11 - 11 - 11

This letter was received by my great-grandmother informing her that her brother had been killed in action during World War One.

B.E.F
10/11/17

Dear Miss Addison,

                    It is my sad duty to tell you that your brother was killed by a bomb early on the morning of the 8th November.

Anything that I may say is I know of little value, but really he was a most exceptionally fine chap and just the night before we were remarking what a pleasure it was to have anything to do with him. He was so obliging, so smart in appearance and so thorough.

I sympathies with you very deeply.

Daylight Robbery

'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.’

Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

 
 Window tax is possibly one of the strangest forms of taxation ever devised, also known as ‘the tax on light and air’ it was introduced in 1696 by the then king of England William III to help make up for losses caused by the clipping of coinage. The tax would take into account the amount of windows a dwelling had and would then charge accordingly, in 1747 a house with ten to fourteen windows would have to pay 6d per window, fifteen to nineteen windows the tax was 9d and anything exceeding twenty window the costs was 1s.

Almost immediately people began to resent paying this tax and as early as 1718 it was noted that there was a decline in revenue raised by the tax as people began blocking windows up.
 

Of coarse the wealthy would do the opposite and as a sign of their ability to pay the levy they would build grand, ostentatious houses with literally hundreds of windows. It also seems that the professional classes were not to be out done either and conceived the idea of building houses with exceptionally large windows in them. Some windows known as Bottle Windows would run the whole length of the house, allowing the interior to be flooded with light.  

 



 

 By the mid nineteenth century and with the industrial revolution in full flow the more enlightened people in society realised that the lack of light and air in poor urban areas had begun to have an adverse effect on the populace, causing disease and ill health to run rife through the cities’ dark and damp tenements. By 1851 the situation was deemed so bad that the Act was repealed by the government and was eventually replaced with a new tax system.

It is believed by some that the phrase ‘Daylight Robbery’  may have originated from the taxation on windows, but  it has to be said that the expression itself was not officially recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary until 1949 when it appeared in print in a book by Daniel Marcus Davin called ‘Roads From Home’.

Your Country Needs You

These stunted iron stubs that are found on the tops of walls across the whole of Britain have long since become part of the country’s urban architecture, but the story behind these unobtrusive rusty remains actually tell a revealing truth about British wartime propaganda.

It is commonly known that these stubs are all that is left of thousands of tons of wrought-iron railing, which were hack-sawed down during the second world war as part of the drive to collect scrap metal for the country’s war effort.

But what is less well known is that the government at the time never actually used the majority of the scrap metal for it’s intended purpose, and that the whole exercise was implemented in an effort to make the people feel as if they were making a valued contribution to the war effort.

It was later claimed by dockworkers at Canning Town in London, that during the war they would tow large barges full of scrap metal and decorative iron work down into the Thames estuary and dump it. They claimed that at certain points in the estuary the shipping would need river pilots to guide their vessels, because the submerged scrap metal would have such an adverse effect on the ship's navigation systems.

Psychogeography - An Aspect

Psychogeography: a beginners guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round it’s edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the street; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.

Robert MacFarlane, A Road of One’s Own.

 The term psychogeography first entered the general consciousness through the writings of Guy Debord and the Lettrist group in 1950’s Paris. Debord defined the meaning of this term as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. But Debord’s grand ideas would never really see fruition with him or the Lettrist, as the movement was soon to merge with numerous other post war avant-garde groups to form the Situationist International, a far more serious and politically conscious group.

In actual fact it appears that Debord was not the first psychogeographer. The idea itself seems to have existed for hundreds of years, with such luminaries as Defoe, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Breton, Machen, Poe and Aragon all practicing this obscure art-form to some degree or other.

 The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood:
Were builded over the pillars of gold,
And Jerusalems pillars stood.

Jerusalem, William Blake.

But to find the true genesis of the idea of psychogeography you have to look to the arch-visionary William Blake. It was in his poems about London that you really find the first seeds been sown. The likes of the epic Jerusalem, with the line ’My streets are my Ideas of Imagination’ - a poem which goes on to give the exact location of the new Jerusalem within the city’s boundries, or London which describes his wanderings through the city's eighteenth century streets. But it is his longest published poem - Milton: A Poem that really taps into the psychogeographical vain; towards the end of book one Milton appears and returns to earth as a comet, on landing in Lambeth he enters Blake’s foot. From this point onwards Blake is allowed to treat the ordinary world as perceived by the five sense as a sandal formed of ‘precious stones and gold’ that he can now wear. Blake ties the sandal and, guided by Los, walks with it into the City of Art, inspired by the spirit of poetic creativity.

  

Dreaming Of Winter...

 'The English winter - ending in July, to recommence in August.'

Lord Byron

Xavier De Maistre - Lost In Space

 My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude...it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be. 

Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Round My Room.

 In the spring of 1790 Xavier De Maistre was placed under house arrest for forty two days after taking part in an illegal duel. Whilst confined to his quarters the Count decided to write a travel log about his adventures there in. The following passages are taken from ‘A Journey Round My Room’ published in 1794.

I. My Great Discovery

In the immense family of men that swarm on the surface of the earth, there is no-one, not one (I am speaking , of course, of those who have rooms to live in) who can, after reading this book refuse his approbation to the new way of travelling which I have invented. It cost nothing, that is the great thing! Thus it is certain of being adopted by the very rich people. Thousands of people who have never thought of travelling will now resolve to follow my example.

II. My Armchair And My Bed

After my armchair, in walking towards the north I discover my bed, which is placed at the end of my room, and there forms a most agreeable perspective. So happily is it arranged that the earliest rays of sunlight come and play on the curtains. I can see them, on fine summer mornings, advancing along the white wall with the rising sun; some elms, growing before my window, divide them in a thousand ways, and make them dance on my bed, which, by reflection, spread all around the room the tint of it’s own charming white and rose pattern. I hear the twittering of the swallows that nest in the roof, and other birds in the elms; a stream of charming thoughts flows into my mind, and in the whole world nobody has an awakening as pleasant and peaceful as mine.

III. The Beast.

Only metaphysicians must read this chapter. It throws a great light on the nature of man. I cannot explain how and why I burnt my fingers at the first step I made in setting out on my journey around my room, until I expose my system of the soul and the beast. In the course of diverse observations I have found out that man is composed of a soul and a beast.

I had laid my tongs on the charcoal to toast my bread, and some time after, while my soul was on her travels, a flaming stump rolled onto the grate; my poor beast went to take up the tongs, and I burnt my fingers.

IV. A Great Picture.

My forty two days are coming to an end, and an equal space of time would not suffice to describe the rich country in which I am now travelling, for I have at last reached my bookshelf. It contains nothing but novels-yes, I shall be candid-nothing but novels and a few choice poets. As though I had not enough troubles of my own, I willingly share in those of a thousand imaginary persons, and I feel them as keenly as if they were mine. What tears have I shed over the unhappiness of Clarissa!

V. In Prison Again.

O charming land of imagination which has been given to men to console them for the realities of life, it is time for me to leave thee. This is the day when certain persons pretend to give me back my freedom, as though they had deprived me of it! As though it were in their power to take it away from me for a single instant, and to hinder me from scouring as I please the vast space always open before me! They have prevented me from going out into a single town-Turin, a mere point on the earth-but they have left to me the entire universe; immensity and eternity have been at my service.

Le Passage de l'Opera

 I was seeking….to use the accepted novel-form as the basis for the production of a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction, one that would be neither a narrative nor a character study, a novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty headed, without any of the weapons which customarily help them exercise their stupid cruelty, because in this instance the rules of the game would all have been swept aside.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Louis Aragon 1969

Paris Peasant is a novel written by the French surrealist and communist Louis Aragon, published in 1926 it uses an aesthetic style of writing known as ‘le merveilleux quotidian’ (magic realism) to create images of the fantastical from everyday mundane situations. The first half of the book paints a vividly stylistic picture of the city’s once famous arcades - specifically Le Passage de l’Opera - just prior to their demolition by the Haussmanian civic planners.

Aragon's adventures within the arcade alternate between strange hallucinatory visions, which often drift into detailed minutia about the places of commerce and their patrons, through to scathing indictments of the city’s civic planners, bankers and political elite.

The following extract is a description of one of the shops in Le Passage de l’Opera:-

I finally walked out into the passage. By that time the lights had already been switched off. My attention was suddenly attracted by a sort of humming noise which seemed to be coming from the direction of the cane shop, and I was astonished to see that it’s window was bathed in a greenish, almost submarine light, the source of which remained invisible. It was the same kind of phosphorescence that, I remember, emanated from the fish I watched, as a child, from the jetty of Port Bail on the Contentin peninsula; but still, I had to admit to myself that even though the canes might conceivably possess the illuminating properties of creatures of the deep, a physical explanation would still scarcely account for this supernatural gleam and, above all, the noise whose low throbbing echoed back from the arched roof. I recognized the sound: it was the same voice of the seashells that has never ceased to amaze poets and film-stars. The whole ocean in the Passage de l’Opera. The canes floated gently like seaweed. I had still not recovered from my enchantment when I noticed that a human form was swimming among the various levels of the window display. Although not quite as tall as an average woman, she did not in the least give the impression of being a dwarf. Her smallness seemed, rather, to derive from distance, and yet the apparition was moving about just behind the windowpane. Her hair floated behind her, her fingers occasionally clutched at one of the canes. At first I thought I must be face to face with a siren in the most conventional sense of the term, for I certainly had the impression that the lower half of this charming spectre, who was naked down to a very low waistline, consisted of a sheath of steel or scales or possibly rose petals. But by dint of concentrating my attention on her gliding act among the weals of atmosphere, I suddenly recognised this person, despite her emaciated features and distraught appearance. It was under the dubious circumstances of the  insolent occupation of the Rhineland, and of an intoxicated delight in prostitution, that I had first met Lisel, by the banks of the river Saar. She had refused to join the rest of  her people in their flight from defeat, and all night long, as she paraded the Sofienstrasse, she sang songs she had learned from her father, a Rhine hunting captain. What on earth could she be doing here, among the canes?   

Although the book was written as a farewell letter by Aragon to his surrealist companions and so is rooted in the period and culture, it has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance and become recognised as an early blueprint for the movement  known as psychogeography (‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’) and as such has gained a cult following.

Happy Bloomsday

Q.Can you cross Dublin without passing a pub?

A.Yes

http://www.kindle-maps.com/blog/yes-it-is-possible-to-cross-dublin-without-passing-a-pub.html

Idleness - A Philosophy

The following notion was conceived in a public house in a leafy suburb of London known as ‘the Wood’.

 In this pleasant and retired spot I was sitting not long ago, enjoying a gin and that great luxury and blessing of idleness, concerning which so much cant and false doctrine have been preached. It is, no doubt, perfectly true that a few men, a very few men, are born into the world to whom a great task has been assigned by the Almighty, and they are to perform this task or fail at their peril. Woe to the prophet who will not prophesy: doubtless. It would have been woe to Turner the painter if, instead of painting, he had devoted all his energies to that queer, disreputable life he led on the riverside by Chelsea, where he was thought to be an old specimen of the retired mariner. There are the prophets words and in paint and in other forms who have their work to do and must do it. But, for the rest of us, our “work” is but the curse of Adam , the slavery that we have to endure; about as blessed as oakum-picking and limestone quarrying and treadmill climbing and the other employments of the poor fellows that we call convicts, as if we were not as much convicts as they. We have been convicted of the offence of been born, and the sentence of the Court has been that we shall earn an honest living: an awful and a dreadful doom, if we had the courage to confess it. For, if we see clearly, we shall see that the men we call convicts and criminals have evidently chosen the better part. They have refused to abide the dreadful sentence that was pronounced against them at the moment of their birth. They have revolted, in one way or another, and the plan of things has got hold of them and pronounced a second sentence against them, and enslaved them, as it believes, in a much worse fashion. But the scheme of things is mistaken. It is not a much worse fashion. The convicted criminal is the victim of greater force. He cannot help himself: true: but he has no responsibility for himself or for his actions. He may think oakum-picking a loathsome occupation for a man; still, he is forced to do it, the choice is not his, but that of others. Violent bodily compulsion absolves him from all sense of degradation: if there be anything of a kind it is on the shoulders of those who order his occupations and compel him to follow them.

But this consolation is withheld from those whom cowardice or lack of enterprise or incapacity keeps the narrow way of what is called honesty. It is, no doubt, sad enough, if you earn your ounces of bread and ounces of meat and ounces of potatoes by compliance with strict demands of the warders and the Governor of the gaol , but it is surely much worse when the said ounces - that is livelihood - are purchased by shameful insincerities and smooth compliance. There are men - many of them - whose life it is to be shamed and insulted on Monday and then to be the good companions of the oppressor on Tuesday - lest they lose their living on Wednesday……

……Hence, I say, my profound contempt for all those who praise “work” and the ways of honest living, which are, mostly, degradations somewhat below those experienced by the procurer of Soho. Hence, my profound gratitude for the bliss of idleness, for the happy state in which you may survey the universe, somewhat in the manner of Socrates, who, so far as I remember, never did an honest day’s work in his life, and made a very fine end. And, in this spirit, I was relishing the savours of things in general, thanking heaven that I was at last, after long years, an idler once more, and sipping my gin and water, when a man entered the retired tavern which I have endeavoured to describe. He sat down opposite to me. His manner threatening. He said in a very meaning tone: “The leaves are beginning to come out” and looked hard at me as he said it.

The above extract was taken from the opening chapter of Arthur Machen’s autobiography ‘The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering’ published in 1924.

Desire Lines

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard first coined the phrase 'Desire Lines' in his 1958 book 'The Poetics of Space'. Expressed as 'a term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn't designed, but is rather worn away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

The perfect desire line is a path that either run parallel with an existing foot path or one that diverges from said path only to intercept it later, usually shortening the length of the journey. It could be said that each one of these mud tracks represents a subconscious need to rally against the strictures of conformity and the town planners bludgeoning slide rule, or maybe it's just the simple fact that it's the most natural and obvious route from point A to point B. 

 http://thoughtsfitsstarts.blogspot.com/2012/01/desire-lines-v15.html

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