Desk Notes No.4

Turner skies, sundial poetry and The Long Goodbye

Dear friends,

July, heatwave, lethargy: the reason this newsletter is a week late. I’m usually the kind of person who can’t sit still. I cram so much into holidays that I return home needing another to recover. I carried two books to Norfolk this year and read a single, lonely chapter. Give me a beach to walk on and I’ll stay out until the magic hour. Only by the sea can you experience the full, unadulterated beauty of a sunset.

Feet in the water on the sands of West Runton, we were blessed with beautiful skies. The flat ocean drawing us all the way to the horizon; the cliffs beckoning our gaze heavenward. On lucky nights, undulating clouds were the dramatic canvas for the sun’s dying gift: a parade of celestial golds and coppers, transforming to burnished pink and mauve. I was inside a Turner painting, an insignificant dash of pigment that would soon fade, erasing me from the epic, majestic spectacle of the universe.

As the hues matured minute by minute, I thought about Turner; about the speed at which he must have sketched, and the necessity of committing details to memory. The Tate tells us that, “Turner is supposed to have preferred sunrises as they allowed him more time to observe a greater range of effects.” The invention of the camera has hardly made this easier. “Generally speaking, the most beautiful moments of light in nature are in extreme situations; those moments when you think you cannot shoot anymore; when every photographic manual advises you not to try,” explains cinematographer Néstor Almendros who worked with Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven:

“Malick wanted a major portion of the film photographed during one of these extreme situations, a period of time he called “the magic hour.” The time between when the sun has set and the fall of night—when the light seems to come from nowhere; from a magic place. It is a time of extraordinary beauty.”

The brevity of magic hour has been blamed for the film’s notoriously long shoot; it being an, “optimistic euphemism,” for a fleeting period as short as twenty minutes. It’s counterintuitive that colours become brighter, more vivid in the fading light, but that’s exactly what happens in the magic hour. Nature’s rules seem to snap, leaving us susceptible to the mysteries of the cosmos. On the clifftops, in a blanket of gently waving wildflowers, I was seduced by the dreamy unreality of it; by its romance, its otherworldliness, its incorporeality.

Both Malick and Turner understood how light and sky can tell stories; how it can draw audiences towards what cannot be visualised, to the metaphysical. The sunset in Turner’s, disturbing, Slave Ship, deploys the colours of blood, of fury - the colours of hell - to set the scene for violence and make a moral point. A vertical surge of light dissects the ship from its slaves, thrown overboard for the insurance money (not an uncommon practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and one fiercely criticised by Turner in a poem he penned and hung beside the painting in 1840). The painting’s light, its palette, the swirling, intangible horizon, suggest divine retribution and harness the sensory power of nature. As Edmund Burke wrote in his 1757 work, On The Sublime and the Beautiful:

“The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

Was it the sublime I felt under those Norfolk skies? Terror as pleasure. A sensation more fulfilling than mere beauty can, alone, provide.

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In this edition of Desk Notes I share the things I thought about in July:

Print - The Sundial on a Wet Day by Thomas Hardy

Sound & Screen - The Long Goodbye, Riz Ahmed; Mogul Mowgli directed by Bassam Tariq

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Print

The Sundial on a Wet Day by Thomas Hardy (1925)

This year, I’ve been making an effort to read more poetry. Indulge me, by letting me begin with The Sundial on a Wet Day by Thomas Hardy. It comes from one of his last poetry collections, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs & Trifles, published in 1925. Introducing the collection for Oxford World Classics, Samuel Hynes explains how Hardy, “saw tragedy as a constituent of ordinary existence, and not as a quality only of noble and dramatic lives.”

I drip, drip here
In Atlantic rain,
Falling like handfuls
Of winnowed grain,
Which, tear-like, down
My gnomon drain,
And dim my numerals
With their stain,—
Till I feel useless,
And wrought in vain!

And then I think
In my despair
That, though unseen
He is still up there,
And may gaze out 
Anywhen, anywhere;
Not to help clock men
Quiz and compare,
But in kindness to let me
My trade declare.

In 1995, my home town’s local council decided to build Europe’s largest sundial. This was (apparently) to commemorate historic local watchmaker John Boot, although I don’t remember ever hearing that at the time. The idea seemed nonsensical. Even to me, an enthusiastic thirteen year old.

I’ve always affectionately referred to my home town as ‘Sunny’ Sutton. Situated just three miles from Mansfield in North Nottinghamshire, Sutton-in-Ashfield is one of the highest points in the county and attracts the worst of the weather. Back in the early 90s, ‘Sunny’ Sutton was physically grey; the Idlewells shopping centre was a concrete latticework open to the elements. Built on the site of the river Idle and the town’s former slums (demolished in 1936) it seemed to embody pessimism.

To outsiders, Sunny Sutton might still appear a depressing place, only now are we beginning to recover from the successive decline of both our major industries - coal and hosiery. Joblessness has been a part of our social landscape for decades. Jobs that many believe were stolen by Thatcher and globalisation. In 2019, Ashfield remained the 73rd most income-deprived local authority in England; the bottom 23%.

I drip, drip here
In Atlantic rain,
Falling like handfuls
Of winnowed grain,
Which, tear-like, down
My gnomon drain,
And dim my numerals
With their stain,—
Till I feel useless,
And wrought in vain!

But, in the face of hardship, Suttoners have always retained their friendly disposition. I’m yet to visit a place where strangers greet each other as frequently on the street, or exchange wildlife stories so freely on a stroll through the nature reserve (transformed from the foundations of colliery waste). The sundial was supposed to change things, to improve our chances. It was supposed make us, “a world renowned attraction.”

It didn’t, of course. Today it’s not even the biggest sundial in Europe. Locals have condemned it as ugly, pointless and impossible to read. In 2019, one resident told the Nottingham Post:

“If you mentioned it to 100 people, I reckon only two would know it to be a sundial. The fact you need the sun to use it makes it a bit silly too. You won’t have much luck with that.”

There are plenty of statues and artworks to be proud of in Sutton. Brierley Forest Park, on the site of the former colliery, is home to a sculpture trail including five stone miners disappearing into the earth, representing the decline of the industry. Questions about the best use of resources aside (and there are many), it is a puzzle why the council chose historic watchmakers for their showstopper - an industry outside the frame of reference even for budding historians like me. Were they trying to make a break with our coal-mining past? To redefine our identity? Was the sundial a symbol of hope? A permanent, physical reminder that the sun will come out tomorrow?

In recent years despair has become so great that Ashfield voted decisively for Brexit (69.8%) and booted out its Labour MP. Today, as the lonely sundial reaches into empty skies, it seems to make a desolate plea to a national government that has forgotten us.

And then I think
In my despair
That, though unseen
He is still up there,
And may gaze out 
Anywhen, anywhere;
Not to help clock men
Quiz and compare,
But in kindness to let me
My trade declare.

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Sound and Screen

The Long Goodbye, Riz Ahmed (2020)

The Long Goodbye directed by Aneil Karia (2020)

Mogul Mowgli directed by Bassam Tariq (2020)

Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Khalid Hasan (1955)

“Britain’s broken up with me”

When we listen to break up songs we usually identify with the broken hearted. But as a white British woman listening to Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, it’s clear I’m the one causing the pain. The record is a commentary on British Pakistani identity in post-Brexit Britain. Ahmed is reeling from our decision to, “take back control.” We’ve dumped him. He’s rejected, angry, in denial. The first track, The Break Up (inspired by Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s poem, Shikwa), is a passionate, personal, emotional history brimming with regret and disbelief. ‘Britney’ is a user.

The tracks are punctuated by answer phone messages from friends and family offering support in the wake of the break-up. There’s humour, but also commentary on the investment made by Pakistanis in their relationship with Britain. Two years after it was released, I’m still staggered by how clever this record is; from the confronting position in which it situates white, western listeners. Not only that, but The Long Goodbye is part of a bigger narrative choreographed by actor, writer, director Riz Ahmed; it’s just one in a web of connected ‘inter-texts’. This kind of elaborate storytelling is usually left to heavyweight Hollywood studios who expand and evolve their comic-book universes in every format from television shows to theme park rides. Ahmed takes a subtler and more powerful approach, nesting his music inside BAFTA nominated film Mogul Mowgli and the Oscar winning short that shares its name, The Long Goodbye.

In Mogul Mowgli, Ahmed becomes British Pakistani rapper ‘Zed’, opening the film with the unapologetic track, Fast Lava:

They put their boots on our ground
I put my roots in their ground
I put my truth in this sound
I spit my truth and its brown

Pride and anger, about the unacknowledged contribution Pakistanis have made to British culture, becomes more complex offstage when Zed is diagnosed with an hereditary auto-immune disease. His body is attacking itself; a metaphor for his identity crisis, what Ahmed describes as an, “internalised dislocation.” Through Zed’s relationships with family, friends and the music industry, Mogul Mowgli explores what it feels like to be torn between two cultures, belonging to both and neither. In doing so, it confronts the very real and personal legacy of empire and partition.

As his illness worsens, Zed is haunted by the figure of Toba Tek Singh; an embodiment of, “the sickness from this separation.” The film makes few concessions for western audiences and the white-gaze, but those who dig deeper will discover a short story written by Saadat Hasan Manto in which Toba Tek Singh is the no-man’s land between Pakistan and India. At the end of the story, a man dies with his legs on either side of the border, half in Pakistan, half in India. “What’s my fucking name? Toba Tek Singh,” raps Zed in the new track that begins reuniting him with his family.

The connected concept of ‘taking back control’ is the focus of Ahmed’s Oscar winning short film, The Long Goodbye (watch above), which sees a British Pakistani family dragged out of their house at gunpoint by rampaging far right activists. It closes with an emotional, monologue version of the track Where You From; a track that articulates the sense of rootlessness and dislocation felt by second generation immigrants in Britain today. In the context of the film’s visual hate, it takes on even greater resonance:

Now everybody, everywhere want their country back
If you want me back to where I’m from then, bruv, I need a map
…
My tribe is a quest to a land that was lost to us
And its name is Dignity
So where I’m from is not your problem bruv

Ahmed’s music confronts us with the reality of our politics. It’s painful and difficult to hear. At the London Film Festival Q&A in 2020, he spoke about the, “colonial amnesia,” and, “collective amnesia,” that plague both White British and British Pakistani communities. The drive for Brexit exploited our nostalgia for a glorious past that never really existed. And our politicians were too reticent to thoroughly condemn the racist and anti-immigration rhetoric underpinning much of the campaign. They say you should never talk about politics or religion. But that morning, when I heard the referendum result, my heart fell into my stomach. Not for political, economic or financial reasons. For emotional ones. We had become a nation who endorsed that kind of language. And we had been exposed on the global stage. Until that moment I’d always been proud to be British. The next day I wrote on my Facebook page that, “I’m waking up to a country that’s more divided than I’d hoped,” and, “we can only promise to try and understand each other better and, in doing so, rebuild our reputation as a tolerant, generous nation, that values working together.” Naivety about the state of the nation was nice, but it’s time to confront our amnesia.

The Long Goodbye ends with the track Karma. A comforting idea, even (or perhaps especially), if that means we pay for our mistakes. I’m guilty of momentary smugness when hearing reports that Brexit is harming Britain. But the feeling is quickly swept away by the knowledge that it isn’t the wealthy orchestrators of Brexit who are reaping the consequences, but those in society least able to afford it. I’ll end with this quote by William Davies from the current issue of the LRB:

“The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to Thatcherites and Brexiters, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation, and would like to banish those who talk down Britain’s prospects… But even Edgerton would agree that we are now in a very bad way. The poor quality of the Tory leadership candidates and the unseriousness of the debate between them creates the impression of a country that can now only speak to itself in slogans, oaths and insults, and has no capacity to describe or explain its problems.”

The time has come to change it.

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Wishing you all a lovely August. If you have any thoughts about the things you’ve read in this month’s Desk Notes, please get in touch in the comments.

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This month’s featured image is from ‘Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of White’ by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1827, courtesy of Tate.

Print, sound & post office banners courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.

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