Random Descents

I have been reading a lot of Wordsworth recently. I should be concentrating on his Duddon Sonnets, since it is this under-appreciated sequence that I have chosen as the primary focus for the research project I am working on at the moment, but I keep getting sidetracked. The visit to Lickey Hills had me leafing through The Prelude in pursuit of the 'spots of time' passage.

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. The Prelude, Book 12, ll. 208 - 218

What prompted the hunt is that I had a bit of a 'spots of time' moment myself as I wandered around the Lickey Hills. It set off a train of thought about the things I choose to record in 'field notes' and the the material that sparks off a response in poetry - the differing sources of inspiration for prose and poetry. 

Looking back over the field notes, these either take the form of straightforward reportage, or a more imaginative response written up as a semi-fictional 'derive'. Usually I choose the latter strategy if I wish to represent the place visited as an alienating environment, and the techniques of psychogeography lend themselves to representing the mundane as exotic, magical or disturbing; really it is a varient of magic realism, I think.

With poetry, often you don't feel quite so in control of the process. In some sense you are left with the impression that the poem has chosen you, rather than the other way round, it does not feel either rational or deliberate. Wordsworth's explanation is that such 'spots of time' are the result of experiencing the world at moments of high emotion or stress and the what we percieve at the time or shortly afterwards becomes in some way 'transfigured' and act later as a 'renovating virtue'. In the passage immediately following the one above he goes on to recount how after becoming lost as a boy on a wild moor, the fear the experience engendered caused his imagination to 'transfigure' the elements of the landscape:

Then, reascending the bare common saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
A beacon on the summit, and, more near
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
An ordinary sight; but I should need
Colour and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all around for my lost guide,
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
The beacon crowning the lone eminence,
The female and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. ll.  248 - 261

I do not doubt that something of the sort does happen and that the places and scenes that we regard as significant may often be those that we are bonded to emotionally. But not always, sometimes vivid moments  seem to simply strike at random. Sylvia Plath captures this sense of inexplicable transformation in her poem Black Rook in Windy Weather.

...ignorant of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality.

Unlike Wordsworth who found strength and consolation from such 'spots of time', Plath regards them as occassional interventions to relieve an existence which is otherwise mundane and meaningless:

With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

Perhaps these 'spasmodic tricks of radiance' are not the result of perception, but a 'trick' of memory. In At Castle Boterel Thomas Hardy recalls an incident from the past when he and his wife had climbed the hill to the village years before. Now he climbs the hill alone, as she had recently died:

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of

Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―

Something that life will not be balked of

Without rude reason till hope is dead,

And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill’s story ? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth’s long order ;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is—that we two passed.

What an astonishing use of hyperbole! Through all geological time the only thing that the rocks recorded were 'that we two passed' .  Through a startling assertion of solipsism, Hardy communicates the profoundity of his loss. In the final stanzas the poet reflects upon the vivid memory of his 'old love's domain' as the phantom figure of his lost love shrinks in the rain.
  

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,

In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

The substance now, one phantom figure

Remains on the slope, as when that night

Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

I look back at it amid the rain

For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

And I shall traverse old love’s domain

Never again. What links the three poems is the power of poetry to transform place, to evoke a transfigured locale. This is what 'voceti' seeks, but as Plath points out it is a 'long wait for the angel, a rare random descent'.

Political Landscapes, Benefit Street, actual streets and imaginary friends.

A beautiful summer's morning in late June - imagine you are in a glider floating high above the English countryside. it is perfectly still and almost silent, apart from distant traffic noise and the whoosh of invisible air-currents streaming across the aircraft's slender blade-like wings. Look down, what might you see? This perhaps?

Here, surely, is the modern mind-map of England, a patchwork of pasture, ploughed fields and woodland, criss-crossed by roads and railways, connecting ancient villages and market towns to the sprawling suburbia of great industrial cities. Flying back from abroad, the chequerboard of green, brown and grey is now an archetypal symbol of homecoming, much as the white cliffs of Dover were to our seafaring ancestors.

Here is a different aerial map of the same area:

Whereas the first map is a screen-shot from Google map's 'satelite view', the second is produced by Open Data Communities, an arm of the UK government's Office of National Statistics. Both show an area of Nottinghamshire around Mansfield, the northern starting point of the A38. The second map does not represent the physical landscape but a social one; it is a map of deprivation, with purple signifying poverty . 

If you ever worked in the public sector, 'Indices of Multiple Deptivation' will be familiar, but most people may not be aware of their existence or how the measures are used. The smallest political unit in English local government is a 'ward' (funny how that hospitalises the entire population). There are 32,482 wards in the country. The Office of National Statistics has ranked them using a cocktail of measures concerning health, educational attainment, crime, income and so on.  This index is used, to lapse briefly into civil service policy wonk speak, 'to target funding to the areas which most need it'. 

Mansfield, where the local economy has been devastated over recent decades by the demise of traditional industries should have benefited from targeted funding. The deprivation map shows this- a small area just southeast of Mansfield town-centre is shaded dark purple - the 50th most deprived neighbourhood in the country.. Put another way, 99.998% of wards in England are better off than these few streets in Mansfield. After a brief pang of guilt concerning 'poverty tourism', curiosity overcame my ethical qualms and I decided begin my journey down the A38 here.

What was I expecting? Something reminiscent of The Wire perhaps. I have driven through the poverty stricken southern suburbs of LA and Miami, and once managed to get lost at dusk in a run down area of Tampa. Here poverty was overt - boarded up single storey wooden houses, trashed shops, groups of young black guys just hanging-out, a few unsmashed streets lights glimmering in the dusk, on empty lots - full of "the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolet's", as the song goes. The place oozed menace. 

By contrast, in Mansfield  deprivation is hidden. The housing is a mix of Victorian terraces and post-war council houses, a few unkempt, but  neat properties out-numbered the scruffy ones. There was litter, but no more so than in most urban areas. Some old mills looked abandoned, but others housed small businesses. The streets themselves were hardly pretty, and somewhat overshadowed by a concrete slab of an office block belonging to a BT technical unit. The area looked run-down rather than desperate. If understatement is one of our defining national traits, here, it seems we had managed to understate poverty. To mis-quote Roger Waters, "quiet deprivation is the English way".

The streets were empty when I arrived mid-morning. It was late January, clear, but chilly, hardly hanging about on  street corner weather. The more I wandered about, the more the the area's poverty did become more obvious. Not just the 'Second Hand City' warehouse, but the well signed 'Community Advice Shop' on the corner of Gladstone St which offered advice about benefits, debt management and health issues. Opposite was a place offering cash for old clothes by the kilogram. Other local businesses included two convenience stores, a takeaway, a hairdressers and a martial arts academy. The place did not seem to have a local pub. Maybe a few beers in front of the telly were all people could afford by way of socialising

I walked up the somewhat ironically named Recreation Street, skirted along the edge of  a 'green space' overlooking open countryside. There was still hardly a soul to be seen. The area mixed modernised terraces interspersed with council houses, some constructed pre-war - brick-built with a nod towards a municipal 'garden city' style - the remainder were more system-built, late 60s 'little boxes'. The place was within walking distance of the town-centre shops, yet close enough to fields for local kids to annoy nearby farmers by running riot, it was difficult for me to regard these streets as a bad place to grow up in; in fact, despite half a century having elapsed, it looked remarkably similar to the streets I grew up in.


However, though the estate felt familiar, the prospects for  people living in it had changed radically over the past 50 years. De-industrialisation has devastated towns like Mansfield, but unlike the poverty of inner cities, where concerns about immigration, policing, and multi-culturalism ensure urban social issues hit the news, the fate of impoverished English shire towns is largely ignored. Furthermore, all the dominating media narratives about poverty are urban based. 

As I wandered around the empty streets on the edge of Mansfield, Channel 4 had just broadcast the second episode of its documentary series 'Benefit Street'. Compared to the programme's instantly notorious James Turner Street in Birmingham, this area of Mansfield scored much worse in the 'Index of Deprivation' in the areas of employment, health, education and crime. 

Later, when I checked out the Channel 4 web-page for the programme it was difficult not to smile; due to the vagaries of 'ad feed' algorithms, an advert for the National Trust was juxtaposed right next to images of benefit dependency, you could hardly have imagined a better illustration of how we have simply accepted the reality of a divided Britain. 


As I walked back along Newgate Lane towards where I had parked the car, two teenage girls popped out of a terrace house across the street, they crossed the road in front of me and disappeared into a nearby newsagents. 

Startling as the Newsagent's sales pitch seems - 'Cheap Crisps, Cheap Sweets, Cheap Pop, Cheap Shop - especially sited next to a pawn-broker - the message is really just an extreme variant of  strap-lines of major supermarkets have adopted since the banking crash. Here we have a few of their recent adverts -