A Very Very Very Dark Matter explained

What on earth is A Very Very Very Dark Matter about?

I have loved everything by Martin McDonagh I have seen so far, in order: The Beauty Queen of Leenane (at Young Vic), In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. All this created high hopes for McDonagh's new play, at the nearly-new Bridge Theatre on the south bank of the Thames near Tower Bridge in London. However, I walked out of the play completely flummoxed: I'd watched ninety minutes of a racist childrens' writer and a foul-mouthed novelist and couldn't understand what it was all for.

In my bafflement I pleaded with a member of the bar staff, "Have you seen the play? What on earth links Hans Christian Anderson and the Belgian massacre in the Congo?"

She told me that she had no clue either. I suspect she just wanted me to work it out for myself. Perhaps Martin has told everyone at the Bridge not to give the punters an easy way out.

After a couple of nights sleeping on it: here's what I think it's about:

Hegemony

The play is about the lasting effect of colonialism, and western economic and military dominance generally, on arts and culture.

The narrative focuses on Hans Christian Anderson, and to a lesser extent Charles Dickens. They are two celebrated writers, still widely read 150 years later. This is because they were great writers, which is widely acknowledged, but also because they lived in powerful rich western nations, which is perhaps less acknowledged.

The could have been other, just as talented, artists living elsewhere but they did not, and do not now, enjoy the same success and exposure as Anderson and Dickens. For example, the greatest author at the time might have been a Pygmy woman living in the Congo. Hans Christian Anderson did not literally steal his work from a Congolese Pygmy but he might well have stolen her cultural prominence through the mechanism of Western military and economic dominance which excluded the voices of non-western artists.

The play deals in part with the genocide committed by Belgian troops in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some eighteen years after Anderson's death. The violence and economic extraction  of those events are the obvious features of empire, but McDonagh wants to expand on that and tell us about the cultural effect of empire.

History is written by the victors. McDonagh is telling us that the victor also gets to dominate arts and culture. To take an example: India's most prominent artistic symbol, the Taj Mahal, was created, and is a lasting monument to an oppressive colonial regime*.

In the real world, ghosts go unheeded

Anderson's racism and dismissiveness of the true author reflects the general attitude of entitlement of the rich west to the cultural centre-stage. He is deliberately ludicrous: McDonagh lampoons his, and by extension, the West's outrageous divisiveness of the rest of the world, and its creative output. Anderson has a similar function to  Sacha Baron-Cohen's absurd Borat when he is used to ridicule anti-semites.

Anderson sees apparitions of Belgian soldiers. This mirrors Scrooge's dreams in A Christmas Carol (neatly by Dickens) and there are three time periods in the story: the first act, the second act ten years later, and the massacre eighteen years after that representing a horrific, avoidable future. The killing of ten million people is a gruesome real-world amplification of Christmas Yet To Come. Unlike Scrooge, and despite the far greater evil, Anderson does not repent. As a result, 'Marjory' must take up arms to resist her oppressors.

McDonagh is making a point about the tragic difference between morality tales (neatly by both authors) and real life. In the real world, people fail to repent, mistakes are repeated infinitely and real suffering is the result.

Controlling the means of production

The Belgians took the hands of people in the Congo to punish them for not producing sufficient rubber. This has symbolic resonance as hands are often the means of artistic production as well. There is a myth that the hands of workers who created the Taj Mahal had their hands cut off to stop them producing anything as beautiful again: the coloniser is able both to project his own culture and then throttle the culture of others.

The heavy symbolism continues as 'Marjory' receives a machine gun hidden inside an accordion to fight the oppressive soldiers. This blunt instrument** of a prop-metaphor has an artistic instrument literally being used as a weapon***. Amidst global power-struggles, a medium of entertainment becomes a tool of violence. The gun is given to her by another marginalised group: 'gypsies'. Perhaps McDonagh is suggesting that oppressed groups can work together against Western cultural hegemony.

Rhodes must fall, but that must only be the start

The play ends by telling us about the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. This is an example of a western nation's continued unwillingness to discuss the negative impacts of empire, and doing so through the use of art and cultural symbolism. Tearing down some statues is clearly not enough but it might be a good start. If we can start to reject the permanence of imperial left-overs and make our own decisions about the cultural landscape, perhaps we can do so from a more enlightened and inclusive viewpoint.



* I am aware that this doesn't fit the West-as-oppressor theme but a) it's a neat image, b) there have been plenty of non-western empires and it seems narrow-minded to ignore that, and c) I wanted it to work with the call-back later on.

** ;)

*** I wrote this before reading any of the reviews for the play. I wanted to form my own opinion. As I result, I missed the even more obvious prop joke. Michael Billington in the Guardian notes that Charles Dickens has a LITERAL SKELETON IN HIS CLOSET. Facepalm.

Short Fiction: Your Shape

I come home this evening and climbed the stairs of my empty house to reach my bedroom. Opening the door I am surprised to see the duvet heaped on the left side of bed as though a person were stretched out underneath. It could be you. It could be you lying under that duvet. There on your side, dozing and waiting for me. As long as I don’t disturb the covers the illusion is real and you remain, sharing the room with me as you sleep. I reach out to touch your hip, to wake you and let you know I’m here. My hand hovers above the duvet, a layer between your skin and mine. I smile, anticipating the contact, the pleasant warmth of awakening. My hand lands and the duvet yields and collapses. It deflates, cold and empty.

Review: London Library

I don’t like to get sentimental about books. I mean – I don’t like to think of myself as someone who gets sentimental about books as physical objects*. It’s so whimsical, so twee to romanticise the block of printed paper held between cardboard covers. That thing in itself is just a transmission method. Plenty of us enjoy cinema but we’re unlikely to obsess about the reels of Polaroid (or whatever it’s made of. It’s not worth looking up). What excites us, rightly, is the stories, characters and ideas that the medium delivers to us.

It’s the same with e-readers. ‘They don’t smell like a book’, ‘You can’t crack the spine’, ‘It’s not like the real thing’. These phrases come from people that don’t like books as much as what they’re printed on. Should we not celebrate the things that make Virginia Woolf different to Lee Child, rather than the thing that makes her the same?

I could make this argument all day but Alan Bennett sums it up beautifully in the Headmaster’s trite eulogy to Hector in The History Boys:

‘He loved language; he loved words. For each and every one of you, his pupils, he opened a deposit account in the bank of literature and made you all shareholders in that wonderful world of words.’

With his absurd metaphor, the headmaster exposes his lack of understanding about the value of literature. Just as books are a medium, so are words.

I’ve yet to mention London Library but I thought I’d try to give some perspective with a framing-device (a technique of literature and not of book-binding, I should note).

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London Library is on the corner of St James Square, just North of Pall Mall and South of Piccadilly. With the East India Club on one side and Chatham House on the other, it completes a trinity of august institutions around the North and West sides of the square. Inside, it is an architectural hotchpotch: dark-varnished wood in places, institutional white-washed walls in others due the gradual evolution of the building. It has been repeatedly extended (both side-ways and upwards), with the interruption of World War II bombs, resulting in a delightfully confusing maze. As the collection has grown, and space become scarcer, the librarians have been forced to expand outwards and upwards.  Three further floors are currently being added to one section and a tiny courtyard has been covered in glass to create a delightful reading room.

For all its change, London Library is all about permanence.  ‘Nothing is thrown away’ was our guide’s oft-repeated mantra. In this place, history is palpable, not pulpable**. The ‘book-stacks’ – a phrase that rings with ageless strength to my mind – are Victorian. The best technology available at the time to maintain even humidity and heat (vital to preserve the books) was to replace solid floors with wide grills, allowing the air to circulate vertically. The result is that the browser, whilst tightly enclosed by the shelves either side of him, can see through several floors above and beneath: a strange twisting of perspective.

The library precedes the wide-spread use of the Dewey-Decimal system. As a result, books are organised by category and then alphabetically resulting in odd juxtaposition of titles, particularly in the wonderfully wide-scoped ‘Science and Miscellaneous‘ section. Apparently it is haven of serendipity for blocked writers.

Our guide referred to the ‘old and special’ books being locked away in a separate space. I couldn’t help but imagine the magical tomes in Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University library, chained up for the protection of browsers due to their violent inclinations. She went on to say that these books could not be taken out. My suspicions were confirmed.

We were told that, due to the structure of the bookshelves built into the walls, and sheer weight of the amassed books, if all the books were taken away the walls would cave in and the building would collapse. It’s so wonderfully magical that I was more than willing to suspend disbelief and live with that possibility. With its purpose removed, the living structure would capitulate to gravity and give up – like an elderly couple whose lives are so centred around one-another that one passing shortly precedes another.

The books and the building have a symbiotic relationship. Just as the building provides shelter and a stable environment for the books, the books lend their strength to the building, holding it upright.

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It would be lazy to leave my frame disassembled. For all my cynicism, London Library is gorgeously romantic. If Anthony Powell was right and Books do Furnish a Room***, the library is finely appointed, a triumph of interior design.

Tours are available on Monday evenings and are free. Call 020 7766 4704 to book.

*Mutatis mutandis x 2

**I’m so sorry about this.

*** I actually have no idea what he meant by this. If you’ve made it through ten volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, do let me know.

Drink-along Chekhov

Some people find Chekhov a little.. slow. I’m confident the below could turn any Cherry Orchard into a Cheery Orchard.

· Drink every time someone brings in a samovar.
· Drink if there’s a doctor.
· Drink if there are soldiers.
· Drink if someone drinks (obv).
· Drink every time someone complains about the heat or cold.
· Drink every time someone worries about money.
· Drink every time someone worries about trees.
· Drink if someone kisses someone they shouldn’t.
· Drink every time someone attempts to prophesy the future.
· Drink every time someone complains about unrequited love.
· Drink if someone is frustrated by how uncultured the people around them are. 
· Drink every time someone is WASTING THEIR LIFE IN SOME PROVINCIAL BACKWATER.
· Just drink. It’s the only way to dull the pain of awareness of the futility of life, wasted talent, lost opportunities for romance, inability to find motivation and the callousness of people towards the natural world and each other.

Art Review: People and Places: Mo Farquarson, James Hawkins @ The Gallery in Cork Street

A friend kindly invited me along to a preview of this exhibition on Cork Street. I didn’t know what to expect and could see little connection between the two artists’ works but each was a delight in its own way.

Mo Farquarson sculpts animal and human figures in bronze. She has a clear affinity with animals: from the farm-yard to the river-bank to the desert. She creates a connection between statue and viewer by tapping into our desire to personify: her camel is certainly arrogant, her geese inquisitive. The connection is heightened by touch: what a pleasure to be able to feel the artwork and give two senses over to the shapes created! It gives some impression of the realism that Farquarson conveys that I found myself absent-mindedly petting her otter like it might a dog.

Her human figures include dejected bus-shelterers and hurried, anonymous commuters in streets and stations; but mundanity is contrasted with performance. There is a pair of acrobats, one balanced on the other’s upstretched arm, showing confident strength and skill. The eye is drawn to two parallel, vertical lines: one of force through the performers’ arms and the other of connection between their eyes.

The one exception to Farquarson’s theme of life is an unridden bicycle finished in matt grey to emulate a pencil sketch. It barely seems like an exception at all: something about the warp in its frame and it’s jaunty, unstable angle imbues it with character. I found myself spirited away to the surreal village in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman where people and bicycles start to exchange souls through prolonged contact. Men start needing to lean against walls whenever they stop moving and bicycles, much like this one, start to develop a life of their own.

Leac an Tuadh, StrathVaich

                                                        

There is something quietly spectacular about James Hawkins’ landscapes. Most of them are suspended cut-out shapes, perhaps designed to reflect the focus of the eye: the periphery is done away with. He surrounds placid bodies of water with harsh rock formations or lush vegetation to provide striking contrast. In the mountains, layers of paint are chipped away like rock. Massive brushstrokes, as though the paint has been washed across glass, give the impression of seams of igneous formation.

Loch na h’Oidiche , Flowerdale

Hawkins' subject is the Scottish landscape: a gift of beauty in itself. He has set about conveying cold harshness in Leac an Tuadh, StrathVaich and the rich variety of colour in flowering heather in Loch na h’Oidiche , Flowerdale. Where his other paintings may be monumental, Spate is urgent and powerful: an unstoppable river falls through the painting and bursts outward from its lower edge. Much like David Hockney, Hawkins has the gift of observation of colour and mood, he is able to capture the sense of place and season and convey that on his canvasses: could we ask more of a landscapist?

This exhibition runs between 5th and 9th March at The Gallery in Cork Street.
www.mofarquharson.com
www.jameshawkinsart.co.uk

BONUS REVIEW: Roy Lichtenstein @ Tate Modern

Everything was so flat.

Profound Object

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This piece, by Michael _____, brings the visual art concept of ‘objet trouvé’ to the written word. Visual artists have long re-presented mundane or functional objects, creating art simply by exhibiting those objects as such. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp famously placed a urinal on a pedestal, elevating an overlooked item to the status of art, and more recently artists such as Damian Hirst and Tracy Emin have shown a shark and an unmade bed as artworks. In the same way, Profound Object presents a functional, non-artistic text and asks us to re-examine it as an aesthetic creation.

Short Fiction: Typewriter

It was Thursday evening and I was at a drinks party. I had come along with Paul, a friend from work, and I did not know most of the guests so he was showing me around.

‘That’s Marc, my flatmate, over there. He’s quite a character.’

‘Oh, why’s that?’

‘Well, he’s always fancied himself as a literary figure, not just an author but a really great writer’

‘That’s certainly ambitious, have you read anything of his?’

‘Not yet, but he’s told me a bit about his technique. He works as an assistant in the University science labs and he’s always taken a scientific approach to things. Perhaps stretching that to literature is a step too far but it’s an interesting experiment anyway.’

‘I don’t really understand; there’s no formula for producing art. Did he work out the best time of day to write by finding out when we’re most awake?’

‘It’s a bit more technical than that and, I would say, a lot more fanciful. You see, the scientists were working on psychological feedback effects. When you’re feeling happy, you smile: that’s a given. What’s interesting is that the smile creates a feedback loop. The activation of the muscles in the cheeks releases endorphins which make us happy. It works both ways, you see?’

‘I think I’ve heard about that before; they tell depressives they should smile and it’ll make them happy, right? But I really don’t see how that can make you a writer.’

‘So the mental state causes a motor effect in the muscles and the motor effect in the muscles feeds back to create the mental state. Marc’s theory is, if that works for smiling and happiness, couldn’t it work for other things? He doesn’t want to be just any writer, he wants to be a great writer, so his thinking is that he needs to acquire the mental state of a great writer. He’s decided that if he can sit and type out the great books, he can create a feedback loop and the physical activity in his fingers will create the mental state of a literary genius!’

‘Well it’s certainly a theory but I think he sounds a bit delusional’

‘Maybe, but he’s followed through on it. Really testing the hypothesis. Last Saturday morning he popped out to the shops and came back with a copy of The Sun Also Rises in one hand and a vintage typewriter in the other. He’s really thorough about employing the scientific method and replicating the right environment so he had to get the right machine; he’d bought a Royal Quiet DeLuxe Portable, Hemmingway’s favourite typewriter. He said that the keys might be spaced slightly differently on a different model and so his fingers wouldn’t be following the same paths as Hemmingway. The movement of the fingers is vital in creating the neural message back to the brain. If he could type the same words, on the same typewriter, Hemmingway’s mental landscape as he wrote the novel could be replicated, and Marc could become a great writer.’

‘It’s impressive attention to detail but I think he’s going to be disappointed. He’ll spend ages typing out the book and be no wiser for it.’

‘I couldn’t agree more; I said the same thing to him but he disappeared straight into his room. A few minutes later I heard him start, clattering away at the keyboard. This went on for hours, all day in fact. I think he stopped briefly to make some toast for supper, but then straight back to it. Some dedication! When I woke up on Sunday morning, I could hear him already going at it, tapping away. In fact, he took Monday off work to carry on with it.’

‘It sounds like he’s become obsessed’

                ‘Definitely, he’s not one for half-measures. I came back from work on Monday evening, went into the kitchen and there on the table was the fruit of his labours, the entire manuscript for The Sun Also Rises typed up onto a stack of paper. I had to flick through to check he’d actually done it: it was all there, about 300 pages. Extraordinary! Just then, I heard that he was still going. I suppose I hadn’t noticed before because it had become part of the background noise over the weekend. I opened his door and there he was, hunched over that old typewriter, hammering at the keys. He was so intent on the typing that he didn’t even look up at me. I couldn’t help noticing that there were a couple of bottles of brandy sitting on the desk, one was empty and he was half way through the other one. He stopped at the end of a line, knocked the carriage back across the page, took a swig from his glass and just went on typing!’

                ‘It sounds like he’s really getting into the author’s head.’

                ‘Well yes, Hemingway was well known for his heavy drinking. I don’t know if this was part of the experimental set-up or if the tedium had driven him to it. Either way he must have been pretty sozzled at that point; it’s amazing he was able to keep going. One other thing that struck me was that he didn’t seem to copying from anything this time, just typing away, looking down at the keys. I guess he was trying to repeat the book without prompting, trying to ingrain the lesson.’

                ‘That would be incredible though, to memorise an entire book just from typing it out.’

                ‘You should have seen the state he was in, completely focussed. For some reason I think it might be possible, perhaps he’s devised some special technique to remember it? He’s always telling me about theories that he’s picked up from the scientists at the lab. The other week it was The Clockwork Universe. The concept is that if every single atom in the universe is governed by the laws of physics, the motion of those atoms will continue according to the laws as time passes. Everything is made up of atoms and everything we do or think is just a product of those atoms moving. Therefore, we don’t have any choice over our actions; life and the universe just continue like clockwork as atoms move around on a pre-determined path.’

                ‘He certainly sounds like a sponge for knowledge. Maybe he’s the one to memorise that book’

                ‘Well, I suppose we’ll see when he’s finished. Every night this week I come home and he’s still in his room, typing. I’m actually surprised he’s come along to this, perhaps he’s realised it’s not working’

Just then I was surprised by a shout from across the room.

                ‘And.. here it is!’

Marc, staggering and clearly very drunk, was waving a sheath of paper above his head. The two girls he had been speaking to looked distinctly uneasy. My first instinct was to head over and rescue them but I did not know many people there and thought it was really Paul’s duty to step in and take Marc home.

                ‘This is my finest work yet!’

Marc was still shouting, and slurring his words. Paul walked across to him and took him by the hands, trying to calm him down. It seemed to work and pretty soon Marc was slumped over Paul’s shoulder and being walked towards the door. As they crossed the room to leave, the manuscript fell from Marc’s hand, landing on the carpet. All eyes were on the drunkard but I was fascinated to read what he had produced. Had he managed to re-create the whole book blind, and blind-drunk?

                I picked it up. There was certainly a lot of it, several hundred pages, and, flicking through, all typed. I turned back to the cover of the stack and was shocked. The only text was the title: A Farewell to Arms. Hemmingway’s next book.