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lighthouse A Journal of New Writing

Issue 8 Spring 2015Online Supplement

Contents

Editorial 3Prose and Poetry 6

Catherine Ayres, Michael Brown, Mel Cole, Oliver Comins, Teona Galgotiu, Linda Kemp, Hannah Jane Walker, JDA Winslow

Features 25Madeleine Campbell, Dan Richards

Editors: Scott Dahlie, Andrew McDonnell, Meirion Jordan, Zoe Kingsley, Philip Langeskov, Iain Robinson, Angus Sinclair, Jo Surzyn, Anna De Vaul, Julia Webb, Lynsey White

Published byGatehouse Press Limited

90 Earlham RoadNorwich NR2 3HA

www.gatehousepress.com

Copyright lies with the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

the prior permission of the publishers.

This publication is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This pdf is an online supplement to Lighthouse Issue 8, ISSN 2056-9165 08. It is available free of charge on our website, and we hereby grant permission for you to copy and redistribute it free of charge for personal use ONLY, insofar as this does not contradict the

provisions of the statements of rights and copyright above.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a quarterly magazine from Gatehouse Press dedicated to publishing the very best new writing emerging from the UK. It is staffed by voluntary editors and all profits go back into publishing. For more information, including how to submit work, see our website: http://www.gatehousepress.com/lighthouse/

The typeface for this magazine, IM Fell English, was produced by Igino Marini, and is reproduced with his kind permission:http://iginomarini.com

Illustrations (in order of appearance) by Mel Cole: Light No.s 6 & 7 pencil on paper.

The Lighthouse image was designed and printed using lino cut techniques by Gini Hanbury: http://ginihanbury.blogspot.co.uk

Special thanks to Lee Seaman and James Higham

3

Editorial Meirion Jordan& Zoe Kingsley

Collaboration is / collusion / the element of conspiracy underlying collaboration, the practice of two or more bodies — intellects plotting, scheming and conversing. That twitching anxiety running throughout the process of collaboration, its hint at duplicity, unnerving the collaborator as much as the audience. (Self-) deception is vital to a collaboration working. Collaboration is / the point represented by a cartilage plate between femur and shin / terraces of slush-filled bags stiffened to a meta-membrane itself stretched over ligaments / every historic symbiosis or paleo-engulfed mitochondrial strand you’ve inherited can be the enemy / it’s as old as our eukaryotic idea of change through divisive replication / it isn’t you within but some body. Collaboration is / a poke at the unacknowledged idea that friendship is a dangerous thing. It can take form organically within coterie / the collaborators foremost friends before framing themselves as creative partners and players. It can seem closed as much as it is open in its potential: a folding within the coterie’s fold. Private jokes and references come easily through collaborative friendships / why collaborative efforts so often take the form of hoax — take Ern Malley for example, arguably the greatest modernist poet from the Australian literary tradition who (n)ever existed. A figure fabricated by two poets, designed to mockingly embody the European modernist sensibility detested by the collaborators. A poet whose literary legacy and contribution outlives his creators, who both have subsequently faded into the backwaters / see, this is the double-edge of collaboration, not knowing who comes out better in the end: the collaborator or the collaboration. Collaboration is/ your name misspelled in comic sans, email signatures disclaiming everything / you taste the air in corporate anterooms from which the lights buzz out at night, look carefully at the noticeboard to see if any of these detachable paper strips mean anything to you at all / you scroll quickly through webpages during work hours looking for Tesla’s dream of presence in the cosmos’ electromagnetic bonds / and you interpret / handshake / smell burnt toner and traces of china clay spooling from the copier again. Collaboration is / indeterminate, nothing is stable: the idea and the players are always shifting in relation to each other. It is a game where a schema of sorts is drawn and followed, but it is also a form precariously built

4

on the notion that ‘everything is game’, even the rules themselves. It is a tricky and tricksy thing. Collaboration is / rejecting the deterministic individual / filling Wordsworth’s stolen boat with imaginary friends / like all premodern objects these things are subject to the statistical tendency toward mutation / a means of conjuring others, as with ichneumon wasps — if you feel that something is ever laying eggs in your brain just remember — you won’t fill up that Dunbar number by yourself / that may or may not be yourself / Collaboration is /play. ‘Will you play with me?’ Who asks this? One future collaborator to another or several others? The text to the reader? Both so earnest. And that is why / Collaboration is / twin-stick shooters as you lean into the bright red plastic to find the point where the microswitch clicks into ‘fire’ / splitting the controls on a DDR machine to get out of the hot sun / as in every closed-down arcade you remember how you / watch the little lines of ships dance and intersect, aware that you’ve only got two lives remaining, the smooth bakelite in your hand picking up heat from the last person to roll pound coins down the slot. Collaboration is /risk. Risk of exposure between the players (one finding out about the other: ‘Ha, I knew you were just as much of a fraud as me!’) and exposure to the audience, of what collaboration does / of its very open process and performance. Are you convinced? Did we deceive well? Did the risk pay off? Collaboration is / Risk / neither co-op nor coin-op / hamming your way across Azeroth unfamiliar with the social dynamics and the complex interaction of class-based play / the taste of another person’s sincerity. Collaboration is / diffusion. Diffusion of voice. Take this editorial for example; can you detect who is speaking? Collaboration is / saying no / no / no / not yet / yes. Returning to no as a desired end-state. Collaboration is / an acknowledgment of the text, the creation being a thing in itself. Through the diffusion of voice, there is an implicit redundancy made of it, except for the ‘voice’ of the ‘text’ . The work defies a stable and essentilised authorship. It splinters. It has no origin. Where does the conception of the collaboration come? Who expelled the grit of the idea? ‘Who’ and ‘where’ cannot be determined. Collaboration is/ knowing how many ways a thing can be made —knowing that you do not have to choose between them. Collaboration is / a bastard, in many senses of the word, acknowledged or unacknowledged, depending on the social policy of its collaborators. Some will deceive, dress it up, smooth out the ridges of its labour, claim parentage

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and present it to the audience as the product of a successful and destined coupling. The truth is fidelity throughout conception and performance of the collaboration isn’t guaranteed between collaborators — we’re an unfaithful and flaky bunch. Nothing is intentional; everything is accidental. Collaboration is / refusing the palimpsest tradition . Balancing over-writing with underwriting. Collaboration is / potential. A potential always beckoning toward the concept or performance. Potential is an optimist’s idea of risk. Collaboration is / the two poles of a collapsed giant oscillating under gravity’s pressure. Mass being drawn in also from elsewhere. Formation is likely under a nova condition, or, as in the binary situation, longstanding forces altering rotation periods to create tide-locked facing partnerships, crater lakes, comet-catching surfaces of all kinds / at night the twin radio beams light up telescopes situated on only that angelic pinpoint, goldilocks. Collaboration is / a form of ego-escapism, or an attempt at such a thing. We all need an Ern Malley to transfer our narcissism and self- loathing onto. Collaboration does / what the creative process only scavenges for. Its own built-in audience, the desire to be less creative than your neighbourhood. It’s the rejection of the fantasy of inspiration, as when you look at this page and try to separate its voices in the belief that its particles encode some kind of structure. Well, um, not. Collaboration does / what the creative process is. It’s the externalization of inspiration bouncing between the players. It is a performance — private and public — of the processual, the productive and unproductive, the time wastage and failures experienced before reaching The Collaboration, which runs ahead, and leaves the players and spectators chasing after it. Have you caught up yet?

Prose and

Poetry

7

Catherine Ayres

The patience of small objects

The urchin fossilised next to my bed has forgotten the sea;it splays across its own weight, spines flowering over stone.The paperweights on the windowsill hold down nothing butshadows; they swallow weak light, let it soften their lurid hearts.And the snow globe you gave me still remembers Paris; findsits voice upside down, the Eiffel Tower glittering in the dark.

8

Oliver Comins

Kitchenware

I

A leg-bone consommé, stripped of fat,promotes clarity, leaving us with moreoptions for the next course. Bon viveursmight also be pleased with a gentle start,wanting more than ritual meat and veg.

II

This was not intended for a fridge magnet,nor was it designed with such a graphicflourish in mind. Words have shapes —may become cherished motifs or ornamentswhose subtle knots adapt continuously.

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10

Hannah Jane Walker

I remember when the pub was full of old men

That comic Trebor shiftabsolute stress.I have this old fashioned phone until Junethat is what I was clumsily trying to say, lets justtake this idea and really run with it, these days a kindle,an average man on an island, they don’t know what they want to achieveface it, things that attack people.When I was going to go to university 1981,a well thought of college Jesuit,I didn’t know anyone from my cohort.Did you ever teach, day it wasand hard to get divorced, nowadays,so many factors. So many after school programmes,yes I understand, my wife being an alcoholic.That’s just the way it is.Social services, not not very goodIve got a long way to go downI didn’t sleep for an hour.Right, right, she went to Franceworked for a legal firm and now she’s not teaching Frenchand I really respect her.If he steps out of line I think fair enough.Most kids his age. I come back to that.It’s a hard way of saying the facts,your point of view, is chasing a hard arse with kids.I’m going to give up my job and get my pension paid.My youngest daughter is a teacher, a temporary jobin this sophisticated society, we love with the causes we’ve got.Reason No. 27

11

Linda Kemp

From Archival Suite Archive of the Archive

Footage properly generating space inaugurates palimpsest evidence of tributaries

loosely associated contrasts contrive to bend this interdisciplinary collation of positive images into curation of potlatch & Special Brew

immediate survivors consume sad & lonely reminiscence strategic processions remain fetishistic a tribute to & confident enough

standing committees proceed like the collector need not compilation driving

everything else is just words & whatnot gathering yields further evidence & the detective

s/he walks episodic & imagination. A last crutch hidden in

family wardrobes & pacing it out through the go-slow to no-go.

Watch out on that watch.

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Archive of Achievement

Ectopic filing is melodramatic identities fragmenting & scattering as though

ever yielding evidence traces & truth believe to die to search

a corner of identity blossoming beyond the public dream

detail declares everything as words. It’s never been so silent

saliency offers in the end declares video-footage void & street smart

s/he steps forward into futurology a defunct myth floundering like ethnography

beneath a leaky pen or RSI. Specificities languish together warding declarations

O provisional facets and metadata how this moment files certification.

If I could rubber-stamp you.

13

Michael Brown

O Mistress Mine

And round about thenhow he might have looked more closely at her too much she had talked and at length taught him at the Walker of the shade in things what he hadn’t known was there. How her hair was more than a blackness then and there were words and outside the sheer exhilaration of rain and then the cold music of her scent, its fingerprints of tempera, amber reliquary.

14

JDA Winslow

Parallelogram

‘I am no longer able to find skinny, blonde, neurotic, American girls who smoke attractive,’ thought the protagonist, as the skinny, blonde, neurotic American girl went outside to smoke, in a manner she had copied from her (my) on screen heroes.

She announces to me, in a proud and forthright manner, that she is going to smoke, as if asserting, ‘I am an adult, I can do what I like.’ Her tone is reminiscent of that of a child who has just mastered the fine art of shitting in toilets.

She sits down next to me. I have never found skinny, blonde, neurotic American girls who smoke attractive. I feel a certain obligation to, though. The words CULTURE INDUSTRY flash up in my visual cortex as I carry out a fidelity-favouring comparison between her tits and my girlfriend’s. Extrapolating from the slight rise of her dress, I would posit her as a dead coral skeleton in my (sea)bed compared to my partner’s soft sea slug. I have, however, felt remarkably at ease since Burt #2 sat down next to me.

I am calling her Burt because gender is a construct. I am calling her Burt #2 because Burt is how we are going to refer to the skinny, blonde, neurotic, American girl who smoked, had bigger tits, and jumped out of a window. I suppose we could examine defenestration as the ultimate act of deterritorialization. We are all very intellectual.

Gothic Nun, Burt #2’s companion for the evening, will later confess to me that she feels oddly friendly with me, due to my resemblance to one of her other friends. Burt #2 is eating seafood. Her friend is, too. Everyone at the table is eating seafood apart from us. I bring up the intelligence of octopodes and our protagonist relates it to the table:

‘They’re actually as intelligent as your average pet dog.’

‘What?’

15

‘Octopus.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeh, really, I read an article about it.’

‘Hummmph.’

No one is really that keen to talk because they are all too busy eating what now appears to our protagonist as small, many-tailed puppies, battered. I try and reassure our protagonist by envisaging within the visual cortex a scenario in which we team up with a research group, creating a popular online-only series entitled ‘Your New Best Friends’, in which octopodes gracefully navigate mazes, segregate tastefully-coloured balls into aesthetically stimulating patterns and retrieve locally-sourced snacks from carefully scrubbed perspex corners. The whole thing, I say softly, would be shot with deadpan camerawork and ambient electronica, each tonal shift correlating with the visual bourdon of a slowly spinning sphere.

Burt #2 offers me seafood repeatedly. I decline then tell her I am vegetarian. This happens a number of times. The final time I think it really sinks in because:

‘My brother, he’s like really into raw. You know raw? It’s like vegan but nothing’s cooked, right? And like we went to this raw vegan restaurant in New York and I mean the food was good but I mean by the end of the meal, jesus we all needed to fucking shit. Like you know, it’s basically just nuts, they go straight fucking through you.’

Burt #2 will repeatedly express to us that she needs to write something down. She will repeatedly show our protagonist her notebook and say that it is full, and that she hasn’t got a pen, and that she meant to bring her other one, but, she brought this one! Because! Well, it has her list of Italian Phrases in it that Marco taught her. There is a close-up shot of ciao, hi, grazie, thank you. She closes her book. She enacts a smile that has been air-freighted into her face. Burt would do a similar smile, or at least, at that moment, with Burt #2’s teeth bared, it seems like something Burt could have done. Certainly there is something similar in the later hang-dog face, like they were both underexposed to emotions during their childhood and had to learn them, endless video clips of how to interact properly. Video tutorials on how to feel sad, or happy.

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‘This fucking bitch, this fucking bitch…’

says Burt #2 to Gothic Nun, ‘this fucking bitch.’

We don’t know if they are joking, but, overall, this is nothing new, and certainly not something unique to us. Gothic Nun confides with our protagonist that:

‘Lately, you know, lately, we’ve been fighting.’

Our protagonist nods sagely because we are a little drunk and we are walking over a bridge and the city is beautiful at night.

‘We’ve just known each other for so long.’

I nod sagely.

Before this, in a bar, they were fighting. Gothic Nun is allowed to be sad (we are all entitled to our emotions). Her friend fell off a building. She enters story-telling mode, giving us a little flourish with a de-olived stick from her drink, slowing her voice down, vowels dragging out:‘I meeaan, theere wee weere god knoows whyyy wee’d gone. We weere both, no not her, someone else, we weere both in thiis beautifull apaartment and these two goorgeouus gaay guys came in, and they, I mean theey just did thiis peerfoormance annd god, it was goood. And aafterwaaards I just weent up and I told him and....’

‘I remember,’ says Burt #2, staking her claim to the anecdote. She leans onto the table and waves her own tobacco-filled baton. ‘It was when you were in New York. You were staying with me. I remember you saying to me once you’d got back how good it was.’

‘Oh yeh,’ fending her off with the sharpened stick. ‘Yeh, I remember. Weeell, anyway, that was when I met him. And then the other day I saw that he’d fallen out of a building.’

‘Deliberately?’

‘No, no, not deliberately, I mean I don’t know what happened. I think it was an accident.’

‘That happened to my friend. But I mean, they did it deliberately.’ Burt #2 says it quietly, like she knows she’s stolen my line, words smuggled out from

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behind the cigarette. I don’t think anyone hears it apart from me. I don’t know what to do. I pull my phone out and draft some tweets.

1. Depressipice: brink of depression 2. Best friends bringing up argument 3. Talking about your childhood experiences that involve no one else 4. ‘Almost transcendental’ 5. Talk us through your next performance piece 6. ‘hot daddy is q guy’ 7. 6 year old daughter of hot daddy

Burt #2: ‘Hot Daddy.’

‘She calls him Hot Daddy because he’s got a six year old daughter.’

‘Yeh, she had sex with this guy, hot daddy, and she did it with...’

‘No! Shut up.’

‘What? I don’t know why you’re like this? I think you should be proud. I wanna do it.’

I’m conspiratorial with Burt #2. She assures me she will tell me later. I feel like the revelation could be the crux of the story. My guess is strap-on or hooker.

‘I really don’t know why you’re being like this. I mean anyway, I am a great wingman for her . Like the other night, you remember, right?

‘Yeh.’

‘Like, it was kind of funny because she was all like, having to pretend to be like into this other guy.’

‘And she was like, I really like this guy.’

‘Yeh, that’s right, like, you were supposed to be my fucking wingman. Bitch.’

‘I know, but I mean, it just happened.’

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‘Yeh, so then I had to like cosy up to this fucking creep so she could get laid... and then I pretended I was a lesbian and that she was my girlfriend, so I was like crying, and pretending I was upset that she was getting with this guy, and then he was trying to comfort me, and like being all like, let’s go back to my place, you can sleep there it’ll be ok so like I went back and I got into his bed and he kept touching me and I was like fuck off stop touching me, I’m not going to have sex with you.’

‘That was another time though, wasn’t it?’

‘What? Yeh, I don’t know. It was a different time.’

‘Yeh, that was like, before we were here, yeh?’

‘Yeh, so like anyway, I mean Gothic got laid, and she’d been moody the whole trip. What? Come on! Don’t give me that look, you needed it. The next morning was fun, I mean come on, he was a nice guy. Yeh, they were both like, t-shirt designers so we both stole like three t-shirts, and then like...’

T-shirt designers are definitely a sign of our cultural malaise.

‘Yeh, like, afterwards the guy came out and was like, do you want a t-shirt? and we were like yeh...’

‘Yeh, so we both left wearing these t-shirts with like another three in our bags.’

When I attempt to recall this I struggle to separate Burt #1 and Burt # 2, although I am, objectively speaking, aware of a number of statistical differences. 1. An age gap of six years (in terms of the difference in age that would

be present if Burt #1 were still alive). 2. An undetermined number of cup sizes. 3. A geographical distance of around two thousand miles (childhood

homes) 4. A geographical distance of one thousand, three hundred and sixty

nine miles (the distance from the city in which our protagonist meets Burt #2 to the city in whose environs I believe Burt#1 to be buried. (Her parents did not wish for me to be at her funeral. I envisage the line that passes from the central cavity of Burt #1’s skull to the central cavity of Burt #2’s skull. I imagine her skull is still there,

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unless she was cremated, but I seem to remember seeing a photo of the headstone on Facebook)).

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions, for example sex outside marriage as a sinful thing versus sex anywhere as an enjoyable thing. I assumed Burt’s virgin mary was ironic.

We are walking through the city in the beautiful night.

Gothic Nun: ‘We’ve just known each other for so long.’

‘Yeh,’

‘We’re becoming like sisters.’

‘Yeh.’

‘I mean, you know how it is...’

‘Yeh.’

‘...with best friends. Sometimes you know, you’re just not on the same page, like now.’ Her hand flaps at the slender silhouette of Burt #2, who is walking with all the sombre grace of a heron. ‘But I mean, that’s good, like it gives you the opportunity to check in, to make sure you haven’t lost touch with who you really are...’

We remind our protagonist that our mind is a swinging door. The best policy is just to watch them. We make a note of what passes. On our return journey the group is slowly fragmenting. I still need to find the crux of the story. I allow the rest of the group to drift gently into the night and keep pace with our inebriated wader, hoping to find out more about Gothic Nun and Hot Daddy. Burt #2, though, is speaking in a circuitous manner, words stuck in orbit around some unguessed-at emotional centre, until:

‘So like, what’s your thing? You said you’re like studying art? So you like, make art?’

Thinks I: It doesn’t I think matter what I tell her. She won’t remember. I decide to be honest.

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‘I write.’

‘Really? Cool, cool.’

‘Yeh.’

‘That’s cool.’

‘I dunno.’

‘Excuse me, sorry, do you know where we are? We’re looking for this hotel.’

The newcomer hands me a piece of paper. The hotel is behind us, in the same direction the group has appeared from, their alleyway running at a slight angle to ours before this convergence.

‘Yeh, it’s back there, I think.’

‘How far?’

‘I don’t know, I mean I guess five or ten minutes. I don’t really know where it is.’

‘Well, do you know where we can get a taxi?’

‘I mean there’s a vaporetto stop that way, just by Rialto.’

‘No, they want a water taxi. Don’t you? They mean a water taxi.’

‘Yeh, no, just like a regular taxi.’

‘Like, I don’t know. I guess there’s water taxis near Rialto. I don’t know. They’re really expensive, though.’

‘No, we just want a taxi, like a regular taxi.’

Me and Burt #2 look at each other. I feel like I am announcing a death:

‘You can’t get a taxi. There’s no cars here.’

‘What?’

21

The group performs a loose, frustrated dance, shaking their backpacks at each other. Our protagonists hustle them down the alleyway, and into the square, and indicate one of many signs showing the route to Rialto Bridge. Once they are across the square and down the cut we laugh. We continue to laugh. The conversation we have for the rest of the walk is a joyful, superior post-mortem of the Canadian tourists’ ignorance.

‘Like, you were just like, there’s no cars here and then they all just like, moaned, like collectively’

‘Haha, yeh, I know, I felt bad.’

‘Oh my god! No don’t feel bad! But I like, I mean I felt sorry for them. One of them like, while you were giving directions like, one of them was saying they got off at the wrong train station. Like, they got off at the one on the mainland. Oh my god. That was so funny.’

‘Haha, yeh, yeh, it was funny.’

We round a corner. Gothic Nun is waiting there, along with the other characters. They are talking. As we approach Burt #2 explains what happened. Once we are assimilated into the group we all begin to say goodbye to each other.

‘Bye Jonny. Bye. Oh Jonny, we’re never going to see each other again.’

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23

Rosie Breese

Damp

Our flat was always damp,pre-soaked with some coming flood.

Mushrooms poked up between the tiles.Their domes were closed eyelids.Their gills were matted lashes.

Mould became our constellation.Mould on the ceiling, mould in the folds of the shower curtain, in the folds

of our skin: marksthat at first we couldn’t read.

24

Teona Galgotiu

blow out

i can hear a woman singingi climbed on my window

tried to record itit’s a poor recording

some men joined her loud men

the inability of doing something to get closer to heris maddening

i could go out on the streetsearching for them

i’m afraid of something don’t know whati don’t want to find out they are not real

it’s almost certain they existi can feel them close

the loud men sing an unusual happy birthdayi checked my head for a contusion

i want to blow out candles

,

Features

26

Madeleine Campbell

Chanting the Absent One: Mohammed Dib’s ‘La danseuse bleue’ Paradoxically, although literary translation can be intensely solitary, it is also in constant dialogue. Through my work I have asked countless questions of a writer I have never met, the Algerian Francophone poet Mohammed Dib. My conversations with Dib draw in a multitude of other interlocutors: the poet’s friends and contemporaries, the authors he liked to read, literary critics, historians, philosophers. Some are silent, others are responsive, the extent of their presence or absence determined by their distance in time, space, or language. Sometimes my queries are rewarded with a more material presence, as with Habib Tengour, who knew Dib well and posthumously curated his poetry collections. I met Habib at the Café de l’Institut on a balmy spring day in 2011, a stone’s throw from the river Seine and across from the Institut du Monde Arabe. There, Habib led me through the landscape of Dib’s poetics, patiently explaining references that had eluded me as I began to make sense of Dib’s work and the long shadows cast on it by his Maghrebi heritage. I learned, for example, of the significance of the Aurès Mountains, a symbol of resistance against the French colonists, in Dib’s first poetry collection Ombre Gardienne (Guardian Shadow, 1961); I learned that though his first language was Arabic, Dib had always written in French. His verse sometimes turned to the Arabic heritage of pre-Islamic poetry, sometimes to the medieval Arabo-Andalusian Sufism of his native Tlemcen in North-Western Algeria. Dib spoke English and acted as interpreter for the Americans in Algeria during WW II; when I remarked on the parallels in style between To the Lighthouse and Dib’s early short story Le Talisman, published in 1966, Habib confirmed that Dib ‘was very fond of Virginia Woolf ’ and found ‘Le monde Anglo-Saxon’ of great interest. Habib later helped source the Arabic translation of Dib’s 1996 poetry collection L’Aube Ismaël (Dawn Ismaël). In the Preface to Dib’s Œuvres Complètes (Complete Works, 2007), Habib elucidates Dib’s exploration of the story of Ismaël:

The intimate mixes with political reality; it is about the Palestinian Intifada, with a clear engagement from the author.

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However, instead of focusing on the dramatic events of the Palestinian uprising, —above all the children, facing bullets with rocks—, the poet scales back to the mythical origins of the conflict: the abandonment of Hagar and her son Ismaël in the desert. (my translation)

I initially took up this invitation to, in Habib’s words, ‘rememorate’ a story remote in time, place and culture in May 2013 at The Hunterian in Glasgow with the installation Haجar and the Anجel. This was a multimodal translation of Dawn Ismaël’s opening poem ‘Hagar aux cris’ (Haجar Awakens), developed in collaboration with sonic artists Bethan Parkes and sculptor Birthe Jørgensen. Initially, we wanted to convey the overwhelming sense of ‘desert-ness’ in Dib’s poetics, but also to give a strong sense of location and engagement. Birthe’s sculpture created a semi-transparent, floating wall around a low platform, isolating the viewer from the rest of the gallery space but facing an oil painting by Scottish artist John Runciman, titled Hagar and the Angel (c. 1766). Bethan recorded the sounds of a hailstorm on the Isle of Arran and mixed these granular textures with recordings of the poem in Scottish, Arabic and French voices into an atmospheric soundscape. This created a fragmented experience of the poem, shaped by shifting ‘sound dunes’ emanating from speakers arranged at the four corners of the 3m x 3m platform. The resulting effect was that the poem was perceptible intermittently and accessible only through the language(s) of the listener. Through the juxtaposition of Dib’s poem and Runciman’s painting, separated from each other by over 200 years but inspired by the same biblical tale, we wanted viewers to create their own narrative experience in the context of a contemporary gallery space. It was also a means of engaging with a poet whose oeuvre has been described by his publishers Albin Michel as ‘a hymn to cultural exchange’. At the time of developing this installation I was also helping to organise the UK launch at the CCA in Glasgow of the University of California Book of North African Literature, for which I had translated several poems from Mohammed Dib’s Ombre Gardienne. The book’s editors Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour were scheduled to speak at the launch of Haجar and the Anجel. Pierre had travelled from the USA, but as an Algerian national Habib required a visa to visit the UK. Though the application had been submitted months in advance, the British Consular Services in Paris didn’t come through in time. Pierre spoke for both in his introduction:

In Habib’s work the term ‘exile’ is already mentioned often and if that was translated into Arabic it would probably come to the term that is central here, Hagar, the name. I myself

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published a book called h.j.r., which is the trilateral of the word, the root of the word that gives the word exile. I also have it [tattooed] here on my arm and it is of course that first word in Habib’s book Exile is my Trade and it is the first word, with a vowel insert, of the poem Hagar so that means the [term] Hagar means the one who goes into the desert, the one lost, the one exiled, and so on, so it is a very strong word that really moves a lot of materials mentally, psychically, spiritually, and it is that sense of being on the way, being in Sufi stations or, as the poet Emir [Abdelkader] just said, being on whatever way you want to deal with your travels.

‘h.j.r., Haجar, hejira’… I had used the isolated Arabic character ج (variously transliterated as jeem, jīm or jiim) to indicate the Standard Arabic pronunciation of the ‘g’ sound in ‘Hagar’, which is comparable to the ‘g’ in ‘Angel’ and differs from its pronunciation in French and English. But listening to Pierre outline the genealogy of the name, the sense in the sounds enriched my understanding of the poem. Hagar as single mother, Ismaël as fatherless son, stand for every person who is displaced, in exile or migration, on a journey or hejira. Hagar is the exiled, her son Ismaël is the ‘SNP’ (‘sans nom patronymique’) in Dib’s Simorgh (2003), the fatherless son Omar in Dib’s early novel La Grande Maison (1952) who questions the notion of fatherland, a recurring theme in Dib’s work. I had originally asked Habib to read Dib’s poem ‘Hagar aux cris’ in French and Arabic, to be followed by my reading in English. The delay in obtaining his visa was ironic in the context of the theme of the poem and installation, which confront questions of fear, distrust and ‘othering’. In the event we were extremely fortunate that multidisciplinary artist Nicole Peyrafitte, who runs Cabaret Hérétique in New York, was available following her performance with Pierre at the CCA launch. Nicole kindly accepted my invitation to make a guest appearance and I felt sure her participation would counteract the hirtherto solitary nature of my translation project. With only a couple of hours before the launch, we sat down in the lobby of their B&B, the sun shining on us through the trees on the Great Western Road, and set to developing a loose score for an impromptu performance. We barely had time for one read-through, but Nicole turned to me at the end of it and said: ‘C’est une pièce’ (we have a performance [score]). I have limited experience of reading my translations in public, but her enthusiasm and confidence were infectious. Together we decided on a joint performance of the third of four ‘movements’ in the collection (as Habib describes the structure of Dawn Ismaël), entitled ‘La danseuse bleue’ (The Blue Dancer). We wanted to give a sense of

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the alternately fluid and jarring rhythm of the original poem, the contrasting styles and changes of register, the sounds and internal rhyme of his free verse, while making the English version accessible to what was primarily an English-speaking audience. As we tried out varying combinations of spoken and sung fragments for the performance score, the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ languages became more fluid. We hadn’t rehearsed Nicole’s vocalizations, nor the use of the platform — we originally thought we’d perform at the lectern where the speeches were made for the launch. At the last minute Nicole suggested: what if we were to take this onto the stage of the installation? It was an unexpected, almost uncomfortable jolt; but it was an apposite reflection of the poem and installation’s sense of being on a journey or hejira. So after the speeches and drinks, we invited the audience to join this journey. The viewers arranged themselves around the platform. Many ended up behind the semi-transparent walls and could only make out our silhouettes (I only became fully aware of this later, when Pierre showed us a video he had taken through the dustsheets, slowly circling with his hand-held iPhone lens round and round the outside perimeter). The performance opened with Nicole improvising in song the first nine tercets in French. Using her voice as an instrument, in the manner of John Cage’s 1958 ‘Aria’, she sang a capella over the granular texture of the soundscape. Rather like the aesthetic that dictated the juxtaposition of Merce Cunningham’s choreographic compositions with John Cage’s music at the moment of performance, Nicole’s voice found a further juxtaposition with the installation, forming a sort of multi-sensory collage. It was a haunting sing-song, alternately melodious or clipped, stretching assonances and catching alliterations — as in the following tercet where, addressing a bird (mon oiseau), her voice scaled abruptly up and down in a bird-like vocalization, stressing the vowel sounds:

Mon nuage, mon oiseauVois comme d’un seul envolTu m’as tout volé.

The sudden imperative to improvise through movement as well as voice changed my perspective of the poem in unexpected ways. For the time being, however, uncertain of where to stand or what to do on the platform, I hesitated for a moment, then followed with my spoken recitation of the same tercets in English. It felt natural to keep walking, slowly, and together we fell into a sort of pacing motion, weaving in and out of each other’s space within the virtual boundaries of the platform. We then started to play on the many sound and sense relations between

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French and English, layering words and lines by speaking them simultaneously: ‘nord’/North, ‘sud’/South, ‘est’/East, ‘ouest’/West, ‘couleurs’/colours, ‘cris’/cries, ‘fête’/feast, ‘Danse’/Dance, as in the following fragment. Nicole’s (French) voice is marked in bold font on the performance score:

Source Text:

Je me fais perchoirÀ oiseaux : il en vientDu nord comme du sud,De l’ouest comme de l’estEt battement d’ailes suisEt ne suis que couleurs,Fête, ne visQue de cris.

Danse,Je ne danse que pour toi,Garçon à l’odeur de figuier.

Performance Score:

I become a resting postFor the birds: they fly in nord sudFrom the North and the South est ouestFrom the East and the WestAnd I am lost in the beat of the wings couleursAnd I am all colour, FêteFeast, you shall feed crisOnly on cries.

DanseDance DanseI dance for you alone,Boy with the scent of the fig tree.

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Dib’s poetry is a mix of voices, with abrupt changes in tone and perspective, a dialogic style I find difficult to translate without labouring its aesthetic quality. I thought the next stanza, for example, would bring us closer to his poetics if I perceived it as a bilingual chorus: in the following Nicole spoke the first unit in French, I spoke the next in English, providing alternation without translation except for the words ‘Rossignol / lui’ in the two penultimate lines, which were spoken simultaneously in English and French (this sequence can be followed by zigzagging between the English and French versions below, following the bold font). A conventional approach to the translation might leave the proper noun Rossignol untranslated, and the subsequent object pronoun ‘lui’ (an abrupt change in perspective) would be more elegant as ‘he’ than ‘him’ in English; the performance licensed us to both voice the translated noun ‘Nightingale’ and retain the othering form of the pronoun ‘lui’ as ‘him’, foregrounded by changes in tone and slight caesurae (marked by vertical lines) on either side.

Performance Score:

Ce que rouge rougeoyant,Piquée pas sa mèreJe n’ai pu attraper,Ce qui tête de serpentNe pique pas,Ce qui meule sur meuleNe moud pas.Ce qu’emporte le vent.Ce qui vieillard chenuSe plaint quand Rossignol|Lui,| meurt en chantant.

I spoke the next two stanzas in English. Nicole insistently repeated in French the words in bold, her jarring interruptions reflecting the upheaval, loss and questioning that arise from enforced exile: the homing pigeon (‘pigeon’) who transforms into a raven (‘corbeau’), the past that is beyond reach, like the country left behind (‘passé’, ‘pays’), the bittersweet ambivalence and dangerous lure, perhaps, of newfound freedoms (blazing (face)/‘(visage de) brasier’, burn/‘brûle’), the loss inherent in any gain (found/‘trouvé’, lost/‘perdu’).

That which red erubescent,Stung by her motherI could not catch,That which head of a serpentDoes not sting,That which millstone upon millstoneDoes not mill. That which the wind carries off.That which, hoar-ridden elder Whines even as Nightingale,|Him,| sings his last breath.

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Source Text:

Ce qui pigeon,Vienne la nuit, se faitCorbeau sous la lune,Le passé ne serait-ilPlus qu’un autre pays?

Visage de brasierOù toute chose brûleÀ trop s’en approcher,Qu’ont-ils donc trouvéCeux qui t’ont perdu ?

Performance Score:

As the homing pigeon, pigeonCome nightfall, turnsRaven in the moonlight, corbeauCould the past be nothing passéNow but an other place? pays

Blazing face brasierIn whom all things burn brûleFor flying too close,What is it they found trouvéThe ones who lost you? perdu

I led the two penultimate stanzas, which again reminded me of a chorus in several voices, in English. In the first of these stanzas Nicole maintained the choral element by repeatedly whispering in French the diegetic line ‘Il y a une histoire qui se raconte’ (In this moment a story is told). Our score developed (unplanned) echoes of how the chorus in a Greek tragedy prefigures its catharsis: ‘Already, the sea has come crashing’. This prepared the way for the redemptive appearance of Hagar, undefeated, who ‘spells this dance over and over’, ‘the dance become sea’. Nicole half-spoke, half-chanted the incantatory ‘Hagar toujours rebelle’ (Tireless Haجar rebel) throughout the second stanza as I recited the English verses.

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Source Text:

Les mains, feuilles tenduesAu-dessus d’un feu invisible,Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.Déjà, la mer est là renverséeEt il n’y a que feu répandu.

Ce qui avance là,Hagar toujours rebelleEt qui multiplie le movementHagar toujours rebelle,La danse faite mer.

Performance Score:

Her hands, an offering of leaves Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.Reach for a fire unseen, Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.In this moment a story is told.Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.Already, the sea has come crashing Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.And nothing remains but spreading flames.

Relentless advance, Hagar toujours rebelle,Tireless Haجar, rebel Hagar toujours rebelle,And she spells this dance over and over Hagar toujours rebelle,Tireless Haجar, rebel Hagar toujours rebelle,This dance become sea.

I spoke the final stanza of the poem in English and Nicole closed with an improvisation of the French tercet in song in a slow, insistent, vowel-rich enunciation, marking and separating the syllables of the final word (é-blou-i-ssante — which sounded like ‘ay-blue-ee-ss-aunt’ — thus ending with a recall of the ‘blue’ in the poem’s title). Interspersing preceding words with shhh

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sounds, she echoed and handed back to the installation’s soundscape, which had been running in the background from the beginning of the performance.

Who would upstage her,Who would banish her, Sombre, resplendent?

Qui l’en délogerait,Qui l’en chasserait,Sombre, éblouissante ?

***

Staging a collaborative performance of ‘The Blue Dancer’ on the platform of the installation added a new sense to the poem: instead of source and target being read in sequence, the English version provided a dynamic counterpoint to the aural qualities of the source text (sound, rhythm, musicality), expressing an experience quite distinct from reading each text in isolation. Further, as intonation, rhythm and movement can change with each performance, I feel that through this medium some element of the transient quality of translation can be shared in real time with the audience. In the performance of ‘La danseuse bleue’, this effect echoed the viewers’ prior experience of the installation, where perceptions of the soundscape differed depending on the participants’ varying attention span as they tuned in and out of the soundscape’s transient sounds, voices and languages. In this way the act of performing effectively changes the script to a living score, where certain elements are fixed (the words and syntax of the poem) and others are open to degrees of freedom for the performer(s) — as, for example, in their gestures and movement, or the timbre and intensity of a vowel, in the unscripted dimensions of intensity, pause, duration. In this particular event, the additional opportunity to perform the piece in French and English afforded the possibility of bringing the original poem to the fore through the layering of lines and words in both languages. We improvised on these ‘degrees of freedom’, but I imagine we could equally have planned them in advance — time constraints dictating it would be the former. In a bi- or multilingual performance, both recited and sung, the most culturally determined elements of meaning-making can be left indeterminate to provide a richer sonic and semantic experience than a static, definitive, representation of the poem in the target language could on the page. Such improvisation allows for the process of Derrida’s ‘différance’, or deferred meaning, to operate in collaboration with a live audience.

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***

After the launch, I revisited the experience of performing in canon with Nicole, listening to the recorded performance. I was struck by the incantatory nature of the sound elle; this revelation was so insistent that I ultimately redrafted my initial translation to reflect this. In the penultimate stanzas I had rendered the epithet ‘rebelle’ as the verb ‘rebel’ in English with a stress on the second syllable, but this was primarily to provide a sound rhyme with the French word. The English ear is accustomed to the French pronunciation and meaning of the word belle and some may also perceive a subtext in the sense of re-belle (beautiful again). On re-reading the entire poem in French, however, I also noted the pervasive nature of the sound elle in its folding and unfolding within French vocables. Searching the literature on Arabic roots for a clue, I found that, just as the trilateral h.j.r. described by Pierre ‘moves a lot of materials mentally, psychically, spiritually’, the sound elle relates to the trilateral ع ل ل (reading from right to left, the isolated Arabic characters, ‘ayn, lam, lam’). French scholar and Islamologist Louis Massignon transliterates these roots as ‘ ‘.L.L.’ and associates them with the Arabic word ‘illāh, or deity. In the light of this reading I returned to my translation in order to reflect this sound and its metonyms. That this poem is about a feminine entity is revealed in the title: it might have been more accurate to translate ‘La danseuse bleue’ as ‘The Female Blue Dancer’ or the ‘The Blue She-Dancer’, given the feminine form of the noun ‘danseuse’ (as opposed to the male form ‘danseur’). Further, elle stands for the feminine subject pronoun ‘she’, which in this poem could refer back to Hagar, but also to a feminine noun: in one instance, as we shall see, ‘elle’ refers to ‘la danse’ (the dance). The French homonym ‘aile’ means ‘wing’, thus adding to the polysemic layering in this poem that opens with an ‘hirondelle’ (swallow; my emphasis). To add a further spiritual dimension, the shift from the first to third person feminine singular in ‘The Blue Dancer’ could indicate the loss of self characteristic of a dervish trance, as the Algerian academic Sari Ali Hikmet suggested in Synergies Algérie:

Suddenly, the ‘I’ disappears, as in a dance of dervishes, and the absent will appear, the GHAIB [The Absent One] in the form of the third person singular. In a state of ecstasy, the dervishes say or cry out: him: Houa, in order to then say the supreme truth: She, Hya. (my translation)

The Dibian scholar Beïda Chikhi traces the progression of the Arabic radical which she transliterates as ‘el’, in women’s names throughout Dib’s ,ع ل ل

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works as the development of an aesthetic fantasy or mythology which she argues combines the divine and the feminine: this onomastic aesthetic, which bridges French and Arabic sounds and signs, offers an illustration of Dib’s characteristic cross-fertilisation of culturally distinct mythologies. In a sense the (male) poet is the dervish who, through this incantatory poem, summons the divine She, Hya, to achieve ecstasy — a being beside oneself, or a state of otherness. The performance of his poem, in turn, lends ephemeral body, gesture and voice to his incantation — and asks members of the audience to participate in this by allowing what they hold sacred to rise within them and transport them outside themselves, to a state of otherness. I worked this relation to the Arabic language and culture into my revisions as I followed the phoneme elle or el through fragments of the poem. The sound occurs in the very first line of ‘La danseuse bleue’ as part of the French ‘hirondelle’ and I used its English cognate to replace the more common ‘swallow’:

Une hirondelle m’a frôléEt j’ai cru à une penséeVenue me visiter.

A swallow brushed against An hirondelle caressed meAnd I trusted in a dreamCome to visit me.

I could then echo the generic term ‘oiseau’ with the sound and syllabic weight of the word ‘swallow’, a more contemporary translation of the earlier ‘hirondelle’:

Mon nuage, mon oiseauVois comme d’un seul envolTu m’as tout volé.

My cloud, my swallowYou know when you took flight, You took it all from me.

In the next stanza, the antecedent ‘La danse’ (the dance) from the first line is repeated in subsequent lines with the feminine pronoun ‘Elle’, lending incantatory force to a trance-inducing chant. The permanent dilemma caused by feminine and masculine nouns in French, which Dib plays exquisitely in his use of pronouns, acquires an extra dimension given the significance of the Arabic trilateral ع ل ل. Whereas English would require the pronoun ‘it’

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to refer back to ‘the dance’, this aesthetic interpretation based on cultural associations allowed me to refer to the dance as ‘she’. Spurred on, perhaps, by the incantation and the experience of performing it, I attempted to approximate the sound of the French verb ‘sort’ (the final /t/ being silent in French) with the English verb ‘soars’ (the final voiced sibilant determines the pronunciation of the vowel in assonance with ‘sort’). Admittedly I opted for a slightly overstated register compared to Dib’s sober style, but with these shifts from the source text I aim to offer a slant evocation of its ghosts — expressed in a French layered with the Arabic language and culture.

La danse. Elle sort de mes pied,Elle sort de mes seins,Elle sort de mes bras,Elle sort de mes veines,Elle sort de mes yeux.

The dance. La danse. It rises through She soars through my feet,It rises through She soars through my breasts,It rises through She soars through my arms,It rises through She soars through my veins,It rises through She soars through my eyes.

Referring to the dance as ‘she’ also allows a sacred connection to be made with the ‘she’ in the following stanza, which marks Hagar’s transition to a trance-like state, a dissociation, as highlighted by Sari Ali, from the earlier ‘je’ to ‘elle’, or from the first to the third person singular (my emphasis in bold):

Et le seul chant frissonne,Et le masque sous le visage :Elle n’ira perdre que cela.

And the lone chant shivers free,And the masque beneath the face:She shall lose only this.

In a multilingual performance, this ‘she’ can be layered with the sound elle. However, when translating the insights gained from performance onto the page, typography also offers the possibility to shadow ‘she’ with the French

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and Arabic characters, to trace visual lines of flight and hint at the homonymy of elle/aile/ع ل ل:

And the lone chant shivers free,And the masque beneath the face:ع ل ل Elle

She shall lose only this.

***

Translating ‘La danseuse bleue’ was and continues to be a collaborative experience: from the initial translation on the page to staging an installation with visual and sound artists in a museum setting, from the context provided by Habib’s preface to Pierre’s illuminating etymology of the word ‘Hagar’, to insights gained from performing the poem. Nicole also enabled another kind of presence: interacting with her on stage in French and English brought my earlier, solitary conversations to life, made them visible, audible, tangible — present — the performative element in the time-space of the performance conjuring somehow an interaction with all the absent partners I had conversed with in the build-up to this moment.

***

More information on the installation Haجar and the Anجel and the work of the Jetties Collective can be found at www.jettiesproject.tumblr.com. The full text of the translation follows this article.

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Madeleine Campbell

La danseuse bleue – The Blue Dancer by Mohammed Dib

An hirondelle caressed meAnd I trusted in a dreamCome to visit me.

Up there it is only A solitary cloud;But a shadow was cast.

And all this silence.Such silence! So alive!On earth, I listen.

But then this shadow,The cloud takes away. TenSeas they shall cross.

Stone for a wellheadSealed against itself,I stay for memory.

I stay and, shadowCome to visit me, whereIs my son’s shadow?

My cloud, my swallowYou know when you took flight, You took it all from me.

Shine, little flame,To you, I runAnd I shall reach the Lord.

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Sorrow’s bright shadow You who listen and remember:Step by step, guide me.

* I become a resting postFor the birds: they fly in nord sudFrom the North and the South est ouestFrom the East and the WestAnd I am lost in the beat of the wings couleursAnd I am all colour, FêteFeast, you shall feed crisOnly on cries.

DanseDance DanseI dance for you alone,Boy with the scent of the fig tree.

La danse.She soars through my feet,She soars through my breasts,She soars through my arms,She soars through my veins,She soars through my eyes.

That which red erubescent,Stung by her motherI could not catch,That which head of a serpentDoes not sting,That which millstone upon millstoneDoes not mill. That which the wind carries off.

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That which, hoar-ridden elder Whines even as Nightingale,He sings his last breath.

As the homing pigeon,Come nightfall, turnsRaven in the moonlight,Is the past nothing nowBut an other place?

Blazing face In whom all things burn For flying too close,What is it they foundThose who lost you?

* And the lone chant shivers free,And the masque beneath the face:ع ل ل Elle She shall lose only this.

Immovable, the blue dancer,Now clear and clearer,Now blue and bluer,With level poiseHer hips regainTheir stance at every step, Immovable before each step.

Her hands, an offering of leaves Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.Reach for a fire unseen, Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.In this moment a story is told.Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.Already, the sea has come crashing Il y a une histoire qui se raconte.And nothing remains but spreading flames.

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Relentless advance, Hagar toujours rebelle,Tireless Haجar, rebel Hagar toujours rebelle,And she spells this dance over and over Hagar toujours rebelle,Tireless Haجar, rebel Hagar toujours rebelle,This dance become sea.

Who would upstage her,Who would banish her, Sombre, resplendent?

This translation and its typography has beeen revised to incorporate aspects of the performance score, as discussed in the preceding article.

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Dan Richards

The Cairngorms, January 2014

An extract from Dan Richards’ book, Climbing Days, a peripatetic biography he is writing of his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early 20th Century. Using Dorothy’s 1935 memoir as his guide, the book traces her life and climbs in the UK, Switzerland, Spain, Canada and North America with her husband, the literary critic and scholar, Ivor Armstrong Richards. The final chapter is to retrace their celebrated first ascent of the North Ridge of the Dent Blanche in 1928, one of the last great Alpine climbing problems.

The extract below is taken from Chapter 4, and deals with a Conville Winter Mountaineering course he undertook earlier this year in the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland.

We woke before dawn. Fortunately I’d dreamt all the worst case scenarios overnight so felt slightly more prepared for disaster. Spurred by a strong cup of sweet tea, I blearily dressed in the thermal base layers I’d laid out the night before — long-johns, wool top, first pair of thick socks, salopettes — mountaineering dungarees, with all the braces, zips and fastenings that involved. A merino mid-layer top, second pair of socks, fleece top, and two-part plastic boots — lacing the boxing boot-like inner then pushing that into the rigid plastic outer before lacing that too. This was made more cumbersome by the fact I’d begun to resemble the Michelin Man as the clothing mounted.Next gaiters with their elastic straps, velcro and snap fasteners, enclosing the shins to sit over the boot laces and tongue. A fiddle. But eventually dressed and, feeling toasty, I clomped to the kitchen for breakfast and a briefing on the day ahead. There were nine of us in all, the six from the train together with Louie from Bedford, James from Preston, and Sam from Sussex — who’d travelled up sideways overnight on the Euston sleeper.1

1 from ‘Sleeping Compartment’ by Norman MacCaig

I don’t like this, being carried sidewaysthrough the night. I feel wrong and helpless — likea timber broadside in a fast stream.

Such a way of moving may suitthat odd snake the sidewinder

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All of them seemed unbelievably cheery considering it was still dark outside — relaxed and raring to go, whereas I was getting the yips as to how I’d fare taking bearings or tying bowlines; or whether I’d skewer myself with an axe.

Sat round the large wood table we introduced ourselves to instructors Jonathan Preston and Mark ‘Sammy’ Samuels — very nice, fiendishly knowledgable chaps, as it turned out. Jonathan was very business-like, composed and trenchant whereas Sammy seemed to crackle with an enthusiasm just south of manic. I was placed in Jonathan’s team. Together we looked over the printouts of the day’s weather forecast and then collected the rest of our kit — packing spare warm mitts, goggles, helmet, thermos, laminated map, compass, and head torch in our rucksacks. Pulling on my wool hat, waterproof jacket and gloves; and carrying my crampons and ice axe, I made our way out to the stiff dawn and the bus. Then, driving into the hills below smattered mackerel cirrocumulus, air warming, light welling — the sun rose as a saturated Polaroid developing before us; the day scrubbed clean, Brautigan blue: ‘the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen.’2

* * * * *

The twin lochans in the bowl of Coire an t-Sneachda were invisible, buried. Our cohort stood with backs pressed behind a large boulder which provided some shelter from the wind which thwacked and swirled about us. The wind had been spoiling for a fight since we’d set out from the Coire Na Ciste ski centre an hour or so before, constantly hassling, outright opposed to our progress, bowling gusts in two and threes with just enough interval to recover balance before the last knocked you over again. Although not snowing, the wind whipped and strafed us with powder from the slopes. Dashed and peppered, I zipped my collar over my mouth and pulled my goggles tighter and began to develop an eye for the rolling waves of snow ahead which showed the gusts to come, bracing before they hit. In the lulls I heard our boots on the snow, in-step, crisp as Visa cards swiping frost off a dozen windscreens. We were a crunching peloton, trooping over sastrugi and the teardrop drumlins formed behind rocks —

in Arizona: but not me in Perthshire.

...It’s no good. I go sidelong.I rock sideways - I draw in my feetTo let Aviemore pass.

2 Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel — Richard Brautigan — (Simon & Schuster, 1976) Canongate, 2012

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frozen velodrome helmet lumps, shaped by the squalls which luffed my hood, rasped my ears and ripped the hat off Jonathan’s head sending it racing away behind us. As one the group turned and watched it go, streaking down the valley like a frighted hare and out of sight, never to be seen again.

Now, behind the boulder, I pushed up my goggles. Their sepia tint which had given the cirque and rock field a Martian aspect instantly turned to dazzling neon blue, as if a flare had gone off. It took a good minute for my vision to recover. I spent that minute rather blindly fiddling with loose gaiters and creeping salopettes, a dance I’d repeat throughout the day to come. Around us rose the cliffs of Coire an t-Sneachda — Corrie of the Snow — whose colosseum tiers shot sheer into the low cloud, their snow flanks steepening until they dovetailed into bare granite outcrops, fissured and quartzy; mean. Their darkness was such that it burnt through the white around them, their severity hypnotic. Jonathan pointed out climbs above — Jacob’s Ladder, Aladdin’s Mirror and Crotched Gully — deserted today, unfancied in this weather, but many climbers have come unstuck in this place… and I’ve written ‘come unstuck’ there, but as I look at it now all the Wodehousian chutzpah drains away and it stands mealy-mouthed and hollow — for to come unstuck in this charged white hanging space is often to die. This place will eat you.In early 2007 alone, five climbers died here in four accidents, either caught out by the conditions or falling from the routes overhead:

‘Young people have always been driven to go out and have adventures, and that’s a good thing,’ said Roger Wild of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland. ‘But mountains aren’t a commodity you can put in a supermarket trolley… There’s nothing wrong necessarily going climbing in the face of a bad forecast. You would perhaps set out earlier, or climb something easier. But you can’t point at these lads and say they did something wrong. You can say they were a bit off the mark in one or two areas. But we should be proud of them, going out and having an adventure.’3

Later in the same article, John Allen, a Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team Leader, spelt out the dangers of seeking instant gratification without thorough grounding in the Cairngorm’s nature — ‘A lot of younger climbers have not got that long apprenticeship in winter climbing… They may have a good knowledge of rock climbing or climbing on indoor walls and be technically proficient, but they’re not necessarily prepared for what the weather in winter can do.’

So back in the wind we practiced step cutting and walking zig-zag paths up

3 The Guardian, Saturday 3rd February 2007

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snow slopes — ice axe always in the hand nearest the bank and so ready for an arrest should one slip. En route back down and round the corrie’s floor we passed debris from a recent mini-avalanche and again our eyes swept up and over the cliffs and their freight of ice and snow. The wind had dropped and a steady dust of flakes begun when we took off our bags and set to digging a snow hole, kneeling down to tunnel with the adze end of our axes. As luck would have it, someone hit upon a previously excavated cave so all six of us were inside drinking thermos coffee in relative comfort within a few minutes. I can thoroughly recommend this hermit crab approach as a time-saving device since next day I dug a hole in a hard-packed drift and was hacking away prostrate, knackered out, legs waggling, for half an hour before anything approaching a burrow was made; but that cramped cocoon could have been lifesaving in a blizzard or if injured and awaiting help. That was the crux of the Conville course: the idea that whilst risk can never be eliminated in the mountains it can be managed; that you ‘need enough in your locker’ — to quote Sammy — to survive and return to safety if things get out of hand. ‘Risk was the salt,’ wrote Dorothea of her Skye climbing, ‘but he or she would be a stupid cook who thought the more there is of it the better!’ And so, mindful to avoid being stupid cooks, we set about learning our place within the Cairngorm’s wild sphere so that to walk into it and witness its stark beauty was not to jeopardize the eggshell flesh beneath our high-tech layers.

‘The Mountain Rescue service does its magnificent work, injured are plucked from ledges by helicopter, the located, the exhausted carried to safety,’ wrote Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain’s foreword. ‘And some are not rescued. A man and a girl are found, months too late, far out of their path, the girl on abraded hands and knees as she clawed her way through a drift. I see her living face still (she was one of my students), a sane, eager, happy face. She should have lived to be old.’4

If this sounds morbid or hectoring — Robert Macfarlane diagnosed a ‘macabre fascination’ in his introduction to the 2011 reprint — then it might be qualified by the fact that Shepherd considered the Cairngorm landscape kindred and intrinsic, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that her writing sometimes mirrors the cold dispassion of the mountains — a savage, oppositional territory — oscillating like the range itself between extremities.

‘All these are matters that involve man,’ she wrote. ‘But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its structure, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it... to know it in itself is still basic to his craft.’

4 The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd — (Aberdeen University Press, 1977) Canongate Canons, 2011

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Here, small events snowball and gather momentum: the weather turns, someone has no over-trousers, the bearing’s off so the wrong path is taken, it gets dark early, you run out of water; little mistakes born of inexperience or carelessness accrue and catch you out later on… none of this happens on a climbing wall, those perpendicular ring road gyms. Mountains are uncivilised. ‘They sort people out,’ my father told me having read a draft of this book. ‘They’re not joking. They sort whole teams of people out…’ He described walking on snow slopes in sunshine and, within a few minutes, being completely swallowed up in whiteout, besieged; stripped of all normality. ‘It’s like having your head in a white bucket. No landmarks. Suddenly you’re completely isolated, you lose the horizon, it’s loud, it’s freezing, the ability to judge time fails you, your ability to judge distance goes; you forget where you were, you doubt how many are in the group, you flail, you grope about. Exhausting. Total disorientation… struggling not to panic.

Imagine hours of that. It’s like nothing else.’

He stopped. ‘All the kit in the world,’ he said slowly, ‘all the kit in the world will not get you out of that. It’s like nothing else. That’s the issue with people walking onto mountains who’ve only ever been on walls; it’s often not the falling off that hurts you, not often. People worry about falling off; they worry and they plan and buy all the kit and they forget about the journey to the face or the summit they want to tackle: the walk there and back. They think the kit will save them and go out unprepared for the sudden changes of weather, light and temperature.’

There had been snow blowing hard about us on that first journey up to Coire an t-Sneachda but it was akin to hard rain and we’d been able to see where we were going: the people in front and behind, the onrushing gusts, the sky, the ground. Whiteout blizzards aren’t like that. Only when I encounter one firsthand, later in my travels, did I fully appreciate their extreme, overwhelming uncanniness. When it struck, I felt as if I’d been pushed into a massive tumble drier full of snow. The peripheral world closed down to become a granular stereogram. The light flattened out, a dimension short, and as the powder ambit drifted I felt myself begin to spin head over heels as if in flight, yet I was still stood frozen, wasn’t I? I stamped my feet and they struck unseen snow but all was fuzzy and obscured, as if by swirling ash. All but blind in the teeming storm, I squinting in hope of seeing through the pall but the pall was all there was.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in murk.’

It was indeed like nothing else; at once hugely frightening yet beautiful — more so once out of it and back in the known world with renewed dominion

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over my eyes and legs; able to think back and conjure the eerie unseen scene at one remove. Even digging that snow hole, earlier in the day, my mind had begun to play tricks. Buried, the light seemed to be seeping through from all directions. Nose to the snow, I had no horizon and soon began to doubt my senses, up from down. I knew my legs were outside but which way were they pointed? Suddenly claustrophobic, I squirmed out backwards several times to check myself. Outside in the light it was ridiculous: I’d been totally lost and baffled inside a sleeping-bag sized hole! But I’d felt a rising panic and I had not liked it. ‘Were I really buried in an avalanche or snow cave, I’d really struggle to dig myself out,’ I thought with sudden clarity; and the thought scared me.

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Author Biographies

Catherine ayres is a teacher, living and working in Northumberland. Her poems have appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Spontaneity, Domestic Cherry, StepAway, Prole and The Moth, as well as the No Love Lost anthology published by Pankhearst press. She recently came third in Ambit magazine’s ‘Under the Influence’ competition. MiChael Brown’s pamphlet, Undersong, was published by Eyewear in June 2014. His poetry has recently been published in Other Poetry, Black Light Engine Room, The North, Brittle Star and The Interpreter’s House. In 2014 he won the Untold London Brazen Valentine Competition with his poem, ‘From Hungerford Bridge, Looking East’. Madeleine CaMpBell: Born in Canada, Madeleine lived in France for over a decade before settling in Scotland. Her translations of Maghrebi poets have been published in the University of California Book of North African Literature and Scottish Poetry in Translation. She recently co-edited Quaich: An Anthology of Translation in Scotland Today. Mel Cole is an artist, whose work is collected and exhibited internationally most recently in Copenhagen. As a London based artist she has an MA in Fine Art from Camberwell College and now working as a drawing tutor. http://www.melcole.co.uk oliver CoMins lives and works in West London. His pamphlet Yes to Everything was published earlier this year by Templar. Other recent work has appeared in Poetry Review, The North and The Rialto as well as anthologies from The Emma Press and HappenStance. teona GalGotiu has just turned 17. She has been writing for the Romanian magazine SUB25 since she was 14 and she is currently organizing the Super Film Festival which is the first Romanian film festival made entirely by teenagers. After high-school, she plans on studying film directing. linda KeMp is based in Sheffield, with recent work appearing in Blackbox Manifold, E•ratio and a pamphlet, Immunological, published by enjoy your homes press. asiM Khan is from Birmingham, England. His work both has appeared and is forthcoming in various print and online magazines. His blog is at www.photoetric.co.uk. dan riChards is co-author of Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood; Climbing Days, an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of his great great aunt and uncle — Dorothy Pilley and I. A. Richards — is set to be published by Faber in Spring 2016. hannah Jane walKer writes poems which sound like talking. She has also written four plays. The shows are part poetry gig and part interactive experience, about the moments we all face in the process of trying to be a person. She has been published by Oberon Books, Penned in the Margins and Nasty Little Press. Jda winslow is a lapdog of the bourgeoisie, blogging at jdawinslow.tumblr.com.

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