Deserted Balsdean: A wisht place

The ‘Ruins’ chapter from The Old Weird Albion follows a walk through Balsdean, a lost hamlet hidden among the Downs north of Rottingdean and Woodingdean; a conjuring walk, in which the memories of others flood and recede from the walker’s own, leaving fertile ground in their wake. The walk was created by Grasscut, a pair of Brighton-based artists/musicians who, through their work 1 Inch 1/2 Mile, have made one of the great walking artworks present in the British countryside.

Balsdean has been considered haunted for generations – it has been peeled away from existence as an inhabited place since the 18th-century and long before, from thriving agricultural village to a place difficult to find in person, nonetheless on a map. Now it is little more than a cluster of once-buildings, an engraved stone, a few poems, a feeling – a chill and a whisper. This is what Grasscut evokes on their album, created to be listened to on a tour-guided walk through the dene. 1 Inch nods to the landscape through which you walk – ‘The Tin Man’ at an oft-creaky gate, ‘Meltwater’ from above a valley-floor field that shimmers in the morning sun, the grandiose ‘In Her Pride’ as you ascend out of the valley back to the real world. But it never falls into descriptive traps: its conjuring is of pure memory. Through samples of Pound and Belloc, of Sebald and John McCormack, as well as recordings of the artists’ relations and random encounters, it plays with ideas of nostalgia, of the things done in the name of memory, of the power of remembering and of forgetting and of the ‘quick eyes gone under earth’s lid / for two tons of broken statues / for a few thousand battered books’ – more skeletons than still exist of Balsdean.

Grasscut offers their music, a map, and a starting point via their site. I followed this beginning at dawn on an early-Spring day and its birds above the radio tower (‘High Down’), its attitudinal shift as I passed through into the flat of the dene and into the ruins of the dwellings (‘1946’), the final navigation and feverish climb out of Balsdean (‘shake a sheet of green on me’) – it was part of an awakening to a different way of using the landscape to remember. Not to remember things, events, even people, but to remember memory itself, and its disintegration – like Sebald on Woolf, as sampled by Grasscut:

… the wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a windowpane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, I think. And it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There is no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows as a reader of Virginia Woolf that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls—the souls of those who got away and, naturally, of those who perished. I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.

1 Inch 1/2 Mile is about landscape, it is about memory, but more than these it is about a nod to the power and danger of remembering and forgetting; it is about erasure and reassembly: it is about accessing, within a place, a new understanding of what it is to forge memory from the acts of knowing, learning and forgetting.

Chalk engravings, Cissbury

The Old Weird Albion book shies (hides?) away from the academic for the most part, but that’s by no means to say that there are not intersections between the capital-S-sciences and the psychic and emotional lives that we drag across the landscape. Anne Teather’s research into chalk engravings in the neolithic flint mines at Cissbury is one of those points. This piece for Antiquity Journal – The first British Neolithic representational art? The chalk engravings at Cissbury flint mine – is a gateway drug of sorts. It has led me to J Park Harrison’s 1877 explorations of Cissbury’s chalk engravings, with their Indiana Jones-style descriptions that must have rocked the meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute:

I descended with the aid of a rope, down a steep slope composed of loose chalk, to a ledge about 10 feet from the bottom [and] cut in the solid chalk rock. … The entrances to the galleries were choked with rubble. Being without tools, all that could be done was to clear a passage just sufficient to gain access to the entrance of the east gallery whilst lying at full length on the chalk rubble; and I found it to be the best plan to enter with the feet foremost, in order the more readily to push down the heavier blocks of chalk into the chamber below. Gradually advancing in this way, whilst resting for a few moments, I observed on the chalk jamb immediately opposite to me, a complex figure or double character. It would most probably have escaped notice altogether had the circumstances not been so favourable for observing it, and it certainly would not have been seen by any one standing on the floor of the pit, even if it had been clear of rubbish ; nor, again, by a person entering the excavation in the usual way in such cases, on hands and knees, its position being under the spring of the chalk-soffit of the entrance, about 2 feet 6 inches from the ground.

Harrison’s discoveries of chalk engravings in the flint mines at Cissbury should have been remarkable, but he was squashed: the powerful, legendary, Augustus Pitt Rivers decided these marks were made by modern vandals entering the pit in the same manner as Harrison. But in his rebuttal, he makes the most important statement about the engravings – and Harrison, and his 20th-century avatar, the visionary archaeologist John H Pull:

… nothing could be more natural, as we all know, to an individual of the English race than to immortalize himself by scoring his name, especially upon any object or monument of antiquity, which is always considered most appropriate by the British public for the inscription of their autographs.

What Harrison and Pull recognized, and what Teather alludes to in her research, is the universality of this desire to make a mark in the landscape – whether it’s Richard Long or Nancy Holt, the builders of the Nazca lines or Avebury, or you and I picking up a stone at the start of a walk to deposit it at the end. These carvings – even the mere lines dragged with a pick across a nodule of chalk – are so compelling: the clash of tool on chalk (a deer antler, perhaps, dug into the soft features); the familiar ache of boredom, the unfamiliar (to most of us) fear of unprotected underground labor. Were these scorings more than logistical information – perhaps the time markings of a laborer, like a film-noir prisoner’s wall notches? Were the figures the dreams of those cut off from the world above ground, the reminder in their world of the seemingly basic needs from which they’d been separated: hunting, fishing, the sun and moon? Were they a compulsion we still possess to make marks in and of the landscape – whether that landscape is the crown of a hill or the bowels of its belly?

Image credit: Figure 2. Pecked deer motif with sun or moon, Cissbury (accession number AN1880.249 photograph A. Teather © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford).

Crop Circles: The artistic view?

The 2010 crop-circle season opened last week with a military-badge-like piece near Old Sarum, and a piece just this past weekend about as close to Stonehenge as the makers might get. Obviously, that has sent many’s a heart a flitter, and the talk of ley-line connections between the two, etc., has already begun in earnest.

Below, I’ve tried to write a piece offering the Old Weird Albion point of view on the phenomena. The OWA stance is that man-made circles are far more interesting than any alien-made phenomena; that contemporary art criticism and ethnological folklore studies give us the appropriate tools to not only view crop circle’s through a more fascinating prism, but to appreciate the aesthetic and conceptual beauty of what must be the art world’s most radical practice.

This piece is, however, a  work-in-progress – comments and suggestions are beyond welcome!

A little bit of Ludwig Van?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today ran Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill’s essay on the peculiar police state Britain is becoming – in which light, sound, and even the so-called classics of Western culture are all mere tools of the never-ending battle with hoodies, chavs, and ASBO’s.

His piece revolves around a growing number of communities in which classical music is being used to either punish or discourage young people – be that exposure to Mozart in after-school detention, or the use of Shostakovich to keep kids from loitering in various public places. It’s revelatory to see the way that Britain – well, let’s face it, England – has become so security-minded as to turn an entire generation of its populace against the very cultural foundations that we in the West allegedly hold so dear. (Of note, however, is the anti-hoodie playlist, which, at least amongst O’Neill’s brief mentions, boasts no Benjamin Britten, no Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, Frank Bridge or John Ireland. Even when dispersing hooligans, xenophobia plays its part.)

That old British troublemaker, Class, seems to rear its head in the argument, too. Why is it that this generation of hoodies implicitly understands classical music to be punitive? Is there that little exposure – rivaling or event beating-out the lack of arts education in America – that this music is understood from birth to be below even “uncool”? Or is there an understanding that this is music attached, by its very origin and nature, to a Class – that it is understood to be beyond the pale for anyone without an Eton jacket or at least a closet full of Midsomer Murders DVDs?

In the 1950s and early-1960s, the ruffians of the English underculture took their implicit cultural non-existence and turned it on its head, as Teddy Boys and Mods re-imagined the Edwardian dandy and the tailored City banker as street-savvy knife merchants, making dangerous fashions out of the very cloth they’d been taught to read as of a superior class. More recently, before being entirely taken over by the more “casual” side of Casual and the hip-hop elements of funky and grime, the more violent elements of English society turned Burberry, Hackett, and other top-name brands into signifiers of street crime and football extracurricular activities – to the point that as recently as 10 years ago there were pubs with “No Burberry” signs on their doors. (In a rather nasty pub I once met a footie lad of the scariest variety – scar-faced and black-eye’d (glad not to have seen The Other Guy) – and realized that his outfit a) Cost more than my rent and b) would’ve gotten him on the A-list at any ritzy Manhattan gay bar. I did not mention this.)

Might it be that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll see the love of Ludwig Van espoused by Anthony Burgess’ thugs come to a true fruition – that Mahler and Mozart will be the watchwords of a new breed of horrific post-ASBO mugs? That the thunderous conclusions of Frank Bridge’s The Sea (Suite) will become, like a Burberry check or an Edwardian pocket-watch, the nationalist’s pastoral – the signifier of a hidden Stanley knife and a nasty disposition? Maybe my sick admiration for the urban bricoleur is too twisted to be trusted, but somehow it just seems right. And the idea of dodgy Dagenham pub filled with football lads swaying glasses to Ivor Gurney is just sci-fi enough to adore.

“Gangland Bling”

The Guardian reports on The Battle to Save the Staffordshire Hoard – an effort to raise £3.3 million to buy, for the British public, the massive hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure discovered last year in a field near Lichfield. Historian David Starkey refers to the 1,800 gold and silver objects – buried for over a millennium – as “gangland bling … the Rolex watch and gold chains of a gang leader.”

Such a quip might seem more press magnet than historical analog, but Starkey goes on to make a rather beautiful statement about the vital ties between history and legend.

“It underscores what I always say, which is that history is not just about reason and logic, which is what you get with the school curriculum, it is about story and myth and emotion. This hoard has got all of those things.”

There have certainly been rumblings about Staffordshire’s importance – particularly the immediate claims, based solely on the treasure’s quantity, that it would be more important than Sutton Hoo. But its importance as a catalyst for furthering study of a cloudy and fascinating time in English history is undoubtable.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the ‘history’ of what happens to Staffordshire: Will the public rally around the appeal, to keep it as the national treasure it most surely ought to be? And what will it become in the popular mindset – what will this collection of martial objects mean as a discovery, rather than a historical or archaeological item? It’s a question raised at the time of the Hoard’s announcement, last September, by this excellent blog post by medievalist Karl Steel.

In it, Steel wins my (belated) analogy of the year award for 2009: “Sutton Hoo ship burial sites … speak of an intent valuing more than just the objects themselves … The Staffordshire find, on the other hand, is a jumble. If Sutton Hoo is a Henry James novel, Staffordshire is (very nearly) Tristan Tzara’s Hat.” He goes on, more importantly, to pose the question of what this discovery says about its contemporary discoverers – one reemphasized by this new appeal’s demand that the worst thing that could happen is that the Hoard might be “split up and that can’t be allowed to happen.” As Steel puts it:

“… I doubt we’re going to understand more culturally from this hoard then we did from Sutton Hoo … But we can perhaps learn something else precisely by virtue of the hoard objects’ cultural irrecoverability. I wonder what value we can get if we can also attempt to preserve our initial fascination with the hoard as a hoard, in this moment in which our desires and those of some eighth-century Mercian coincide? Can this shared desire, that emphasizes the gold, the weight, the worry about ‘mates’ finding out, say anything to us?”