The Other Window

What links Proust, Labyrinth, Gary Lineker and Elton John? Don't worry you can unsubscribe if you want.

‘Memoria, memoria, memoria, memoria’ – Kurt Cobain

Apologies for the six-month absence. Work on podcasts has taken over somewhat and what I thought would be a regular mailout of music and book recommendations lasted two posts, which is, as Britney sang, just so typically me. I’m hoping to make this more frequent from now on!

In case you missed it, I am extremely proud of The Clientele Podcast, a deep dive into the music of one of my favourite bands. I particularly enjoying working on this episode with the writer Anwen Crawford, this interview with singer and guitarist Alasdair MacLean about his lyrics, and this chat with my friend Kate Connolly who first introduced me to the band.

Anyway, the below post was something I put together for a writers’ club I’m in with a few friends (I’m making it sound like a literary salon, it’s normally just four people sitting around eating crisps). It was prompted by a conversation I had on Twitter with my friend Paul during which he introduced me to this luminous passage from the second volume of In Search of Lost Time: 

Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Paul also sent me this brilliant interview with Alan Moore, which includes the following quotation from Terence McKenna:

Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvellous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colours, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, ‘that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,’ instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception.

Alan Moore responds to this by discussing what he calls the ‘probably psychedelic pre-verbal reality that we enjoyed as infants’.

I love these two linked concepts – tributes to the transformative power of sensory experience. For Proust, the ‘smell of autumn’s first fires’ (which could be a Clientele lyric) has an evocative pull because it hasn’t been weakened by overfamiliarity. The power that a sense memory like this has to teleport us back to our childhoods is so profound that it’s as if the memory exists objectively, ‘outside us’; as if the memory is somehow part of the autumn fire itself. For McKenna and Moore it is language, the grid which imposes its definitions upon reality, that has weakened our ‘probably psychedelic’ capacity to experience the world as it really is, with prelapsarian wonder.

That was the starting point anyway, but I ended up talking about Labyrinth and toys you used to get in boxes of breakfast cereal.

Did you know who David Bowie was before you watched Labyrinth? Chances are you did, but I was only about eight when I first watched it, and at that age Diamond Dogs and ‘Warszawa’ aren’t really on your musical radar. I can remember being told that the enigmatic figure in the exceptionally tight leggings was a successful musician and had been famous for decades. In the solipsistic bubble of childhood I had assumed that because this was the first time that I had heard about David Bowie then this must be the first time that anyone had heard about him. From my perspective, David Bowie had launched his career with Labyrinth – but no, the Goblin King had a hinterland.

And what a disquieting discovery that was. But that description doesn’t go far enough. It felt like the floor had disappeared beneath my feet and I was plummeting through a universe of profound mystery. There was a world that existed outside of me. If I could be wrong about this, what else could I be wrong about?

You probably understand what I’m trying to get at. But I’m not communicating just how deeply I felt the strangeness of this new knowledge. It was like when you try to imagine whatever is beyond the edges of the universe; you start thinking thoughts that feel slightly beyond what the brain is capable of thinking. The world without you in it. Life going on before you and after you.

When I was around 10, I used to absolutely love the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album by Elton John. I would pore over the gatefold sleeve, analysing the illustrations for each song and looking at the photos of the band members posing with their instruments. And I had so many questions – questions to which I assumed there would be answers. For the song ‘Grey Seal’, why was there a picture of the phoenix bird from the lyrics, and not the seal itself, which would have made more sense? Why were the band photographed in a park – or was it a cemetery? How could a song with no title have a title? Were Bennie and the Jets a real band? What did the song ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ actually have to do with The Wizard of Oz? And the lyrics! ‘Your mission bells were wrought by ancient men / The roots were formed by twisted roots, your roots were twisted then’ – how was I supposed to interpret that?

The album was so mysterious to me that it felt like it must mean something, and that all I needed was a key to unlock it and it would start to make sense.

I soon realised of course that most of my questions didn’t have any answers, and didn’t need them. I was experiencing a beautiful moment of blissful ignorance before learning that art didn’t need to mean anything, and that the lack of meaning could in itself be very beautiful. And it was in that state of ignorance that the enjoyment was most profound – my mind painting pictures of the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny back toad.

It strikes me that this is part of the enduring appeal of Sgt. Pepper (another extremely loose concept album) – the way it plays with the fact that it could mean something. The album presents itself as if it can be decoded and yet so much of it is mysterious. Who is Sgt. Pepper and what does he have to do with fixing a hole where the rain gets in?

I think the lesson here was that the feeling of something being meaningful, of having complexity, often exists aside from the actual content. Like a dream which appears to have a complicated plot that you realise is nonsensical when you wake up; the dream was just giving you the feeling of experiencing complexity. Or waking up in the middle of the night to write down a nugget of profound wisdom that has just occurred to you, only to find that it’s meaningless waffle in the morning. Perhaps there was no meaning, just the impression of meaningfulness.

‘It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.’ – Magritte

‘I have nothing to express! I simply search for images, and invent and invent: only the image counts, the inexplicable and mysterious image, since all is mystery in our life.’ – Magritte (again)

Breakfast cereals always used to come with toys. There’d either be something buried in the bag within the box itself or you’d have to collect tokens and send off for it. One time, I want to say Crunchy Nut Cornflakes (but surely that was a cereal for adults) announced a range of little toy models of footballers. They were caricatures moulded out of plastic, their heads cartoonishly huge, their features exaggerated. The only one that I can remember was the Gary Lineker model. And that was the one I really wanted. Gary Lineker had just moved to Barcelona from Everton and so his model was dressed – somewhat unbelievably – as a matador, holding up a red flag, suspended in which was a football. Clever stuff. The ball was all part of the same piece of plastic but it looked really effective – like someone had just hoofed the ball into the flag.

The model fascinated me because I wanted to know what it looked like from behind. I wanted to know if the football was making the red flag bulge at the back or if it was flat. After all, why bother to put the bulge in if no one will see it anyway? Verisimilitude? The method acting of breakfast cereal toys? It was the whole idea of things being hidden that interested me. What happens inside a Lego house when you put the roof on it? Do things exist if I’m not there to observe them?

Anyway, I sent off for the Lineker toy and there was a bulge in the back of the flag. Mystery solved and another mystery spawned. A world existed beyond my perception. The cold indifferent universe did not depend upon me to exist.

A miniature railway in a garden that at one point took you completely out of view of the house. Losing a keyring with a plastic toy policeman attached to it in the grass, lost green, lost meadow, memory green, fragment hill. The strange green lane where we walked after spending the night at a friend of my parents in London (I forget where in London, I forget which friend). A dream I had, a red car on a grassy stage set; my brother and me in the back, with food spilt and trampled into the floor. A fever where I dreamed of a tiny white flower intact against a sea of noise and colour, as small as the smallest Lego brick, always on the brink of being destroyed, but surviving the migrainous torrent. All these childhood memories are slightly beyond what can be described, as if they make use of another sense. Even when I think of teenage years, there are memories which have a curious resonance; that feel powerful in ways that can’t be defined. The way the song ‘Diamonds O Monte Carlo’ reminded me of a family about to go on holiday, a girl’s head poking out of an upstairs window. Reading a Robert Westall book on a holiday in Wales, the pages getting stiff in the sun in the car. A book I read about a teenager (maybe it was The Ice Storm) visiting New York, sleeping on a couch… it was around Christmas, and that’s all I can remember about it. Opening The Lord of the Rings at random and finding the scene with Galadriel’s mirror and the whole thing feeling brilliantly mysterious (in a way that it didn’t when I actually got around to reading it). A Guided By Voices fanzine where Robert Pollard talked about how there is someone just like you in another room somewhere, lost in suburbia, living a life which is just as vivid and complex as yours. Days snowed off from school, a group of friends huddled around the TV watching The Red Balloon, the trees black against the snow outside.

When I was about five or six I went with Dad into the school where he worked. It must have been an inset day and maybe there wasn’t anyone else around to look after me. I recall a certain amount of confusion and I can remember thinking how strange the empty school was. We got a lift in the DT teacher Mr P’s baby blue Volkswagen Beetle. In the school hall the windows had been painted over with murals which gave a stained glass effect as the sun poured in. On one of the windows was a painting of the Mona Lisa, but in the background, instead of a vista of Renaissance-era Italy, there was the view from the school field looking out towards the River Severn, complete with the Oldbury nuclear power station. For years afterwards I thought that the Mona Lisa had a nuclear power station in the background. I was very confused when I found out it didn’t.

When I remember it (and I can’t remember it very well) the school was completely empty, but there must have been other teachers there. Dad must have been joining them for meetings. Where was I for the meetings? It’s so strange to think about this day and the way my Dad would have experienced it. He was probably pretty tired. I’m sure, like everyone else, he found meetings very boring. So I guess – a long day, made more difficult for having to bring his youngest son in with him. 

Is part of what made this day so remarkable the feeling of, ‘Ah, so this is what adults get up to when they go to work’? A glimpse behind the curtain of the adult world? Or it it just a kind of otherness that I’m describing? Perhaps it was the sheer unprecedentedness of the day. But, no, that doesn’t go far enough. If I were to describe that day, what I would want to get across would be the fact that it felt like one of the most psychedelic and memorable experiences of my entire life. But even attempting to describe it will not bring anything that was psychedelic or memorable about it to life. It is completely indefinable. There are no words I could ever use to transmit this feeling to you. 

Because what I felt was obviously completely normal but it was exaggerated through the kind of sustained high of childhood perception. Yes, the VW Beetle was light blue. But that does nothing to get across the engulfing resonant frequency of its light blueness. And that day wasn’t just a day in an unfamiliar place, it was an experience beyond knowledge, beyond the map of my understanding. I watched as the world opened up as if it was being created by my own imagination in real time. With every corridor that we walked down a corresponding pathway opened up in my mind.

On the way back home Mr P stopped to get petrol. And my Dad got out too – I imagine to buy a newspaper. I feel like I know exactly where on the Gloucester Road we stopped. I can remember the tweedy seats. It might have been raining outside. And all I can remember is the exact feeling of that moment and if I could put it into words now I would say, ‘all that I am is changed’.