Had he excluded time from life's equation, he might have come closer to pinpointing the meaning of everything.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Albert
Towards the end of his life, Einstein admitted time was an illusion. Past, present, future - these were the constructs via which humans perpetually deluded themselves. This neatly encapsulated wisdom was offered to the mourners of a friend's funeral. Weeks later Einstein himself died.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Menlove
We didn't know exactly where it was. We didn't even know whether we were going there. It was a spontaneous decision: let's take the bus to Menlove Avenue and Mendips.
I had wanted to make the journey to Mendips for a long time. My friend and I had made a similar walk last year on Queen's Drive. What struck me (inopportune phrasing...) on that occasion were thoughts of the death of John Lennon's mother in a car accident, which have hauntingly recurred ever since. Car accident deaths must have been fairly irregular in those days, given the low number of cars on the road. Look at any picture of any neighbourhood - and especially one as richly suburban as that of Menlove Avenue - from the postwar period and you will wonder at the emptiness of the streets. Some roads even prohibited vehicles. Compare that with the situation today, a world in which all human life genuflects before the altar of the automobile; a world in which humans are ranked second in the claiming of space.
I had wanted to make the journey to Mendips for a long time. My friend and I had made a similar walk last year on Queen's Drive. What struck me (inopportune phrasing...) on that occasion were thoughts of the death of John Lennon's mother in a car accident, which have hauntingly recurred ever since. Car accident deaths must have been fairly irregular in those days, given the low number of cars on the road. Look at any picture of any neighbourhood - and especially one as richly suburban as that of Menlove Avenue - from the postwar period and you will wonder at the emptiness of the streets. Some roads even prohibited vehicles. Compare that with the situation today, a world in which all human life genuflects before the altar of the automobile; a world in which humans are ranked second in the claiming of space.
Julia Lennon's death by car accident, its haunting, encouraged the imagination more than it placed me in the possession of facts. Our walk up Queen's Drive towards Allerton coaxed me into making a fundamental mistake, itself a product of the semi-fictional scenarios I'd invented of Julia Lennon embarking on the short, perhaps perfunctory, journey in her car, a decision that she could not have predicted was to entail that accident and her death. I imagined the airy coldness and the meanness of the interior of the car, the stiff doors and creaking fixtures and fittings; a car, in short, that made no attempt to conceal the ever-present danger of driving and simply being in a vehicle of any kind by lulling you into salable notions of luxury and comfort. Being postwar middle-class, Julia would surely have owned only a functional car, noticeably lacking the de-luxeness of the expensive models available to the upper echelons of Liverpool society deeper in Woolton. I was imagining the higher sense of catastrophe embodied by the car accident of the postwar years, during which few concessions were made to public safety since many lessons had yet to be experienced and learned. Julia Lennon's death by car accident, in other words, was one such lesson from which future generations have benefited with increased safety and security.
But my fundamental mistake: Julia Lennon did not drive the car which killed her; she was in fact that vulnerable being stepping out without realising it into the path of fatal danger. Late to this realisation, having nurtured obsessively specific images of life back then when the death of the mother of a world-historical icon occurred, my imagination had been stopped violently short by the representation of this terrible death and footnote in the history of culture in Sam Taylor-Wood's film of John Lennon's early years, Nowhere Boy. Though my friend had corrected my original assumption of Julia Lennon's death, I had not expected the shocking moment in the film as she meets someone on the street after leaving her sister Mimi's house and, waving that acquaintance goodbye and therefore turned towards him, steps into the path of the car that brutally kills her. Taylor-Wood orchestrates this moment with such precision for the sense of the accident rather than exploiting it as one of the foundational moments in the traumatic life of John Lennon's early years. So precisely and so unanticipated, in fact, that the film places us in the position of those who were to grieve this woman's death all the more keenly because they were not there to witness it. We share, if only for the duration of the film, John's angry mourning only because the film makes us encounter through cinematic violence the moment of loss, which exists only in the imaginary of the griever as the lost object.
*
At first we strolled up Menlove Avenue, peering in at scenes of soft-focused middle-class domesticity as arts workers, academics, designers, cultivated boss builders, spun out a lacklustre Sunday afternoon overcast not so much by the clouds above but by the seeming prospect of an unforgiving downpour. This was not to be, and so the cosy denizens of Allerton habituated themselves to their typical English Sunday confinement.
Menlove and environs are overshadowed by the inescapable resplendence of the area's trees. It's as if the dream of suburbia incubated so preciously by this archetypal middle-class Liverpudlian thoroughfare had been imagined by a town planner whose love of trees far surpassed his duty to create dream homes for the socially mobile. Such arboreal sheltering strikes the suburban walker as the logical conclusion to the bourgeois desire for alienation from the world in the lack of the aristocratic freedom to be sequestered in the splendour of individual estates. But the small-scale delights of Menlove's vision of home are hard to resist. The terraced streets that lie at the Allerton Road end of Menlove Avenue bear all the signifiers of a class quietly assuming their vision of the good life: red brick, shapely but modest rooms, slight variations in street layout, vestibules lined on both sides with decorative tiles, wooden doors seemingly preserved from their heyday, bevelled glass... These are the homes in which perfect Christmases are magically played out. All of this makes the mock-stately individualism of the houses lining Menlove Avenue itself expressive of bourgeois imperiousness, so not exactly the kind of thing fans of the self-styled 'working-class hero' have in mind of his child- and adolescent home. This must have been a world, the working-class psychogeographer cannot but fail to imagine, in which the word 'common' resounded in relation to anything beyond its tightly-controlled, sylvan boundaries, just as Aunt Mimi thought.
Not knowing the location of Mendips, we gathered pace as Menlove Anvenue opened its capacious arms. We passed judgements on many of the houses, celebrating most for their conservation of the past, berating others for their embrace of the ugly white or coffin-coloured plastic, unapologetic fakeness of contemporary so-called style. It simply got in the way of our cherished lost object, which wasn't necessarily Mendips itself nor a generic past which we felt Menlove Avenue symbolised. We weren't so much obsessive Beatles tourists as loyal Liverpudlians, bent on divining the Scouse-Menlove variant that, against the odds, inspired the eccentric Lennon into full Lennon being. To him, the Menlove richness must have been suffocating and liberating. Menlove's sylvan canopy must have weighed down on the young Lennon as much as Aunt Mimi's strictures, but surely offered itself as the natural bedfellow of his eccentrically creative mind. After all, through its branches trees offer momentary glimpses of the beyondness of the sky, mirroring the infinitude of the human imagination.
Perhaps the young John Lennon walked briskly to beat off the demons. Calderstones Park, the home of Liverpool tennis, will have been his cure. We were on the other side to Calderstones Park when we first realised its location on the avenue. It may sound odd to describe a walk up an unswervingly straight avenue as aimless, but this is exactly how we felt about our 'pilgrimage' after having made a detour to Menlove Gardens North and South, which veer off on the left of the avenue. This diversion made my friend consult the snail-slow internet on her mobile phone - perhaps too cleverly, we considered the fact that Mendips was not actually on Menlove Avenue but off it, 'Menlove' being a synecdoche of, distinct shorthand for, middle-class.
Every step of the way could be the site of Julia Lennon's death. This micro-event in the history of the world and insurmountable one in the lives of those directly affected by it impresses itself upon the atmosphere of Menlove everywhere. Soundings from Mimi's disapproving discourse rebound from the postwar past, the word 'common' commingled with the idea of aspiration embodied by her social position. There's a moment in the film when Uncle George and John jubilantly succeed in extending the wires of Mimi's radio upstairs to the teenager's bedroom. The music of the world entering the life of the world's musician. 'Can we turn it over, Mimi?', John exclaims from within his jubilation. 'No John', Mimi solemnly intones, 'We do not turn Tchaikovsky over.' This scene is also a synecdoche of Menlove. Uncle George falls to his death on the floor outside John's bedroom. Jubilation turns inside out, like many such events in John's life. Mendips means solid comfort imbued by Mimi's apparent resentment of life, which spins its own suffocating web around John's escapist mentality. Middle-class life isn't all it's cracked up to be, most people believe John himself believed. Better to be a working-class hero.
According to the film, Uncle George's death had a precise location. Julia's didn't, hence her haunting of Menlove Avenue; the present spectrally undersigned by (the) visions of the nowhere boy.
What my friend and I think will turn out to be a pretty cul-de-sac is instead an enormous circular road with a London-style common at its centre. How privileged that a few houses enjoy a park of their own. An older teenager was out with a spaniel and tennis racket and ball, which he whacked over to the other side of the common for his sprightly companion. The scene was striking for its absence of football and trophy dog, the overbearing signs of oppressive social life in Liverpool. Recreation made ideology. But the tennis kit wasn't random: of course, Calderstones Park lay majestically nearby, a place known for the tennis as much as the kind of teenage cavorting John is likely to have got up to back in the day.
Having pinpointed the actual house number of Mendips, we rejoined the Avenue. The teenager somehow got ahead of us. We saw him handing the dog over to its owner. Another good deed done. Further on, a family made its way in the opposite direction to us on the other side of the Avenue. Jolted into the present by the sight of football colours and a trophy dog. We observed signs of the boringly familiar but had to move on: still some way to go to our destination. Another hundred individual - not intimately terraced - properties before Mendips itself, with long, weeping walls for some distances along the way. Blood sugar on the wane. Being a tightly protected middle-class enclave, there is little opportunity to slake a thirst or kill a blood sugar moment. No rows of shops and post office here in this district of regal car owners. On and on until Menlove Avenue opened up: less trees, more unsightly property developments where Liverpudlians' castles ache to be. And there, neighbouring a neglected bungalow blissfully ignorant of Ikea and in which dark deeds may have gone on, is Mendips, the first in a row of standard issue semi-detached houses whose only claim to individuality is in the pretension of individual naming. Mendips. The National Trust sign quietly declaring its world-historical fame, we looked upon an unassuming pile with a pleasant garden at the rear. How could Lennon and McCartney have practiced in that vestibule? Apparently anything was possible if Aunt Mimi declared it so. I reminded my friend of a scene from the film which is likely to pass the attention of most viewers but which to my mind is imbued with all the anticipatory melancholy before the disaster. John walks into the garden (was it Mendips, actually?) in which Julia and Mimi enjoy the first moments of their successful reconciliation, resting in deck-chairs under the summer sun. John is restless, keen to leave, but his mother asks him whether he is to stay or go. She quietly insists that he joins them both, just for a moment, in the other deck chair under the peaceful sun. He takes his place, but they don't speak, the three of them merely content to be beside each other.
*
We spent less than five minutes staring and reflecting, conscious that hanging around outside Mendips for too long was probably invasive for the neighbours. We waited longer for the bus on the other side of the road, Mendips still in view. Two teenage lovers were enjoying a period of relative privacy near the bus stop, the girl sat on a wall and the boy, obviously, stood tall next to her. Surely they were waiting for the bus, in that characteristically evasive way teenagers have of waiting away from the shelter and the public. Our bus arrived but they did not get on. Still, they made their way by foot, probably to Calderstones Park where, like them, many a teenage dreamer has been found over the years.
But my fundamental mistake: Julia Lennon did not drive the car which killed her; she was in fact that vulnerable being stepping out without realising it into the path of fatal danger. Late to this realisation, having nurtured obsessively specific images of life back then when the death of the mother of a world-historical icon occurred, my imagination had been stopped violently short by the representation of this terrible death and footnote in the history of culture in Sam Taylor-Wood's film of John Lennon's early years, Nowhere Boy. Though my friend had corrected my original assumption of Julia Lennon's death, I had not expected the shocking moment in the film as she meets someone on the street after leaving her sister Mimi's house and, waving that acquaintance goodbye and therefore turned towards him, steps into the path of the car that brutally kills her. Taylor-Wood orchestrates this moment with such precision for the sense of the accident rather than exploiting it as one of the foundational moments in the traumatic life of John Lennon's early years. So precisely and so unanticipated, in fact, that the film places us in the position of those who were to grieve this woman's death all the more keenly because they were not there to witness it. We share, if only for the duration of the film, John's angry mourning only because the film makes us encounter through cinematic violence the moment of loss, which exists only in the imaginary of the griever as the lost object.
*
At first we strolled up Menlove Avenue, peering in at scenes of soft-focused middle-class domesticity as arts workers, academics, designers, cultivated boss builders, spun out a lacklustre Sunday afternoon overcast not so much by the clouds above but by the seeming prospect of an unforgiving downpour. This was not to be, and so the cosy denizens of Allerton habituated themselves to their typical English Sunday confinement.
Menlove and environs are overshadowed by the inescapable resplendence of the area's trees. It's as if the dream of suburbia incubated so preciously by this archetypal middle-class Liverpudlian thoroughfare had been imagined by a town planner whose love of trees far surpassed his duty to create dream homes for the socially mobile. Such arboreal sheltering strikes the suburban walker as the logical conclusion to the bourgeois desire for alienation from the world in the lack of the aristocratic freedom to be sequestered in the splendour of individual estates. But the small-scale delights of Menlove's vision of home are hard to resist. The terraced streets that lie at the Allerton Road end of Menlove Avenue bear all the signifiers of a class quietly assuming their vision of the good life: red brick, shapely but modest rooms, slight variations in street layout, vestibules lined on both sides with decorative tiles, wooden doors seemingly preserved from their heyday, bevelled glass... These are the homes in which perfect Christmases are magically played out. All of this makes the mock-stately individualism of the houses lining Menlove Avenue itself expressive of bourgeois imperiousness, so not exactly the kind of thing fans of the self-styled 'working-class hero' have in mind of his child- and adolescent home. This must have been a world, the working-class psychogeographer cannot but fail to imagine, in which the word 'common' resounded in relation to anything beyond its tightly-controlled, sylvan boundaries, just as Aunt Mimi thought.
Not knowing the location of Mendips, we gathered pace as Menlove Anvenue opened its capacious arms. We passed judgements on many of the houses, celebrating most for their conservation of the past, berating others for their embrace of the ugly white or coffin-coloured plastic, unapologetic fakeness of contemporary so-called style. It simply got in the way of our cherished lost object, which wasn't necessarily Mendips itself nor a generic past which we felt Menlove Avenue symbolised. We weren't so much obsessive Beatles tourists as loyal Liverpudlians, bent on divining the Scouse-Menlove variant that, against the odds, inspired the eccentric Lennon into full Lennon being. To him, the Menlove richness must have been suffocating and liberating. Menlove's sylvan canopy must have weighed down on the young Lennon as much as Aunt Mimi's strictures, but surely offered itself as the natural bedfellow of his eccentrically creative mind. After all, through its branches trees offer momentary glimpses of the beyondness of the sky, mirroring the infinitude of the human imagination.
Perhaps the young John Lennon walked briskly to beat off the demons. Calderstones Park, the home of Liverpool tennis, will have been his cure. We were on the other side to Calderstones Park when we first realised its location on the avenue. It may sound odd to describe a walk up an unswervingly straight avenue as aimless, but this is exactly how we felt about our 'pilgrimage' after having made a detour to Menlove Gardens North and South, which veer off on the left of the avenue. This diversion made my friend consult the snail-slow internet on her mobile phone - perhaps too cleverly, we considered the fact that Mendips was not actually on Menlove Avenue but off it, 'Menlove' being a synecdoche of, distinct shorthand for, middle-class.
Every step of the way could be the site of Julia Lennon's death. This micro-event in the history of the world and insurmountable one in the lives of those directly affected by it impresses itself upon the atmosphere of Menlove everywhere. Soundings from Mimi's disapproving discourse rebound from the postwar past, the word 'common' commingled with the idea of aspiration embodied by her social position. There's a moment in the film when Uncle George and John jubilantly succeed in extending the wires of Mimi's radio upstairs to the teenager's bedroom. The music of the world entering the life of the world's musician. 'Can we turn it over, Mimi?', John exclaims from within his jubilation. 'No John', Mimi solemnly intones, 'We do not turn Tchaikovsky over.' This scene is also a synecdoche of Menlove. Uncle George falls to his death on the floor outside John's bedroom. Jubilation turns inside out, like many such events in John's life. Mendips means solid comfort imbued by Mimi's apparent resentment of life, which spins its own suffocating web around John's escapist mentality. Middle-class life isn't all it's cracked up to be, most people believe John himself believed. Better to be a working-class hero.
According to the film, Uncle George's death had a precise location. Julia's didn't, hence her haunting of Menlove Avenue; the present spectrally undersigned by (the) visions of the nowhere boy.
What my friend and I think will turn out to be a pretty cul-de-sac is instead an enormous circular road with a London-style common at its centre. How privileged that a few houses enjoy a park of their own. An older teenager was out with a spaniel and tennis racket and ball, which he whacked over to the other side of the common for his sprightly companion. The scene was striking for its absence of football and trophy dog, the overbearing signs of oppressive social life in Liverpool. Recreation made ideology. But the tennis kit wasn't random: of course, Calderstones Park lay majestically nearby, a place known for the tennis as much as the kind of teenage cavorting John is likely to have got up to back in the day.
Having pinpointed the actual house number of Mendips, we rejoined the Avenue. The teenager somehow got ahead of us. We saw him handing the dog over to its owner. Another good deed done. Further on, a family made its way in the opposite direction to us on the other side of the Avenue. Jolted into the present by the sight of football colours and a trophy dog. We observed signs of the boringly familiar but had to move on: still some way to go to our destination. Another hundred individual - not intimately terraced - properties before Mendips itself, with long, weeping walls for some distances along the way. Blood sugar on the wane. Being a tightly protected middle-class enclave, there is little opportunity to slake a thirst or kill a blood sugar moment. No rows of shops and post office here in this district of regal car owners. On and on until Menlove Avenue opened up: less trees, more unsightly property developments where Liverpudlians' castles ache to be. And there, neighbouring a neglected bungalow blissfully ignorant of Ikea and in which dark deeds may have gone on, is Mendips, the first in a row of standard issue semi-detached houses whose only claim to individuality is in the pretension of individual naming. Mendips. The National Trust sign quietly declaring its world-historical fame, we looked upon an unassuming pile with a pleasant garden at the rear. How could Lennon and McCartney have practiced in that vestibule? Apparently anything was possible if Aunt Mimi declared it so. I reminded my friend of a scene from the film which is likely to pass the attention of most viewers but which to my mind is imbued with all the anticipatory melancholy before the disaster. John walks into the garden (was it Mendips, actually?) in which Julia and Mimi enjoy the first moments of their successful reconciliation, resting in deck-chairs under the summer sun. John is restless, keen to leave, but his mother asks him whether he is to stay or go. She quietly insists that he joins them both, just for a moment, in the other deck chair under the peaceful sun. He takes his place, but they don't speak, the three of them merely content to be beside each other.
*
We spent less than five minutes staring and reflecting, conscious that hanging around outside Mendips for too long was probably invasive for the neighbours. We waited longer for the bus on the other side of the road, Mendips still in view. Two teenage lovers were enjoying a period of relative privacy near the bus stop, the girl sat on a wall and the boy, obviously, stood tall next to her. Surely they were waiting for the bus, in that characteristically evasive way teenagers have of waiting away from the shelter and the public. Our bus arrived but they did not get on. Still, they made their way by foot, probably to Calderstones Park where, like them, many a teenage dreamer has been found over the years.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Being free
I'd never have thought that hanging out the washing would make me feel so liberated. But it did. Pottering about the house doing nothing or doing small things is an unexpected pleasure after having passed my PhD viva and the PhD overall earlier this week. Plans are afoot to relax...erm, look into publishing the thesis or extract a number of articles from it for those much-vaunted peer-reviewed journals; and other things too, including an increase in book reviewing (and also of book reading - it never ends!).
But this feeling of freedom; the feeling of being entrapped because I should be attending to this or that PhD problem, has gone, and is amazing. I expect I'll be doing more blogging. Now: where are those ideas?!
Yours,
Dr Attic Fantasist
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