In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Backwards to the place we ran from. Vague memories of mum in the garden, walking over cool green grass in the hot summer of 1976, the brook plashing over the road as it dips into the hollow way, the wood smoke drifting over the village in autumn as the first fires are lit and chill descends. The cat who came to stay, camomile tea tasting like harvested hay or a lazy day in endless August, huge puffs of cumulonimbus, angel kisses, rain falling and the scent of petrichor rising from the parched fields. The cool of the parish church with the setting sun shifting stained glass kaleidoscopes on the flagstones. The dreams of flight as billy witches circle the street lamps in June.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. (At the Burial of the Dead, from The Book of Common Prayer 1662)

Nostalgia for a future which never came despite the promises. You’ve never had it so good. The persistance of memory twisted by the years. Hauntology as described by Mark Fisher: “Haunting… can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or… the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism…”

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.”

“Music culture was central to the projection of the futures which have been lost. The term music culture is crucial here, because it is the culture constellated around music (fashion, discourse, cover art) that has been as important as the music itself in conjuring seductively unfamiliar worlds.”

In 1977 Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols snarled “No future, no future, no future for you.” It seems quite tame now, defanged by commercial repetition and the cosy glow of nostalgia. And yet there is still something there beyond the manufactured boy band sneer.

The future has been cancelled, that is, the promise of the future, of a better life, of musical and artistic innovation and progress promised by programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Blue Peter. We were told we would travel around on jetpacks and monorails, eat space food, work less and have more leisure time, be attended to by friendly robots, fly around the world, leave rubbish on the beaches. It didn’t happen, apart from the rubbish on the beaches.

The future has arrived. Now we are told to accept TINA - There is No Alternative - that this is it, stuck in an endless now like an old Shalimar track on CD repeat, a present which never ends, the same day after day, repeats of repeats as the blueprints created in the post-war settlement are used and reused until the schema becomes a faded historical document; classic rock, legacy house, traditional techno, the ska revival of a revival of a revival, a punk DIY revolution now nearly 50 years old; pages fluttering in a wind-blown shopping mall on the edge of town.

We are all to some extent prisoners of the popular culture that we grew up with. Dreams become nightmares as the popular heroes of TV and music culture are revealed to have feet of clay, to put it mildly; Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter, Stuart Hall.

We go back to the vinyl and video and CDs of the past, a retro future, a hipster paradise - remember that tribe? - but we don’t have these solid repositories since they were cast aside for the endless now of decontextualised downloads and streams and dreams of a lost past. Tracing the links from US Garage Rock and UK Punk to Rave and Drum ‘n’ Bass is a historiological task for cultural archeologists now; most listeners swim in a soup where Sun Ra and Boards of Canada are mere flotsom and jetsom in a Spotified eternal pond.

The idea of Hauntology references the abiding presence of, and nostalgia for, a promised future that never quite came to pass; a ghost, a revenant, which cannot be quite exorcised as overloaded cultural production takes on the quality of a photocopy of a photocopy, of endless copy-and-paste on the latest iteration of Photoshop or Ableton. The present as haunted by lost futures from the past, a temporal mash-up leading to a stasis.

From Fisher’s piece in Film Quarterly “What is Hauntology’:

"What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate… More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system. In other words, we were in the ‘‘end of history’’ described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s thesis was the other side of Fredric Jameson’s claim that postmodernism—characterized by its inability to find forms adequate to the present, still less to anticipate wholly new futures—was the ‘‘cultural logic of late capitalism.’’

In “Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures”, Mark Fisher continued to grapple with the notion of Hauntology:

“Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”

“Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn’t just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra”

“Paul Virilio has written of a ‘polar inertia’ that is a kind of effect of and counterweight to the massive speeding up of communication. Virilio’s example is Howard Hughes, living in one hotel room for fifteen years, endlessly rewatching Ice Station Zebra. Hughes, once a pioneer in aeronautics, became an early explorer of the existential terrain that cyberspace will open up, where it is no longer necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of culture. Or, as Berardi has argued, the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated.”

From the country to the city where we ran seeking adventure and a life outside what we imagined were provincial confines. A city like London where the ancient and modern collide and coexist, where the past stubbornly remains as a palimpsest under the grimy pavements, where the streets are most definitely not paved with gold. And yet. John Chapman, a pedlar from Swaffham in Norfolk, dreamed that standing upon London Bridge, in the olden days when the bridge was lined with shops, would bring him luck and great fortune; he walks to the capital but his hopes are dashed as he reaches the bridge and waits for three days. On the third day he tells the story of his dream to a shopkeeper on the bridge, who in return tells his own dream.

“Last night I dreamt myself to be in Swaffham, a place clean unknown to me, but in Norfolk if I mistake not, and methought I was in an orchard behind a pedlar's house, and in that orchard was a great oak-tree. Then meseemed that if I digged I should find beneath that tree a great treasure. But think you I'm such a fool as to take on me a long and wearisome journey and all for a silly dream. No, my good fellow, learn wit from a wiser man than thyself. Get thee home, and mind thy business."

The Chapman realises that the treasure he seeks lies closer to home. He returns to Swaffham, digs under the oak tree, and unearths a great treasure. This is a parable for our uncertain times. As the blessèd Matthew said, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21 KJV)

In 1548 John Chapman, pedlar or chapman, is noted in church records as having financed the building of the north aisle of the Parish Church.

We ran from the city back to where we came from, us ‘somewheres’ as opposed to the rootless and deracinated ‘nowheres’ in the formulation of David Goodhart. Did we find the treasure which was there all the time if only we had the nous? Not exactly; only partially. As the slow collapse continues and the juggernaut flattens our ancient culture under the rubric of progress we may have to run again from the town to the country. There is a small patch of East Anglia in a beautiful place out in the country where a settlement compound. could be established for free women and men. It beckons as the walls of a city built on sand slowly subside and all that is solid melts into air.

“One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight.” - JG Ballard

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Link doesn’t work but the film is a wonderful illustration of a freedom enjoyed by the birds of the air

Link below to the music. I hope this is audible:

“Come out and live with a religious community 
In a beautiful place out in the country.”

Now the music is over there is something in this piece which I think is too subtle; I’ll have to explain the irony and the cryptic messages. The voice in the tune put through a vocoder by BoC is that of Amo Bishop Roden who is a Branch Davidian associated with, but not supportive of, David Koresh. She wasn’t at Waco in 1993.

The facts of the siege are still unclear. What provoked the siege at Mount Carmel Centre Ranch? Ostensibly it was “law enforcement agents” investigating the stockpiling of illegal weapons. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives obtained a search warrant for the compound together with arrest warrents for Koresh and other cult members. The ATF initiated the raid and the Davidians defended their compound resulting in the deaths  of four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians. The FBI took over and, after 51 days, launched a CS gas attack and assault. A fire, the origin of which has still not been established, resulted in the further deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including a number of children and Koresh himself.

The FBI denied that weapons were fired by them although it is contended that gunshots from state agents and flammable CS gas were the true cause of the fire.

This is America with free speech and gun ownership enshrined in the constitution and still the state stepped in where it was not wanted. I am on a rainy island adrift in the North Sea with the island of Ireland to the West and the Hexagon of France to the East with the Atlantic expanse looking out to the North American landmass. 

If compounds which reject the fascist godless state are established in Albion - and some are already extant - will they face the same fate? Will the state do the same to those of us who stand on the land, who are “somewheres”, who have only love and respect for our neighbours and brother and sisters, who wish to exist and thrive outside the cruel Machine as people of Albion with the Christ and St Matthew and St Edmund as our guides?

The compound I suggest at the end - and it’s a real place of refuge - circles back like an ouroboros, not in despair but in hope. Eternal recurrence but with an unknown outcome. 

We gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do.