qui pigeon,
Vienne la nuit, se fait
Corbeau sous la lune,
Le passé ne serait-il
Plus qu’un autre pays?
Visage de brasier
Où toute chose brûle
À trop s’en approcher,
Qu’ont-ils donc trouvé
Ceux qui t’ont perdu ?
Performance Score:
As the homing pigeon, pigeon
Come nightfall, turns
Raven in the moonlight, corbeau
Could the past be nothing passé
Now but an other place? pays
Blazing face brasier
In whom all things burn brûle
For flying too close,
What is it they found trouvé
The ones who lost you? perdu
I led the two penultimate stanzas, which again reminded me of a chorus in
several voices, in English. In the first of these stanzas Nicole maintained the
choral element by repeatedly whispering in French the diegetic line ‘Il y a
une histoire qui se raconte’ (In this moment a story is told). Our score developed
(unplanned) echoes of how the chorus in a Greek tragedy prefigures its
catharsis: ‘Already, the sea has come crashing’. This prepared the way for the
redemptive appearance of Hagar, undefeated, who ‘spells this dance over and
over’, ‘the dance become sea’. Nicole half-spoke, half-chanted the incantatory
‘Hagar toujours rebelle’ (Tireless Ha‫ج‬ar rebel) throughout the second stanza as I
recited the English verses.
32
Source Text:
Les mains, feuilles tendues
Au-dessus d’un feu invisible,
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
Déjà, la mer est là renversée
Et il n’y a que feu répandu.
Ce qui avance là,
Hagar toujours rebelle
Et qui multiplie le movement
Hagar toujours rebelle,
La danse faite mer.
Performance Score:
Her hands, an offering of leaves
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
Reach for a fire unseen,
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
In this moment a story is told.
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
Already, the sea has come crashing
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
And nothing remains but spreading flames.
Relentless advance,
Hagar toujours rebelle,
Tireless Ha‫ج‬ar, rebel
Hagar toujours rebelle,
And she spells this dance over and over
Hagar toujours rebelle,
Tireless Ha‫ج‬ar, rebel
Hagar toujours rebelle,
This dance become sea.
I spoke the final stanza of the poem in English and Nicole closed with an
improvisation of the French tercet in song in a slow, insistent, vowel-rich
enunciation, marking and separating the syllables of the final word (é-bloui-ssante — which sounded like ‘ay-blue-ee-ss-aunt’ — thus ending with a recall
of the ‘blue’ in the poem’s title). Interspersing preceding words with shhh
33
sounds, she echoed and handed back to the installation’s soundscape, which
had been running in the background from the beginning of the performance.
Who would upstage her,
Who would banish her,
Sombre, resplendent?
Qui l’en délogerait,
Qui l’en chasserait,
Sombre, éblouissante ?
***
Staging a collaborative performance of ‘The Blue Dancer’ on the platform of
the installation added a new sense to the poem: instead of source and target
being read in sequence, the English version provided a dynamic counterpoint
to the aural qualities of the source text (sound, rhythm, musicality), expressing
an experience quite distinct from reading each text in isolation.
Further, as intonation, rhythm and movement can change with each
performance, I feel that through this medium some element of the transient
quality of translation can be shared in real time with the audience. In the
performance of ‘La danseuse bleue’, this effect echoed the viewers’ prior
experience of the installation, where perceptions of the soundscape differed
depending on the participants’ varying attention span as they tuned in and
out of the soundscape’s transient sounds, voices and languages. In this way
the act of performing effectively changes the script to a living score, where
certain elements are fixed (the words and syntax of the poem) and others
are open to degrees of freedom for the performer(s) — as, for example, in
their gestures and movement, or the timbre and intensity of a vowel, in the
unscripted dimensions of intensity, pause, duration.
In this particular event, the additional opportunity to perform the
piece in French and English afforded the possibility of bringing the original
poem to the fore through the layering of lines and words in both languages.
We improvised on these ‘degrees of freedom’, but I imagine we could equally
have planned them in advance — time constraints dictating it would be the
former. In a bi- or multilingual performance, both recited and sung, the most
culturally determined elements of meaning-making can be left indeterminate
to provide a richer sonic and semantic experience than a static, definitive,
representation of the poem in the target language could on the page. Such
improvisation allows for the process of Derrida’s ‘différance’, or deferred
meaning, to operate in collaboration with a live audience.
34
***
After the launch, I revisited the experience of performing in canon with
Nicole, listening to the recorded performance. I was struck by the incantatory
nature of the sound elle; this revelation was so insistent that I ultimately
redrafted my initial translation to reflect this.
In the penultimate stanzas I had rendered the epithet ‘rebelle’ as
the verb ‘rebel’ in English with a stress on the second syllable, but this was
primarily to provide a sound rhyme with the French word. The English ear
is accustomed to the French pronunciation and meaning of the word belle and
some may also perceive a subtext in the sense of re-belle (beautiful again). On
re-reading the entire poem in French, however, I also noted the pervasive
nature of the sound elle in its folding and unfolding within French vocables.
Searching the literature on Arabic roots for a clue, I found that, just as
the trilateral h.j.r. described by Pierre ‘moves a lot of materials mentally,
psychically, spiritually’, the sound elle relates to the trilateral ‫( ع ل ل‬reading
from right to left, the isolated Arabic characters, ‘ayn, lam, lam’). French
scholar and Islamologist Louis Massignon transliterates these roots as ‘ ‘.L.L.’
and associates them with the Arabic word ‘illāh, or deity.
In the light of this reading I returned to my translation in order
to reflect this sound and its metonyms. That this poem is about a feminine
entity is revealed in the title: it might have been more accurate to translate
‘La danseuse bleue’ as ‘The Female Blue Dancer’ or the ‘The Blue She-Dancer’,
given the feminine form of the noun ‘danseuse’ (as opposed to the male form
‘danseur’). Further, elle stands for the feminine subject pronoun ‘she’, which
in this poem could refer back to Hagar, but also to a feminine noun: in one
instance, as we shall see, ‘elle’ refers to ‘la danse’ (the dance). The French
homonym ‘aile’ means ‘wing’, thus adding to the polysemic layering in this
poem that opens with an ‘hirondelle’ (swallow; my emphasis).
To add a further spiritual dimension, the shift from the first to third
person feminine singular in ‘The Blue Dancer’ could indicate the loss of self
characteristic of a dervish trance, as the Algerian academic Sari Ali Hikmet
suggested in Synergies Algérie:
Suddenly, the ‘I’ disappears, as in a dance of dervishes, and
the absent will appear, the GHAIB [The Absent One] in the
form of the third person singular. In a state of ecstasy, the
dervishes say or cry out: him: Houa, in order to then say the
supreme truth: She, Hya. (my translation)
The Dibian scholar Beïda Chikhi traces the progression of the Arabic radical
‫ع ل ل‬, which she transliterates as ‘el’, in women’s names throughout Dib’s
35
works as the development of an aesthetic fantasy or mythology which she
argues combines the divine and the feminine: this onomastic aesthetic, which
bridges French and Arabic sounds and signs, offers an illustration of Dib’s
characteristic cross-fertilisation of culturally distinct mythologies.
In a sense the (male) poet is the dervish who, through this incantatory
poem, summons the divine She, Hya, to achieve ecstasy — a being beside
oneself, or a state of otherness. The performance of his poem, in turn, lends
ephemeral body, gesture and voice to his incantation — and asks members of
the audience to participate in this by allowing what they hold sacred to rise
within them and transport them outside themselves, to a state of otherness.
I worked this relation to the Arabic language and culture into
my revisions as I followed the phoneme elle or el through fragments of the
poem. The sound occurs in the very first line of ‘La danseuse bleue’ as part
of the French ‘hirondelle’ and I used its English cognate to replace the more
common ‘swallow’:
Une hirondelle m’a frôlé
Et j’ai cru à une pensée
Venue me visiter.
A swallow brushed against An hirondelle caressed me
And I trusted in a dream
Come to visit me.
I could then echo the generic term ‘oiseau’ with the sound and syllabic weight of
the word ‘swallow’, a more contemporary translation of the earlier ‘hirondelle’:
Mon nuage, mon oiseau
Vois comme d’un seul envol
Tu m’as tout volé.
My cloud, my swallow
You know when you took flight,
You took it all from me.
In the next stanza, the antecedent ‘La danse’ (the dance) from the first line
is repeated in subsequent lines with the feminine pronoun ‘Elle’, lending
incantatory force to a trance-inducing chant. The permanent dilemma caused
by feminine and masculine nouns in French, which Dib plays exquisitely in
his use of pronouns, acquires an extra dimension given the significance of
the Arabic trilateral ‫ع ل ل‬. Whereas English would require the pronoun ‘it’
36
to refer back to ‘the dance’, this aesthetic interpretation based on cultural
associations allowed me to refer to the dance as ‘she’.
Spurred on, perhaps, by the incantation and the experience of
performing it, I attempted to approximate the sound of the French verb ‘sort’
(the final /t/ being silent in French) with the English verb ‘soars’ (the final
voiced sibilant determines the pronunciation of the vowel in assonance with
‘sort’). Admittedly I opted for a slightly overstated register compared to
Dib’s sober style, but with these shifts from the source text I aim to offer a
slant evocation of its ghosts — expressed in a French layered with the Arabic
language and culture.
La danse.
Elle sort de mes pied,
Elle sort de mes seins,
Elle sort de mes bras,
Elle sort de mes veines,
Elle sort de mes yeux.
The dance. La danse.
It rises through She soars through my feet,
It rises through She soars through my breasts,
It rises through She soars through my arms,
It rises through She soars through my veins,
It rises through She soars through my eyes.
Referring to the dance as ‘she’ also allows a sacred connection to be made
with the ‘she’ in the following stanza, which marks Hagar’s transition to a
trance-like state, a dissociation, as highlighted by Sari Ali, from the earlier
‘je’ to ‘elle’, or from the first to the third person singular (my emphasis in
bold):
Et le seul chant frissonne,
Et le masque sous le visage :
Elle n’ira perdre que cela.
And the lone chant shivers free,
And the masque beneath the face:
She shall lose only this.
In a multilingual performance, this ‘she’ can be layered with the sound elle.
However, when translating the insights gained from performance onto the
page, typography also offers the possibility to shadow ‘she’ with the French
37
and Arabic characters, to trace visual lines of flight and hint at the homonymy
of elle/aile/‫ع ل ل‬:
And the lone chant shivers free,
And the masque beneath the face:
‫علل‬
Elle
She shall lose only this.
***
Translating ‘La danseuse bleue’ was and continues to be a collaborative
experience: from the initial translation on the page to staging an installation
with visual and sound artists in a museum setting, from the context provided
by Habib’s preface to Pierre’s illuminating etymology of the word ‘Hagar’,
to insights gained from performing the poem. Nicole also enabled another
kind of presence: interacting with her on stage in French and English brought
my earlier, solitary conversations to life, made them visible, audible, tangible
— present — the performative element in the time-space of the performance
conjuring somehow an interaction with all the absent partners I had conversed
with in the build-up to this moment.
***
More information on the installation Ha‫ج‬ar and the An‫ج‬el and the work of
the Jetties Collective can be found at www.jettiesproject.tumblr.com. The full
text of the translation follows this article.
38
Madeleine Campbell
La danseuse bleue – The Blue Dancer
by Mohammed Dib
An hirondelle caressed me
And I trusted in a dream
Come to visit me.
Up there it is only
A solitary cloud;
But a shadow was cast.
And all this silence.
Such silence! So alive!
On earth, I listen.
But then this shadow,
The cloud takes away. Ten
Seas they shall cross.
Stone for a wellhead
Sealed against itself,
I stay for memory.
I stay and, shadow
Come to visit me, where
Is my son’s shadow?
My cloud, my swallow
You know when you took flight,
You took it all from me.
Shine, little flame,
To you, I run
And I shall reach the Lord.
39
Sorrow’s bright shadow
You who listen and remember:
Step by step, guide me.
*
I become a resting post
For the birds: they fly in
nord
sud
From the North and the South
est
ouest
From the East and the West
And I am lost in the beat of the wings
couleurs
And I am all colour,
Fête
Feast, you shall feed
cris
Only on cries.
Danse
Dance
Danse
I dance for you alone,
Boy with the scent of the fig tree.
La danse.
She soars through my feet,
She soars through my breasts,
She soars through my arms,
She soars through my veins,
She soars through my eyes.
That which red erubescent,
Stung by her mother
I could not catch,
That which head of a serpent
Does not sting,
That which millstone upon millstone
Does not mill.
That which the wind carries off.
40
That which, hoar-ridden elder
Whines even as Nightingale,
He sings his last breath.
As the homing pigeon,
Come nightfall, turns
Raven in the moonlight,
Is the past nothing now
But an other place?
Blazing face
In whom all things burn
For flying too close,
What is it they found
Those who lost you?
*
And the lone chant shivers free,
And the masque beneath the face:
‫علل‬
Elle
She shall lose only this.
Immovable, the blue dancer,
Now clear and clearer,
Now blue and bluer,
With level poise
Her hips regain
Their stance at every step,
Immovable before each step.
Her hands, an offering of leaves
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
Reach for a fire unseen,
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
In this moment a story is told.
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
Already, the sea has come crashing
Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.
And nothing remains but spreading flames.
41
Relentless advance,
Hagar toujours rebelle,
Tireless Ha‫ج‬ar, rebel
Hagar toujours rebelle,
And she spells this dance over and over
Hagar toujours rebelle,
Tireless Ha‫ج‬ar, rebel
Hagar toujours rebelle,
This dance become sea.
Who would upstage her,
Who would banish her,
Sombre, resplendent?
This translation and its typography has beeen revised to incorporate aspects of the
performance score, as discussed in the preceding article.
42
Dan Richards
The Cairngorms, January 2014
An extract from Dan Richards’ book, Climbing Days, a peripatetic biography he is writing
of his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the
early 20th Century. Using Dorothy’s 1935 memoir as his guide, the book traces her life and
climbs in the UK, Switzerland, Spain, Canada and North America with her husband,
the literary critic and scholar, Ivor Armstrong Richards. The final chapter is to retrace
their celebrated first ascent of the North Ridge of the Dent Blanche in 1928, one of the last
great Alpine climbing problems.
The extract below is taken from Chapter 4, and deals with a Conville Winter
Mountaineering course he undertook earlier this year in the Cairngorm Mountains,
Scotland.
We woke before dawn. Fortunately I’d dreamt all the worst case scenarios
overnight so felt slightly more prepared for disaster. Spurred by a strong
cup of sweet tea, I blearily dressed in the thermal base layers I’d laid out
the night before — long-johns, wool top, first pair of thick socks, salopettes
— mountaineering dungarees, with all the braces, zips and fastenings that
involved. A merino mid-layer top, second pair of socks, fleece top, and twopart plastic boots — lacing the boxing boot-like inner then pushing that into
the rigid plastic outer before lacing that too. This was made more cumbersome
by the fact I’d begun to resemble the Michelin Man as the clothing mounted.
Next gaiters with their elastic straps, velcro and snap fasteners, enclosing the
shins to sit over the boot laces and tongue. A fiddle. But eventually dressed
and, feeling toasty, I clomped to the kitchen for breakfast and a briefing on
the day ahead.
There were nine of us in all, the six from the train together with Louie
from Bedford, James from Preston, and Sam from Sussex — who’d travelled up
sideways overnight on the Euston sleeper.1
1 from ‘Sleeping Compartment’ by Norman MacCaig
I don’t like this, being carried sideways
through the night. I feel wrong and helpless — like
a timber broadside in a fast stream.
Such a way of moving may suit
that odd snake the sidewinder
43
All of them seemed unbelievably cheery considering it was still dark
outside — relaxed and raring to go, whereas I was getting the yips as to how
I’d fare taking bearings or tying bowlines; or whether I’d skewer myself with
an axe.
Sat round the large wood table we introduced ourselves to instructors Jonathan
Preston and Mark ‘Sammy’ Samuels — very nice, fiendishly knowledgable
chaps, as it turned out. Jonathan was very business-like, composed and
trenchant whereas Sammy seemed to crackle with an enthusiasm just south of
manic. I was placed in Jonathan’s team. Together we looked over the printouts
of the day’s weather forecast and then collected the rest of our kit — packing
spare warm mitts, goggles, helmet, thermos, laminated map, compass, and
head torch in our rucksacks.
Pulling on my wool hat, waterproof jacket and gloves; and carrying
my crampons and ice axe, I made our way out to the stiff dawn and the bus.
Then, driving into the hills below smattered mackerel cirrocumulus,
air warming, light welling — the sun rose as a saturated Polaroid developing
before us; the day scrubbed clean, Brautigan blue: ‘the blue of human eyes, waiting
for something to happen.’2
*****
The twin lochans in the bowl of Coire an t-Sneachda were invisible, buried.
Our cohort stood with backs pressed behind a large boulder which provided
some shelter from the wind which thwacked and swirled about us. The wind
had been spoiling for a fight since we’d set out from the Coire Na Ciste ski
centre an hour or so before, constantly hassling, outright opposed to our
progress, bowling gusts in two and threes with just enough interval to recover
balance before the last knocked you over again.
Although not snowing, the wind whipped and strafed us with powder
from the slopes. Dashed and peppered, I zipped my collar over my mouth and
pulled my goggles tighter and began to develop an eye for the rolling waves
of snow ahead which showed the gusts to come, bracing before they hit.
In the lulls I heard our boots on the snow, in-step, crisp as Visa
cards swiping frost off a dozen windscreens. We were a crunching peloton,
trooping over sastrugi and the teardrop drumlins formed behind rocks —
in Arizona: but not me in Perthshire.
...It’s no good. I go sidelong.
I rock sideways - I draw in my feet
To let Aviemore pass.
2 Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel — Richard Brautigan — (Simon & Schuster, 1976)
Canongate, 2012
44
frozen velodrome helmet lumps, shaped by the squalls which luffed my hood,
rasped my ears and ripped the hat off Jonathan’s head sending it racing away
behind us.
As one the group turned and watched it go, streaking down the valley
like a frighted hare and out of sight, never to be seen again.
Now, behind the boulder, I pushed up my goggles. Their sepia tint which had
given the cirque and rock field a Martian aspect instantly turned to dazzling
neon blue, as if a flare had gone off. It took a good minute for my vision
to recover. I spent that minute rather blindly fiddling with loose gaiters and
creeping salopettes, a dance I’d repeat throughout the day to come.
Around us rose the cliffs of Coire an t-Sneachda — Corrie of the
Snow — whose colosseum tiers shot sheer into the low cloud, their snow
flanks steepening until they dovetailed into bare granite outcrops, fissured
and quartzy; mean. Their darkness was such that it burnt through the white
around them, their severity hypnotic.
Jonathan pointed out climbs above — Jacob’s Ladder, Aladdin’s Mirror
and Crotched Gully — deserted today, unfancied in this weather, but many
climbers have come unstuck in this place… and I’ve written ‘come unstuck’
there, but as I look at it now all the Wodehousian chutzpah drains away and
it stands mealy-mouthed and hollow — for to come unstuck in this charged
white hanging space is often to die. This place will eat you.
In early 2007 alone, five climbers died here in four accidents, either caught out
by the conditions or falling from the routes overhead:
‘Young people have always been driven to go out and have adventures, and that’s a good
thing,’ said Roger Wild of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland. ‘But
mountains aren’t a commodity you can put in a supermarket trolley… There’s nothing
wrong necessarily going climbing in the face of a bad forecast. You would perhaps set out
earlier, or climb something easier. But you can’t point at these lads and say they did
something wrong. You can say they were a bit off the mark in one or two areas. But we
should be proud of them, going out and having an adventure.’3
Later in the same article, John Allen, a Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team
Leader, spelt out the dangers of seeking instant gratification without
thorough grounding in the Cairngorm’s nature — ‘A lot of younger climbers have
not got that long apprenticeship in winter climbing… They may have a good knowledge
of rock climbing or climbing on indoor walls and be technically proficient, but they’re not
necessarily prepared for what the weather in winter can do.’
So back in the wind we practiced step cutting and walking zig-zag paths up
3 The Guardian, Saturday 3rd February 2007
45
snow slopes — ice axe always in the hand nearest the bank and so ready for an
arrest should one slip. En route back down and round the corrie’s floor we
passed debris from a recent mini-avalanche and again our eyes swept up and
over the cliffs and their freight of ice and snow.
The wind had dropped and a steady dust of flakes begun when we took
off our bags and set to digging a snow hole, kneeling down to tunnel with the
adze end of our axes. As luck would have it, someone hit upon a previously
excavated cave so all six of us were inside drinking thermos coffee in relative
comfort within a few minutes. I can thoroughly recommend this hermit crab
approach as a time-saving device since next day I dug a hole in a hard-packed
drift and was hacking away prostrate, knackered out, legs waggling, for half
an hour before anything approaching a burrow was made; but that cramped
cocoon could have been lifesaving in a blizzard or if injured and awaiting help.
That was the crux of the Conville course: the idea that whilst risk can never
be eliminated in the mountains it can be managed; that you ‘need enough in
your locker’ — to quote Sammy — to survive and return to safety if things get
out of hand.
‘Risk was the salt,’ wrote Dorothea of her Skye climbing, ‘but he or she
would be a stupid cook who thought the more there is of it the better!’ And so, mindful
to avoid being stupid cooks, we set about learning our place within the
Cairngorm’s wild sphere so that to walk into it and witness its stark beauty
was not to jeopardize the eggshell flesh beneath our high-tech layers.
‘The Mountain Rescue service does its magnificent work, injured are plucked from ledges
by helicopter, the located, the exhausted carried to safety,’ wrote Nan Shepherd in
The Living Mountain’s foreword. ‘And some are not rescued. A man and a girl are
found, months too late, far out of their path, the girl on abraded hands and knees as she
clawed her way through a drift. I see her living face still (she was one of my students), a
sane, eager, happy face. She should have lived to be old.’4
If this sounds morbid or hectoring — Robert Macfarlane diagnosed a ‘macabre
fascination’ in his introduction to the 2011 reprint — then it might be qualified
by the fact that Shepherd considered the Cairngorm landscape kindred and
intrinsic, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that her writing sometimes mirrors
the cold dispassion of the mountains — a savage, oppositional territory —
oscillating like the range itself between extremities.
‘All these are matters that involve man,’ she wrote. ‘But behind them is the mountain
itself, its substance, its strength, its structure, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that
man does to it or on it... to know it in itself is still basic to his craft.’
4 The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd — (Aberdeen University Press, 1977)
Canongate Canons, 2011
46
Here, small events snowball and gather momentum: the weather turns,
someone has no over-trousers, the bearing’s off so the wrong path is taken,
it gets dark early, you run out of water; little mistakes born of inexperience
or carelessness accrue and catch you out later on… none of this happens on a
climbing wall, those perpendicular ring road gyms. Mountains are uncivilised.
‘They sort people out,’ my father told me having read a draft of this book. ‘They’re
not joking. They sort whole teams of people out…’ He described walking on snow
slopes in sunshine and, within a few minutes, being completely swallowed up
in whiteout, besieged; stripped of all normality. ‘It’s like having your head in a
white bucket. No landmarks. Suddenly you’re completely isolated, you lose the horizon, it’s
loud, it’s freezing, the ability to judge time fails you, your ability to judge distance goes;
you forget where you were, you doubt how many are in the group, you flail, you grope about.
Exhausting. Total disorientation… struggling not to panic.
Imagine hours of that. It’s like nothing else.’
He stopped. ‘All the kit in the world,’ he said slowly, ‘all the kit in the world will
not get you out of that. It’s like nothing else. That’s the issue with people walking onto
mountains who’ve only ever been on walls; it’s often not the falling off that hurts you, not
often. People worry about falling off; they worry and they plan and buy all the kit and they
forget about the journey to the face or the summit they want to tackle: the walk there and
back. They think the kit will save them and go out unprepared for the sudden changes of
weather, light and temperature.’
There had been snow blowing hard about us on that first journey up to Coire
an t-Sneachda but it was akin to hard rain and we’d been able to see where
we were going: the people in front and behind, the onrushing gusts, the
sky, the ground. Whiteout blizzards aren’t like that. Only when I encounter
one firsthand, later in my travels, did I fully appreciate their extreme,
overwhelming uncanniness. When it struck, I felt as if I’d been pushed into
a massive tumble drier full of snow. The peripheral world closed down to
become a granular stereogram. The light flattened out, a dimension short,
and as the powder ambit drifted I felt myself begin to spin head over heels as
if in flight, yet I was still stood frozen, wasn’t I? I stamped my feet and they
struck unseen snow but all was fuzzy and obscured, as if by swirling ash. All
but blind in the teeming storm, I squinting in hope of seeing through the pall
but the pall was all there was.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in murk.’
It was indeed like nothing else; at once hugely frightening yet beautiful —
more so once out of it and back in the known world with renewed dominion
47
over my eyes and legs; able to think back and conjure the eerie unseen scene
at one remove.
Even digging that snow hole, earlier in the day, my mind had begun
to play tricks. Buried, the light seemed to be seeping through from all
directions. Nose to the snow, I had no horizon and soon began to doubt my
senses, up from down. I knew my legs were outside but which way were they
pointed? Suddenly claustrophobic, I squirmed out backwards several times to
check myself. Outside in the light it was ridiculous: I’d been totally lost and
baffled inside a sleeping-bag sized hole! But I’d felt a rising panic and I had
not liked it. ‘Were I really buried in an avalanche or snow cave, I’d really
struggle to dig myself out,’ I thought with sudden clarity; and the thought
scared me.
48
Author Biographies
Catherine Ayres is a teacher, living and working in Northumberland. Her
poems have appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Spontaneity, Domestic Cherry, StepAway, Prole
and The Moth, as well as the No Love Lost anthology published by Pankhearst press. She
recently came third in Ambit magazine’s ‘Under the Influence’ competition.
Michael Brown’s pamphlet, Undersong, was published by Eyewear in June
2014. His poetry has recently been published in Other Poetry, Black Light Engine Room, The
North, Brittle Star and The Interpreter’s House. In 2014 he won the Untold London Brazen
Valentine Competition with his poem, ‘From Hungerford Bridge, Looking East’.
Madeleine Campbell: Born in Canada, Madeleine lived in France for over a
decade before settling in Scotland. Her translations of Maghrebi poets have been published
in the University of California Book of North African Literature and Scottish Poetry in Translation. She
recently co-edited Quaich: An Anthology of Translation in Scotland Today.
Mel Cole is an artist, whose work is collected and exhibited internationally
most recently in Copenhagen. As a London based artist she has an MA in Fine Art from
Camberwell College and now working as a drawing tutor. http://www.melcole.co.uk
Oliver Comins lives and works in West London. His pamphlet Yes to Everything
was published earlier this year by Templar. Other recent work has appeared in Poetry
Review, The North and The Rialto as well as anthologies from The Emma Press and
HappenStance.
Teona Galgotiu has just turned 17. She has been writing for the Romanian
magazine SUB25 since she was 14 and she is currently organizing the Super Film Festival
which is the first Romanian film festival made entirely by teenagers. After high-school,
she plans on studying film directing.
Linda Kemp is based in Sheffield, with recent work appearing in Blackbox
Manifold, E•ratio and a pamphlet, Immunological, published by enjoy your homes press.
Asim Khan is from Birmingham, England. His work both has appeared and is
forthcoming in various print and online magazines. His blog is at www.photoetric.co.uk.
Dan Richards is co-author of Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley
Donwood; Climbing Days, an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of his great
great aunt and uncle — Dorothy Pilley and I. A. Richards — is set to be published by Faber
in Spring 2016.
Hannah Jane Walker writes poems which sound like talking. She has also
written four plays. The shows are part poetry gig and part interactive experience, about
the moments we all face in the process of trying to be a person. She has been published by
Oberon Books, Penned in the Margins and Nasty Little Press.
JDA Winslow is a lapdog of the bourgeoisie, blogging at jdawinslow.tumblr.com.
49
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