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stanzas diary synopsis and guide

  
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Notes to stanzas 53 to 63

53.3 c/rhyme:* Usually when one employs this oblique line within a compound word it is simply to offer two alternative first letters in a pair of interchangeable near homonyms. This would, however, make the pair in this instance rhyme and chyme: the latter being the name, from archaic medicine, for the substance produced by the stomach from food which is in turn transformed by the liver into blood. This is very unlikely. Instead the intention is quite obviously to pair up rhyme and crime and thereby conflate a phrase along the lines of ‘a bonanza of criminal rhymes’ (a very accurate description of ‘these octaves’). It is worth noting however, how formal verse of this kind does sometimes come across as a distillation or concentration of the narrative: something not dissimilar to chyme. The form c/rhyme itself is rather like a ‘digest’ of the longer phrase. We should perhaps take the hint that we should not swallow such ‘crap’.

53.8 villanelle:* A play on she-villain perhaps. Other than that, I fail to see what the persona might have against the Villanelle. It is really not a comparable form. I suspect he is supposed to get some irreverent gratification from the Brummagem rhyme with ‘blinkinell’.

54.4 flops:* Sloggy’s body is usually erect. This moment of flopping is the moment we leave him and follow first his girlfriend, her car, and then the fox towards Britannia’s bedroom. It is almost as if he is no longer Sloggy when, like the ‘drunken sailor’, he slumps—in the way a phallus is no longer a phallus when not engorged—and his character literally ‘unwinds’: unravels and runs out of wind (like a sail going limp.) Later his physical body will become dissipated in a different way by the coin’s gaze through the mock crystal-cut ashtray (see 229.3).

A continued effort to avoid the implications of this smouldering discovery lay behind my decision to go exploring. But even as I did, I could feel the very experience I was trying to evade consuming me. Not only was I failing to distract myself from the truth, I was enacting a pivotal moment in an existence which I knew to be hurtling unstoppably towards the fatal realisation of its own predestination. When caught in this lemniscate loop however, one must continue to act in order to continue to exist; just as the reader must continue reading for the story to take place.
    Having shifted most of the possessions I still kept in college away from the centre of the room, I positioned the stepladder directly beneath the access hatch: or as close as all the papers would allow. Mechanically, I climbed up past the lightbulb (which I had switched off for fear of electrocution, preferring—apparently—to conform to the parlous gothic cliché of carrying out this kind of clandestine exploration entirely by candlelight).
    I tried the hatch-cover with the fingertips of one hand: no movement. It was sealed with at least one layer of heavy, leaded paint. I hesitated. The rain continued drumming, the candles on the desk glaring back at me expectantly. What else could I do? With a single sharp thud of the heel of my hand, I struck the centre of the flimsy hatch. It jumped up a few inches into the roof-cavity releasing a shower of paint flecks, some of which fell directly into my eyes and mouth. I spluttered and blinked repetitively, wondering why I had not looked down.
    Edging the cover away from the access hatch, I felt around the immediate surrounding area with my two hands. If there were any rodents or insects lurking on the brink, I theorized, it would be preferable to be bitten on the finger than the nose or ear. Besides, the hatch looked barely wide enough to take the full breadth of a grown man’s shoulders. I might get stuck up there with the offending creature fastened to one of the tenderer of my facial extremities, and no way to pull my arms into the space to fight it off.
    At first I felt nothing but a few small lumps of plaster and a rough beam. When I allowed my hands to pat tentatively around the opposite side of the opening, however, (hoping to find another sturdy wooden feature which might allow me to spread my weight and haul myself into the cavity) I came across what I assumed to be a roll of wallpaper.
    What I pulled out of the loft was in fact a peculiarly thick and heavy roll of brown parcel paper. This I took down the ladder. Without brushing it clean, I leant it in the corner of the room next to the door. For months it stood there in a ring of dark red brick-dust. It is now the only thing I am capable of looking at, but that evening, and for the intervening period, I thought only that I might keep hold of it in case I wanted eventually to pack up the material and send it to an appropriate library for continued maintenance.
    Other than this, the attic seemed entirely empty. In a matter of two or three hours I managed to haul the boxes up there one by one and stack them in the space above the window. I took great care to organize them so that all the weight was distributed evenly. Lifting in such a confined space was also taking a rather heavy toll on my back, but I might have done the job in half the time had I avoided hunkering down occasionally, or sitting on the beam with my legs dangling through the access hatch, trying (pointlessly, of course) to visualize where I was in relation to the outside of the building.
    Once the necessary space had been cleared, I spent the next few days making the room passably comfortable. It was really very cosy by the end. I could sit facing the window with the door behind me to the right and the stack of papers behind me to the left, the folded step ladder propped against it. On the only bare wall I hung a brass-rubbing my father had made of a monument to a Medieval knight in his Parish church. I had a sheepskin rug in the middle of the floor on which I would sometimes get a little sleep during the day. On the desk, apart from the large accounting book (a ‘triple cash book’) in which I had decided to catalogue the contents of the archive, there was a strictly rationed single row of essential reference works between two white ceramic book-ends, an empty Players tin containing pencils and a slide-rule, a cheap but heavy cut-glass ashtray, a pair of opera glasses I would use at idle moments to identify the species of a distant tit or thrush, and, vice-clamped to the right side of the desktop, was my dented but largely still co-operative anglepoise task lamp. I had everything I needed. I felt absolutely at home.
    You must forgive these protracted banalities: I have to explain all of this now and in the kind of detail to convince myself, when reading back each paragraph, that any of it really happened. It is the only way I can remember what the room actually looked like. You see, not just this marginalia but in fact this entire work is simply a prologue to the annihilation of all three of us: myself, the past (as I may as well call it now) and you: the reader. My peripheral field of vision over the past few months has gradually been dominated by the greedy progress of the fire that has now finally engulfed us all.

55.6 comes in shot:* Hair in the gate. [Poet’s note]
    The fact that you ‘shoot’ with a camera has always lent it a far more aggressive attitude than other ways of recording what is seeable. The perfect combination of lens and gun is to be found in the sniper’s rifle. There is, I think, the threat of the sniper’s lens to be felt in all telescopic, observational photography. The snap of the shutter being obviously analogous (though, typically for this poem, in reverse) to the firing of the gun: it cannot kill but nevertheless, in some sense, captures the life photographed. The instant of capture never happens where moving pictures are concerned of course. The exposures are motorized and occur continuously. Even so, the sense pervades when watching such ‘footage’, of the quasi-divine ability on the part of the viewer to snatch away at any moment the fragile life it is observing. The fact that everybody seems capable of seeing everybody else in such a way in this panopticon city of the future makes the existence of individual creatures seem infinitely delicate. The future city resembles a besieged Stalingrad.
    The fox, as well as being the animal symbol of cunning and deception, is also the definitive object of the hunt. The paradoxical calm and self-assurance of this particular fox is not, I think, to be interpreted as the opposite. The fox stands as the perfect counter to the sniper’s-eye view. It absolutely defies the threat by bringing calm to the mise-en-scène, and does so specifically because of its permanent assumption of the threatening viewer. The fox, unlike all the humans in the piece except for the demonic Britannia, never labours under the delusion it can be invisible.
    For more reasons than this, the first appearance of the fox is a breathtaking moment of poetic distraction. The burlesque is suddenly thrown into relief. The scene’s effectiveness comes from the creature’s temporal ambidexterity, achieved by a metaphoric transformation of the cityscape through which it moves. The fox is just as natural as ever when its actions are reversed. It therefore trumps the stylistic gimmick and denies the irony. It is portrayed not simply as a responsive and sensitive creature which comes out when the street is deserted, but also as the dramatist of the scene, entirely in control of its environment. The problem of the bubble of quietness surrounding the appearance of the urban fox is perfectly evoked: one can never be quite sure which is cause and which effect. We like to think the fox only shows itself when the coast is clear, but we suspect it has a hushed exclusion zone magically projected around it as it goes, as if the deluded people and their delusional technologies are dumbstruck by its passing. It is not to be trusted though; its jape is never far away.
    This moment is very different to the poem by the current laureate, John Masefield ‘Reynard the Fox or the Ghost Heath Run’, and yet it must have been an influence.

55.8 pizza:* Italian for ‘pie’. The word is used in ironic pretension; the box is probably just one of those flimsy folded card affairs in which bakers put cakes for transportation. The moral environment of gluttony and careless littering (‘wrapped up’ in Italianate language by way of a sarcastic mock-dignification) is therefore driven home: this is a society in which people routinely eat sugary cakes or pies in the street and toss away the packaging. One cannot avoid being reminded of nursery rhymes: ‘A Song of Sixpence’ for example, ‘Simple Simon’, and (perhaps especially) ‘The Queen of Hearts’.
    The second occurrence of this word—in stanza 148, in a prurient pun: ‘12 inch pizza boy’—forces us to acknowledge the proximity of this foreign word to the English ‘pizzle’ (originally the member of a bull used as a flogging instrument, but now the penis of any large mammal). Perhaps there is a deliberate employment of these phallic undertones to raise the ‘pizza box’ to the level of a totem: both a site of disruption and a shamanistic gateway between two worlds—that of Sloggy and that of the fox. It is also possible, therefore, that the word is to be pronounced not /'pi:tsa/ but /'pizə/ or even /'pi:zə/ in this Birminghamized dialect (the latter being homonymous with the town containing Italy’s most infamously crooked phallic symbol).

56.2 copper:* (See 26.8 the right way round?* for a discussion of copper tokens as opposed to gold and silver money.) The association of the fox with copper is a natural poetic commonplace when one considers its colour. The question we should ask, however, as with any well-thumbed copper coin, is not what is its natural worth, but what precisely does it stand for? A certain cunning in defiance of the noble hunter, no doubt; a disregard for estate and property; an ability to breach the frontiers of the proverbial henhouse; the mentality of the disobedient scavenger: these things are salient but tend to miss the importance of the creature’s name beyond its beastly nature. Four men shared the name with the creature through the period of history that formed this city into the icon of the new dissenting revolutionary movement: Charles Fox, the leader of the Whigs in Parliament in the C18th, who supported the French Revolution; George Fox, the founder of The (Quaker) Society of Friends, whose ideas and followers laid the crucial foundation stones for the capitalist industrial revolution in the English midlands; John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments (better known as The Book of Martyrs) was perhaps the most important text in the birth of Puritanism and later the fomenting of the Civil War; and Colonel ‘Tinker’ Fox, a Birmingham metalworker who became the leader of an extremely cunning, unruly and effective band of Parliamentarian guerrillas who used Edgbaston Hall in the town as their headquarters during the period of the 1640s (between its infamous sacking and the creation of the New Model Army.)
    This last figure is without doubt the most likely to be referenced. ‘Tinker’ Fox’s virtual single-handed disruption of Royalist control of the Midlands (always the main battleground of the war) provided not just the impetus but also the logistic model for the Parliamentarian regrouping and Cromwell’s ultimately successful new army. Fox’s was a troop of full-time professional soldiers who were drawn almost exclusively from amongst the metalworkers and new tradesmen of the area and they shared a zealous and radical non-conformist faith extreme enough to label the enemy ‘Amalekites’. He was eventually sidelined towards the end of the war because of his persistent refusals to compromise in terms of theological politics and the (quite unsurprising) prevalence of support for the Levellers amongst his followers.
    It cannot be emphasized strongly enough how important was the Civil War in cementing the symbolic relationship between Birmingham and the libertarian anti-royalism emphasized in this poem. Before the war the town was just a sapling of the dominance of commerce and industry over the ancient values of order and nobility that would characterize the next three centuries. It was little known beyond its immediate environs. The arming of the Parliamentary forces by Robert Porter, the ubiquity of the pamphlet Birmingham’s Flames with its satirical woodcut of Prince Rupert firing the town (plus another, equally biased, on the same subject by Porter himself), and the ‘heroic’ tales of Tinker Fox’s exploits which subsequently circulated in the dissenting underground all changed that. Birmingham became genuinely famous. Clarendon was moved to single the town out as ‘notorious’ for ‘hearty, wiful, affected disloyalty to the King’. Never again would anyone have to wonder which town in England stood purely for radicalism, industry, unfettered commerce, and defiance of the church and crown. Birmingham had foxed the monarchy.

56.2-3 dorsal / Fur:* There is a good deal of evidence that the poem was originally intended to be even more prosaic than it is. The ‘unstuttered’ enjambments that characterize this stanza—in which lines ending with a falling multisyllable are followed by trochees, so as to avoid interrupting the regular alternations of stress—are very common in the erased stanzas (see 68-78 for example). The result is to prejudice the continuity of prose rhythm over the purity of the poetic line. Obviously, the ‘purity of the poetic line’ is hardly a great concern in this intentionally sub-Byronic idiom, but it is interesting that the poet should choose this moment in particular to legitimize these otherwise rigorously eradicated, prosaic enjambments. One might expect the fox’s linguistic environment to be more, not less, poetic; and in lexical and metaphoric terms, at least, I think it is.
    The prosaic rhythm may just derive from a desire not to abandon the rhyme on Balsall (Heath) which cannot be achieved in any other way. There is a sense, however, in which this rhythmic suppleness mirrors, in the prosody, the transformative effect the fox has upon the viewer and the whole environment. There seems to be an inability on the part of the verse-form to contain the fox. Just as, in the following stanzas, the fox’s image appears to distort its televisual representation (as if it emits some form of jamming signal), here its casual/causal movement effects a metamorphosis on the shoddy burlesque: it trots between the stationary rhymes like treetrunks, turning Ottava Rima into what, these days, we might want to call prose-poetry.

57.6-8 bandages embalmed with sap… dog-eared book:* The poet is playing on the idea of ‘foxing’ (the build up of mineral and fungal deposits, similar to certain varieties of lichen, creating a mottled orange/brown effect) in old manuscripts. ‘Dog-eared’ obviously adds, metonymically, to the effect. The likening of this deterioration of old books to the flaky bandages on Egyptian mummies is very worrying...

embalmed with sap: In a cloyingly solecistic contribution to the latest Philological Quarterly (XXXII, III, July 1953: 344-6), Robert A. Day from Dartmouth College supports Grierson’s tacky suggestion that ‘glew’ in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell ("Now therefore, while the youthful hew / Sits on thy skin like morning glew,") refers to "the glistening gum found on the bark of certain trees" on the startling grounds that Marvell could have read Gavin Douglas’s Middle Scots mistranslation—‘gum or glew’—of viscum (‘mistletoe’) in the description of the Golden Bough from the Æneid. Not only does Day countenance Grierson’s reading (can we really accept that Marvell, despite his love of the unsettling image, is suggesting this young woman appears to be covered in something resembling Lyle’s Golden Syrup?) but he also excuses Douglas’s translation for the reason that viscum can also refer to myrrh or birdlime.
    This is patently absurd. Marvell means ‘glow’, nothing more unpleasant. He is likening the girl’s blushing skin to the approaching sun—the first pink light of morning—and therefore intensifying the paradox of his seductive appeal that she join him in escaping it. The standard emendation to ‘dew’ is wrong, but perfectly understandable in the context; and much less ridiculous than ‘glue’.
    Day has stumbled blindly upon something vital in this Virgilian thicket, however. The ‘glew’ in question (though neither ‘gum’ nor ‘mistletoe’) nevertheless might bear arboreal overtones: ‘thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires.’ A surface gloss might be something like: So, while you are still in the pink, like the first light of dawn, and while the burning blush in your skin betrays your concealed arousal [‘willing soul’ as opposed to resisting body]… A deeper reading, however—one that approached a little closer to the Marvellian idiom—would suggest the contradictory images of biological mortality and spiritual immortality which co-exist as a transcendental paradox in the phallic icon of the Golden Bough. To return to the arboreal overtones, perhaps ‘instant fires’ might therefore be glossed as fox-fires.

Fox-fire, to elucidate, is an unearthly phosphorescence emitted by naturally decaying wood. A perfect metaphor for Marvell and also, I would have the temerity to suggest, a much more likely explanation of the Golden Bough phenomenon than Frazer’s: that the mistletoe itself is what makes the bough ‘golden’ (led by a desire to literalize the connection he sees between the Druids and the ancestors of the Romans). Virgil simply uses viscum as a metaphor, perhaps (out of a desire to draw the same universalising analogies as Frazer) in the knowledge of Druidic ritual use of the winter-fruiting epiphyte. It certainly seems much more natural to me that the glowing branch should be literally (and very practically) incandescent (Virgil is at great pains to emphasize the gloominess and deathliness of the grove) and that the ease with which Æneas can detach it from the trunk can be explained by its rottenness. The important connection Frazer draws with lightning need not be lost. The tree could easily be one that had been struck by lightning (hence the dead bough) and understood therefore somehow literally to contain the power of the thunder god (Jove).
    All of which brings me back to this strange, foxing moment in the copse of silver birches. The fungal deterioration of a book, the bandages around a mummy (usually encased in figurative golden sarcophagi), the strange glow emitting from dead wood: all these things seem to be disturbing portents of the ‘first glimpse of our heroine’. We are about to watch as, like the morning (or ‘mourning’) glew that sits on the skin of Marvell’s Coy Mistress, the ‘sun leaks bright lines on… the landscape of [Britannia’s] skin like grapefruit rind.’ Unlike Marvell, though, there is nothing in the least bit ‘coy’ about this Sibylline hag.
    The fact that fox-fire also (once again) connotes George Fox’s inner light of Quakerism should not go unnoted.
    book: The etymological roots of this word are traditionally traced to bók, Old Norse for ‘beech’, with the explanation that runic writings were thought to have been originally cut into the bark of these trees. Our poet appears to have found some deeper common origin however. The most primeval forms of writing in forested countries—analogues of which can still be found in English woods—might easily have been short messages of love, warning, belonging and self-assertion carved into the trunks of trees. So, a hypothesis: ‘beech’, ‘birch’, ‘bark’ and ‘book’ are all cognate. I do not have the resources to check this properly at the moment, but I suspect I am right.
    Furthermore, if I were to choose from amongst the indigenous species a type of bark which might be easily taken off and used in a similar way to modern paper, I would choose not the beech, but the silver birch.

58.2 drawn:* A wincing play on ‘sketched’ and ‘dragged’ or ‘gutted’ (as a corporal/capital punishment).

58.5* Notice that the camera ‘shot’ has become like paint on canvas. The fox has also become ‘half-formed’ (quasimodo). The suggestion is, I think, that the fox’s influence on the scenery has extended to the lens through which it is supposedly seen. Its nature cannot be contained by the technology and is disrupting the reception. In literal terms, I see this as a moment in which the ‘screen’ on which the fox is being watched suffers noise and problems with its horizontal hold creating a distorted and disturbing appearance similar to one of the grotesque and apparently vandalized parodies of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez with which the enfant terrible of the British artworld, Francis Bacon, has been trying (more than a little phantasmagorically) to terrorize the critical establishment this year. The effect is only temporary though, and, of course, it is the fox that fixes it.

I started this fire. Or, to be more accurate, it started inside me. I suppose I can be no more to blame for this tragic turn of events than can a building made with faulty wiring…
    It began with an itch. Before I even registered any sensation, I would find myself scratching vigorously at the skin between the crease of my thighs and my buttocks. It seems impossible that my hand could creep past the waistband of my trousers and start to rake unceremoniously through my underpants without the slightest conscious knowledge on my part of the discomfort it was attempting to relieve, but that is precisely how it happened. Soon enough, a hard, brown crust began to form on that part of my body, not dissimilar to the surface of a crème brulée, which spread first to my inner thighs and then my abdomen and round into the small of my back.
    By this time, I was so in thrall to the poem I was attempting to stop working on that the following couplet forced itself into my mind:

The eczema spread across his perinæum
Like dry-rot in a crypt or a museum.

59.6 stole:* A play on ‘fox-fur’ and ‘stolen goods’ presupposing the wrongfulness of ‘thieving’ the life of a fox. This pun therefore pre-empts the discussion on putative legislation forbidding fox hunting. (See stanza 61*).

59.8 vixen:* The word vixen sounds plural to me. The extra syllable,—en, is a pluralising suffix in words like children, oxen and brethren. This seems to go along with a multiple sense of femininity, compared to singular masculinity. The genitals must have something to do with it. A phallus is a one; it stands up to be counted. The pussy is… more complex: not a pussy at all… a vixen’s den. [Poet’s note]
    This is by far the longest of the poet’s own marginal interjections. The handwriting is strangely childlike and inconsistent. I hold little store with graphology however and refuse to draw any conclusions from this. I shall also resist speculating as to whether these brief annotations are not, in fact, the work of the original poet, but of some interfering editor. The free license taken in erasing and altering the text, the flippancy and brevity of the comments, the similarities in turn of phrase to those which appear in print all suggest a writer editing his own work. It is this entry in particular which serves to justify the philological-hermeneutics of my approach. The poet is revealed to be an explorer amongst the linguistic undergrowth, intent on unearthing the hidden, tangled roots of words.
    That said, however, there is a seriously tendentious and narrow account of the –en suffix given here. This ending carries its own complexities and ambiguities as a morpheme. It can form diminutives like kitten and maiden, feminines like vixen, plurals like oxen, adjectives from nouns as in golden, verbs from adjectives as in darken and fasten, and past participles (and therefore adjectives) from strong verbs as in sunken and broken. It is a multiplicitous and metamorphic suffix which is given its only surviving ‘feminine’ aspect by the word vixen. The poet is perfectly aware of this, I think. He perhaps sees these marginalia as part and parcel of the ironic effect, and therefore by no means as exegesis. The idea is probably to bring us back to the dangerous ambiguities and multiplicities of language which surround the anti-heroine to whom we are imminently to be introduced.

60.1 waxwing lyrical:* ‘Waxing lyrical’. Anyone who has spent time in archives of manuscripts, examining the work of C16th and C17th scribes (or even reading the increasingly shoddy work of modern students) will recognize the syllabic repetition of the first letter of a word as one of the most common orthographic errors. The phrase is still rather dubious however. I assume it to be used by analogy to the growing moon and in reference to a blooming or strengthening of intense poetic diction. There is also a simultaneous strand of the usual negative, tawdry symbolism. Employing a painterly metaphor, one can refer to purple prose as ‘laying it on thick’ or ‘with a trowel’, an action which seems very similar to another denotation for waxing: the daubing of depilatory wax on the hirsute limbs of a female impersonator.
    The bird, Bombycilla garrulous is famous for being a pretentious chatterer and also a herald of cold weather and bad tidings. In French it is jaseur, which also means ‘a pompous, verbose critic’, after its incessant and over-elaborate chirruping. In Dutch it is pestvoegel ‘the plague-bird’ being the leader of the migrators from Siberia which fly before the blizzards like the flagships of an invading Slavic winter. For once, however, despite the obvious preoccupation with Aristophanes, I think it might be a little far-fetched to argue that the poet intends this error. Allusions to Icarus are certainly beyond the realms of possibility.

Over the next few days the spread of this ‘lichen’, this ‘vagabond-flesh’, over the entire surface of my limbs and torso was accompanied by a burgeoning unrest in my alimentary canal. As my skin became hard and rough and almost entirely senseless, my guts growled and rumbled. My diet had not changed. I still ate the same kinds of leftovers from the common room as I had done throughout the preceding six or seven months: cold beef and potatoes, the bonier flakes of cod set in congealed lumps of parsley sauce, dry scraps of roly-poly left because they had never come into contact with the jam, the odd stale muffin or two, sometimes a bit of shredded lettuce and slice of semi-ripe tomato. Nevertheless, my intestines now seemed to have turned into an orgiastic nest of dragons.
    I began to fart. It was not just the usual increase in sporadic releases of trapped wind that everybody suffers now and then, but a seemingly interminable exodus of angry flatulence that struggled out of me with all the force of a vast litter of pigs fighting to be born, filling this little room with noxious, brooding gases.

61* We are, I think, to take it that fox hunting has been made illegal by Act of Parliament. When so many other, infinitely more bestial, activities seem not only to be quite legal but also societally condoned, one must assume this to have been an act of pure class-hatred on the part of the market traders and mechanics who no doubt make up the majority of MPs in this brummagem future, and who (having nothing better to do because they are, in all other respects, anarchists and eschew all moral and societal intervention by governments) are attempting to take even the simplest pastimes away from the traditional, rural folk who they despise. Think of the Rump Parliament…
    There is also a hint of metropolitan sexual deviancy in this sentiment. Effeminacy has inculcated itself amongst a certain type of ‘artistic’ male in London since the days of Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle. These sensitive types have always been squeamish when it comes to killing animals: a sensitivity which they seem perfectly capable of circumnavigating when it comes to wearing fur. Wilde himself, having nothing like the knowledge of ancient English traditions that he flamboyantly displayed in his clothing, described fox hunting as ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.’
    The idea has just struck me that London need not have anything to do with it. There is no reason to assume Britain has the same legislative or executive constitution in this future as it has today. Westminster may have no jurisdiction here. Perhaps Birmingham has long since declared itself an independent republic or an anarchist commune; perhaps the ‘war’ for independence from Great Britain is continuing as the events unfold; the characters’ actions being much more easily understood if only we could interpolate their attitudes to this situation and their potential roles in the conflict. There are no direct references to any war or alternative political establishment, but the underlying echoes of battles between Birmingham and the Crown, and of the unfettered anarchism of the city, cannot be ignored. I shall certainly need to give this hypothesis some thought.

62.7 smitten:* The reliteralisation of this metaphor makes me flinch. The verb to smite could have come straight out of the King James Old Testament, but the tendency in contemporary English is to restrict the word’s use to the past-participle metaphor meaning ‘love-struck’. The persona insists, however, on the riding crop as the most salient of the feudal trappings and therefore brings us back from smitten to smite. This is the anti-Episcopalian hatred of the TV-voice infecting the metaphoric undertow of the stanza. As a rather Miltonic gesture, it is championing the proto-communist egalitarianism of industrial capitalism and likening the traditional deference to (or smittenness with) aristocracy and sovereignty amongst the unpoliticized peasantry to idolatry. Within this ideology, the only figure allowed to smite is God, between whom and the puritan individualist no man shall come. The riding crop is therefore depicted as a cheap, idolatrous imitation of the holy thunderbolt.
    Crop also carries obvious agricultural overtones which allow it to reap an allegorical harvest from the traditional political divide between town and country. Remember, for example, the importance of the Corn Laws in the creation of the modern Conservative Party. Further evidence of this castigation of the putatively feudal aristocracy and its proponents, is the word trapping, which, (before it was generalized to mean any surface adornment denoting status) was originally a decorative caparison covering a horse’s saddle, and therefore a natural partner to the crop. It also has its own obvious hunting connotations.

Then, inevitably perhaps (it seems inevitable now), one afternoon as the sun began to sink over the gatehouse, I burped: not a loud, rasping belch; it was more like an isolated little hiccough, and yet a long, bright yellow tongue of flame flickered out from between my lips to dab a disc of soot onto the window-pane. It happened again: more forcefully this time, more like vomiting a hot, purple cone of fire. Next my nose and ears began to act like Bunsen burners and, eventually, the fire grew up through all the cracks in my desiccated skin like dandelions in a pavement.
    This is not only a fire in my room, and my fire; this fire is me. If I thought it would do us any good, I might apologize for this. It could make no difference though. I no longer have a will. I have become nothing but the performative function of a diabolical future which speaks itself into existence in a fiery voice…

63.1 sting:* The crop has left its mark.

63.2 press play:* One can only surmise the hyphen to have been accidentally left out of this particular American scion. There is a typical pattern involving two apparently contradictory complex verbs here: the compound press-play and the phrasal pull back. The latter, via an analogy with retreat, probably denotes the action of reducing the magnification of the scene by mechanically reducing the distance between the two lenses in the camera whilst the film is still running. This is also, I believe, ‘to pan out’, the opposite of the action that follows: to zoom in. Press-play, is perhaps an American sporting or military metaphor, literally meaning to push forward quickly into opposition territory (the opposite of a retreat) and thereby put them under pressure. In Britain we might say press forward or press on. In cinematic/televisual terms this could refer to winding the ‘tape’ forwards at a faster than normal speed to skip over unessential material or else create a comic effect. Obviously, however, if one wanted to create this effect in filming (rather than in projection or editing) one would have to do precisely the opposite; namely, slow the revolution of the film spool in the camera. The apparently oxymoronic action of press-playing and pulling back, is therefore revealed to be a counter effect: a vulgarly rapid change of scene in which the camera angle and focus are suddenly changed without filming being stopped. The poet is clearly tempting us to call out ‘cut!’

63.4 camera: era 9

63.4 The River Rea:* The Rea is one of the three main rivers in Birmingham; the others being The Tame and The Cole (all three of which flow North and East to join The Trent). The city’s name most probably derives (though more on this below) from the Toll bridge across the Rea at Deritend which was controlled by the De Bermingham family, who diverted the river to create a moat around their estate. The standard story of Birmingham’s strange rise as a new commercial and industrial city can be summarized as follows. Conrad Gill in his recent first volume Manor and Borough to 1865 in the large two-volume History of Birmingham published last year by the OUP suggests the city’s birth was:

curious and unexpected, for it was an obstacle rather than an advantage to transport that brought trade to this village… In the middle ages there was traffic between Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Walsall, Sutton, Lichfield, and Tamworth on the north side; Coleshill and Coventry on the east; Warwick, Stratford and Henley, Alcester and Droitwich, ranging from south-east to south-west; and on the west side Halesowen and Dudley. The routes between these places would keep to high ground as far as possible, but every traveller on them, in the middle of his journey, would be bound to cross the marshy valley of the River Rea… In this way the routes from all the country round converged… and most of the traffic passed through Birmingham itself, up or down the slope of Dibgeth and through the Bull Ring. So Birmingham became a ‘nodal point‘ on these roads, a natural centre of exchange for all the district within a radius of two dozen miles.
Thus, even in the late Anglo-Saxon period, an inauspicious bog came to rival (for example) the Episcopal seats of Coventry and Lichfield as a place of exchange simply because most traders travelling between these two established cities had to meet there and queue up with many others just to ford the River Rea. When the Norman Peter De Bermingham quickly grasped the new opportunity in 1154 to buy a Market Charter for the place, and soon after (around 1166) to declare its legal transformation from a feudal village to a manorial borough, things really took off. Birmingham began to germinate into one of the new Bourgeois capitalist towns, about whose revolutionary potential Marx has such thinly veiled admiration in the Manifesto, that were springing up like weeds all over Europe to throttle the noble cathedral towns that still overshadowed them.
    It is no coincidence that these new towns were the hotbeds both of non-conformism and new industrial technologies. Both things involve the desires of men to contain, unmediated by authority, the fires of creation in their own homes: to each man his own kingdom, and that the kingdom of (a) god. Even before Abraham Darby’s invention of the coke smelting process—a curious literalisation of the ‘inner light’ of Quakerism—the industrial revolution was well under way in Birmingham. The first description of the town not made for tax purposes appears in John Leland’s (1538) Itinerary of Britain (Toulmin Smith [ed.] 1908: Vol. II, pp. 96-7):
I came through a pretty street as ever I entred, into Bermingham towne. This street... is called Dirtey. In it dwell smithes and cutlers, and there is a brooke that divideth this street from Bermingham… The beauty of Bermingham, a good markett towne in the extreame parts of Warwikshire, is one street goinge up alonge, almost from the left ripe of the brooke, up a meane hill, by the length of a quarter of a mile. I saw but one Parroch Churche in the towne. There be many smiths in the towne that use to make knives and all mannour of cuttinge tooles, and many lorimers that make bittes, and a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.
In the next century the town was to stand to the fore of an avant garde of new Puritan, industrial, commercial centres: places where the absence of any mediating authority became both an (anarchistic) end and the (anarchic) means to achieving that end, especially when it meant the inhabitants could manufacture their own swords, guns and coins. In a section on ‘Birmingham Groats’ from his The Making of Birmingham (J. L. Allday 1894, p.49), Robert K. Dent descants in typically unapologetic style on this theme:
[Birmingham] awarded almost perfect freedom to all who chose to come. Dissenters and Quakers and heretics of all sorts were welcomed and undisturbed, so far as their religious observances were concerned. No trades unions, no trade gilds, no companies existed, and every man was free to come and go, to found or to follow or to leave a trade just as he chose. The system of apprenticeship was only partially known, and Birmingham became emphatically the town of ‘free trade,’ where practically no restrictions, commercial or municipal, were known.
Indeed, but the unwary traveller must remember, just like the unwary reader, that it always costs to cross the Rea. In order to enter this infernal utopia, this Brummagem Commune, this prototype America kindling in the heart of Old England like the coal at the centre of a blast furnace, you have (as it were) to pay the ferryman… the Styx, the Rea, and the Atlantic.



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