The Writing is on the Wall

The Writing is on the Wall:

An Open Letter to the Students of the University of Birmingham

Fellow Students,

Unlike most of you I do not live in Birmingham. I live in London and commute three days a week for my lectures. Unfortunately that means that I often miss out on the crux of action that takes place and I can only comprehend the Zeitgeist from the fallout that has been left behind. I know a lot of people are angry, ashamed, and appalled, but this is misdirected and the student population is being manipulated. What has struck me most from Wednesday’s events is the smear campaign and downright Machiavellian tactics by the management of the University of Birmingham. They are trying to fragment, ostracise, and turn the student population against one another. And they are doing it successfully.

I have seen on Twitter that students have become angry about the defacing and damage incurred to Old Joe and the Aston Webb Building. What I have to say is do not confuse your education with the spectacle of red brick buildings. The vandalism is a bitter pill to swallow, for me too, but it stems from a movement that is defending your interests. See the forest for the trees and decipher what is written on the wall. Do not focus on the graffiti, focus on the words. They are ‘defend education’. An education that you have valued enough to decide to commit yourself to at university, an education which is being attacked more ruthlessly than a clock tower, an education which urges you to question authority. 

It is easier to decry the physical damage to a building rather than the abstract damage of education cuts. So materialise the cuts which can be so easily ignored. See it as the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity that was closed down, the lack of a living wage for all workers on campus (whilst Vice Chancellor David Eastwood earns an absurd annual wage of over £400,000), and the massive increase in tuition fees. These are cuts that effect the students and employees of the university - damaging lives, not stone. 

But the general feeling one gets when walking onto the Edgbaston campus isn't one of pride and solidarity with the protesters; it’s division, it’s scapegoating, it is blissful ignorance. It is a state which is nourished by the media circus being managed by the university to influence the moderate, undecided, apolitical student. They are criminalising your classmates who have stood up for your rights, and making themselves out to be victims. The circulated email from David Eastwood on Thursday was the antithesis of the graffiti, it was a well-crafted statesman address, borne of calculation rather than passion. Old Joe chimes no longer, but retweets as management play on the sympathies we have to a beloved icon, using its credibility rather than use their own. 

Already a dichotomy between students is being formed as the Protect Our Campus campaign on twitter dances slowly to the tune of management. A movement which has a striking resemblance to the broom campaign that followed the London Riots in 2011. I have no doubt that both were created from a mixture of pride and distress, but both forget the core issues and aim simply to sweep all nastiness under the rug. 

I write this not as a defence of the actions of the protesters, but as counterbalance to the heavy stream of partisan propaganda. I have not yet seen a response from management addressing the actual issues that were being protested, I have not seen condemnation from the Old Joe twitter account of the illegal tactics used by the police of forcing protesters to give their details before being allowed to leave makeshift detainment, I have yet seen any denunciation of the heavy handedness from security. 

I end this by saying ‘solidarity’ is not a hollow slogan shouted by ‘extreme’ protesters in the effort to play up to a romanticised image. Solidarity is a necessity, it is integral, and management know this. Do not fear those mysterious anarcho-punks, they are your classmates, your team-mates, your lecturers. Do not stand against those who defend you, your education, and your rights. Do not worry about the stone that stands on a hundred year old campus, worry about the foundations that they were built on. The writing is on the wall: defend education.

A Fountain in Berlin

A Fountain in Berlin

Up the Teufelsberg I pushed my boulder,

And as it rolled back down,

I felt a dead hand upon my shoulder,

And heard the whispers of the town.

"Ich faßte vor ihnen Fuß um an dem flüchtigen Hauch den dies Geschehn zurückgelassen

Hatte mich zu sattigen.”

I stood, steadfast, upon the summit,

And took the breaths I dared,

Before casting my eyes to my landlocked comet,

To push up eternal stairs.

And as I climbed the Teufelsberg,

Water shot from a fountain,

And as it fell back down to earth,

I cursed this hellish mountain.

“That fountain which stands will fade away,

And the water will stream across the ground,

And when I die my body will decay,

And my memory will simply drown.

This mountain I climb is nothing more

Than the dead who have walked before me

Still I carry on and cry out for

A lasting state of reverie.”

But now the stairs were piano keys,

And my steps were hammer strokes,

Throughout Berlin grew Dead Men’s trees

Rooted in each note.

The boulder scratched the ivory,

And scored in it my song.

A song for all the living to see,

And the dead to sing along.

Larkin Rings

Larkin Rings

One day, I will die.

And when I die, scrape out my chest cavity,

And take me home to Scartho.

Fill it with northern soil and push into where

My heart was a seed

From the Bowthorpe Tree.

And as roots grow and wrap around my bones and

Commit me to the earth, and

As my muscles decay, and

As my blood is washed away

I will die once more, but be born again.

I will become Dead Man’s Tree

For the children at Springfield School

Who will harvest me for sixers.

And one day two young lovers will carve in me

A second heart,

Which they will later turn their heads away from as they pass.

And through tunnels of yellow

Old men with thinning hair and coffee stained shirts will walk up to me

Daily, like clockwork,

Until one day they don’t.

And I will die once more, but be born again.

Is There Still a Role for the Arts and Humanities in a World Increasingly Dominiated by Science and Technology?

This essay was submitted in 2012 as part of The University of Birmingham's Essay Competition.

         

An intrinsic part of human nature is the need to define and be defined. Similarly embedded in us are our senses of pride and vanity, so there is little hesitation to label the last century as ‘the heroic age of physical science’. It is reasonable to want to embrace science and attach this epithet to ourselves because, in terms of efficacy, the expansion of science has had a far more positive influence on humanity in the last hundred years than what its predecessor of social instruction, religion, had in millennia. The comfortable and longer lives that we live can be attributed to the developments within science, and so there is a logical compulsion to be grateful towards it. However the upward trend of science’s authority in society has led to the assumption that art’s role is receding.

            The dichotomy between art and science is accepted without question and is being enhanced by institutions rather than appeased. C.P. Snow postulated that the segregation of science and the humanities is ingrained in our minds from a young age by an education system which nurtures the idea of specialisation towards one or the other. Today, fifty years after Snow cautioned us of the damaging consequences that the bifurcation of knowledge could have, not only have the arts and sciences become foreign to one another in the eyes of a nation, but science has gained the endorsement of the state whilst the arts have been reduced to a mere frivolity. A catalogue of events has ushered science into a central position of society with the welcoming arm of government, whilst the arts are pushed out in the same swift movement. Funding to the arts and humanities in universities has been phased out, whilst the proposed English Baccalaureate detered schools, and by proxy their pupils, from pursuing an education in the arts. At the same time, maths and science have retained their funding, and had their status as an essential component of the future solidified by the amalgamation of science and universities under the same ministerial position. Only through vigorous campaigning were these changes put on the shelf; however it is a clear indication of the arts’ valuation.

            However the belief that science and the arts are diametrically opposed is a fallacy. They share a core principal which is too often overlooked; they both search for truth. We, humans, need to define and ourselves be defined, and both artist and scientist seek to do this. Arguably the difference in these two cultures is nothing more than a variation in medium. The plays of Samuel Beckett share the same inquisitiveness towards the existence of man as the research at CERN, the art of André Breton can offer insight into the human psyche just as the work of Freud can, the words of Friedrich Nietzsche have shaped our world just as much as the work of Charles Darwin. We yearn ‘to know’, but this need for certainty which unites art and science also separates it. Art expresses a subjective truth, whilst science states an objective truth.

            Science’s objective truth has more perceptible applications in the world, and thus can be valued quantifiably with greater ease than art can, specifically its monetary value. This is why art is seen as secondary to science, and why in times of austerity it becomes expendable. But just because art’s value is subject to the individual does not mean to say that it is worthless, nor has value only to those who are literate in the arts. Art is an expression; of a person, of a country, of a culture. It can connect complete strangers with one another. It can connect those who are living to those who are dead. Libraries and museums are not repositories of objects, but a wealth of human experiences, all of which we can expose ourselves to, and for a brief moment imagine what life was like for somebody else who existed on this planet. This is the value which one can place on subjective truth, and which can help define us all. Through art we can define ourselves as individuals. Whilst this value isn’t as easily transferred as money, through education it is possible.

              The dominance of science in our time means art has to adapt, because if we are a scientific culture then we accept it and represent this in art, to know who we are. Carl Sagan said, ‘We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’ It is through science that we are able to know this, and it is through art that we are able to appreciate this.

Salt and Bloc

'Writers Bloc' is a society at the University of Birmingham which promotes creative writing amongst the student body. Whilst I've not yet started attending meetings regularly I still associate myself with it and last night attended 'Scribble Kicks', a poetry reading they hosted which saw Salt Publishing poets Luke Kennard and Abi Curtis launch their latest poetry collections, A Lost Expression and The Glass Delusion respectively. The evening also had members of Writers Bloc read their own poetry. They were all so confident and quite rightly so, I don't think anyone had reason to be embarrassed as the quality which was showcased testifies that this student run group isn't a step towards a middle-aged book club. They take their writing seriously, but not too seriously; I was happily surprised at the lack of poetry about ex's and the large amount of comedic verse which drew a lot of laughs from a warm crowd. The Salt poets continued this trend, Kennard's poem, which for the life of me I can't remember the title of, but it concerns a wolf and the stigmatisation of being middle class, made me crack a smile, which is a pretty good achievement as I was sat on my own in the corner looking fairly glum and feeling sorry for myself. Then Curtis was up and didn't fail to impress, and I'm not being biased because she revealed herself as a fellow Whovian. It was truly inspiring to see these young poets, both professional and amateur, display their art confidently and proudly. Midway through the night I would have happily joined them, but sadly I arrived late and missed the sign-up for the open-mic slots. However, I can gladly link the Writers Bloc's publication 'The Journal' in which my poem 'Larkin Rings' was featured, page 14, alongside other pieces from members.

Abi Curtis                                                                                                                                 Luke Kennard

The Glass Delusion                                                                                                           A Lost Expression

Salt Publishing                                                                                                                        Salt Publishing

£12.99                                                                                                                                                £12.99

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Poetry and Exhaustion

I recently wrote an article for The Redbrick, the student newspaper at the University of Birmingham, which talked about how poetry is received nowadays. This includes thoughts from Simon Armitage who read from  his new book Walking Home  at an event organised by Birmingham's Book Festival.

The resilience of poetry in the modern world is an exhausted topic, but it won’t go away regardless of how many times it’s discussed. It could be thought that examining its role gives it vitality; if it’s being debated then it surely still exists in our conscience and has an important part to play in life. When Michael Gove announced last June that he intended to introduce the recital of poetry for children in primary school on the national curriculum it seemed like an attempt to resuscitate an interest in poetry by indoctrinating people at a young age. However this treatment doesn’t do poetry any favours. Not because suggesting that its popularity is wavering is an acknowledgement of it as an ebbing art form, but because the perception of poetry as a rival to X-factor or iPhones is a fallacy. It’s much healthier to see poetry as something that runs parallel to all of this; something which adapts to the present day and remains significant to those who seek it. This perception was put to the test recently by poet Simon Armitage who in his most recent book, Walking Home, stretched the lengths of its value. Travelling as a modern troubadour along the 256-mile Pennine Way, he relied on his poetry as currency, replacing Pound Sterling with verse.

Starting in Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border, traditionally the end of the route, Armitage gave poetry readings in village halls and church function rooms in return for board and lodging as he made his way to the Derbyshire village of Edale via his home in Marsden, Yorkshire. After each of these readings a sock was passed around as a receptacle for donations, allowing each person to give their own personal valuation. At the end of 19 days, with 18 readings conducted, Armitage accumulated a gross profit of £3,086.42. At a simple glance this quantifiable figure may be enough to say that ‘yes, poetry still remains an important concept amongst people.’ So much so that someone is able to earn (according to Armitage’s sums) £1.11 above minimum wage, which is even more impressive when one considers this was done in villages with relatively small populations. However greater testimony to the undwindling appreciation of poetry can be seen amongst those who travelled with Armitage on his route. Most of them there were strangers who endeavoured the challenging terrain and temperamental weather simply for the chance to accompany one of the country’s most popular contemporary poets.

Speaking last Friday at an event put on by Birmingham’s Book Festival at Adrian Boult Hall, Armitage stated the journey made him feel that his chosen art form had been validated. ‘I’ve always wanted to appeal to anybody and everybody with my poems. Whether that’s somebody who is studying literary criticism with a scalpel or whether that’s somebody picking up a book of poems for the first time. It is an impossible ambition, but a worthy one I think, and in that respect I felt that there was still an appetite out there for somebody saying things in, what I hope is, a memorable way.’

Armitage’s desire to appeal to anybody and everybody is admirable, as is his acknowledgement that not everybody will be drawn to it. It’s treating poetry not as an essential part of life, but something that is readily available. It can be seen in his own experience with poetry; he wasn’t entrenched amongst literature all his life, he studied geography at university and then went on to work as a probation officer. His passion for language and poetry was helped by being exposed to it at school, but its growth was organic, rather than it being forced upon him. ‘I started being interested in poetry when I was about 14 or 15 at school and we started reading Ted Hughes’ work. Up to that point I was asleep, I thought the world wasn’t a very interesting place. Those Hughes poems woke me up, and they woke me up to language and the power of language.’

The other night I asked him what his thoughts were on Gove’s plans and how he thinks poetry should be administered within the education system. ‘I think it’s good to be exposed to good things at school, that’s how I got in to poetry. But my feeling is you need to find or to be shown the poems which are meaningful or exciting to them and my worry about what Michael Gove was saying is that we’ll all be forced to recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. If it’s about giving people the access to forms of language which they understand, which excites them, or gets their imaginations going and is meaningful to them in some way rather than completely alienating and putting them off poetry forever, then I’m completely in favour of it.’

Armitage has recently been involved with a project called ‘Stanza Stones’ which saw the placement of stones engraved with his poetry throughout rural Yorkshire. The depth of the engraving on these particular stones means that they’ll remain there for at least a 1,000 years. This innovative display of public art acts as the perfect metaphor for poetry. It will always be there, it is there to be read just as the Pennine Way is there to be walked. However it must be approached, rather than forced upon people, otherwise it’s an unwelcomed challenge.

Simon Armitage's Walking Home
Faber & Faber
£16.99

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The Sun Also Rises

This summer I was between universities and was finally able to read something I chose myself, rather than it being on a reading list. The first book I read independent of a degree was The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway. I had been planning on reading for a long time and found it liberating to be able to read something without a deadline looming in the distance. Whilst I enjoyed reading a lot of the books on my course, this was a different kind of enjoyment. I wasn’t constricted to a certain time limit, nor did I feel I had an agenda whilst reading – I wasn’t looking at how Hemingway presents European cities, or reading it amongst feminist theory. I had carte blanche on how to approach it. So the experience was less focused, but I could attain a panoramic vision of the novel.

I hadn't read any Hemingway before this but I had been eager to. I accumulated an impression of him through various sources, such as conversations with friends, reading snippets about him and also the Any Human Heart TV series, which is brilliant and something all people should watch. The impression I had of Hemingway was reinforced by his writing. It was indeed full of drinking, boxing and bull fighting and so the 'man's man' image of Hemingway continued to exist for me. But at the same time there was an ever present feeling of disillusionment and loss which accompanied the protagonist Jake Barnes and his circle of friends - a tension in the book which is constantly felt and rarely seen. I saw Hemingway's young, rich and lost generation of the interwar period as a blend of Evelyn Waugh's degenerate and debauched Bright Young Things, and Jean Rhys's troubled Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

The decadence of Jake Barnes' circle of friends meant that they very rarely fell into boredom, especially that which is invoked by lack of money; perhaps a state of exhaustion or a sense of tediousness in their actions, but never genuine boredom – Jake Barnes always seemed happy to go fishing in the middle of nowhere or fraternise with the locals and drink wine. This is where we can see parallels with Waugh's depiction of the Bright Young Things in Vile Bodies (1930). Adam Fenwick-Symes’ group of friends gallivant through the streets of London, using places such as the Ritz as nothing more than rest stops, and 10 Downing St. as a party retreat. Both groups lived their lives as well as they could; jazz and drinking, debauchery and perversion - anything to allow them to ignore – to forget – the pain of that the first half of the twentieth century brought and instead enjoy life.

However there is a huge difference in the characterisation and the way that the generations are presented. The Sun Also Rises attains far greater depth, and the characters are more human than those in Vile Bodies who are better described as caricatures. This distinction in the presentation of both parties simmers own to one of the key differences which is their involvement in the war.

Those in The Sun Also Rises have experienced the war, such as Jake who was in fact wounded and whose wound serves as a physical reminder of the persistent devastation the war has had, particularly to the individual. The Bright Young Things’s generation have avoided this – their anxiety comes from living in the wake of The Great War, which they were too young to experience, and the shadow of World War II which loomed in the distance. They were living in Eliot’s Wasteland and stood on the precipice to further disaster. Not only that but their generation was sandwiched between their fathers and their sons who experience these, but they will see but not be involved. They lack that opportunity for 'glory' which was so valued amongst the upper-classes, and in fact all of Britain during their lives.

In my opinion this why Waugh could not convey the omnipresent anxiety or trauma of interwar Europe as well as Hemingway could. Possibly because the experience of war carries with it far more suffering than the potential of a war, but it could also be that Waugh was in fact part of the generation that had avoided the war (at least at the time Vile Bodies was published, he did later fight in the Second World War). He was a BYT and Hemingway a veteran, and the audience that they wrote for was completely different. Waugh didn’t want to concern himself with war – in fact in Vile Bodies when war had broken out, it was experienced in the back of a car drinking champagne.

When The Sun Also Rises was published at a time when people where only just becoming ready to talk about the effect it left in the lives of those who had experienced it. Some novels such as Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) did write about the post traumatic stress it invoked, but it wasn’t really until the late twenties when it became ‘acceptable’ (for want of a better word) to talk about what had happened, and how it had changed life as it was once known. Wilfred Owen, whose poetry defines the literary output of the war for so many people, had only a handful of poems published before his death in 1918, and only gained notoriety in the late twenties.

Now the comforting forgetful snow was melting; the mood was changing and at the same time so was the literature. One couldn’t ignore what happened, but it was still difficult to express it. Richard Aldington claimed in 1926 that ‘those who have attempted to convey any real war experience, sincerely, unsentimentally, avoiding any ready-made attitudes (pseudo-heroic or pacifist or quasi-humorous) must have felt the torturing sense of something incommunicable.’[1] Here we stumble upon one of the great strengths of Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises – the subtlety of his writing and the huge impact it has. The 'Iceberg Theory' associated with Hemingway's writing is explained in Death in the Afternoon (1932): 'if a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.'[2]

As I said before, there’s a feeling of constant tension in the book which is always felt, but rarely seen. The tension truly emerges in the scenes between Jake and Lady Brett Ashley, who share a love affair hampered by the wound Jake sustained in the war that has afflicted his sex life. The moments of privacy they share are limited to only a few scenes, and when they speak there’s no huge outburst of feelings, but we quickly understand the torment they experience from not being able to be together, and the damage the war has left. We realise that, like Vile Bodies, the carpe diem philosophy is a way of forgetting – of ignoring the anguish and the damage that the war had inflicted upon the individual. It was now starting to permeate into the consciousness of the world. It couldn’t be forgotten by those who had experienced it and who were still living with the consequences. That’s why Hemingway could present the anxiety far better than Waugh, even if it wasn’t explicitly expressed.

By the time Good Morning, Midnight is published Europe had two decades to come to terms with the destruction of war, and was now holding its breath before plunging into another. There was no longer an abashed attitude to the way the individual suffers, and modernist literature, in particular, was able to communicate suffering in one of the truest ways known to the art world. Good Morning, Midnight deals with the isolation and estrangement of Sasha Jenson in interwar Paris. Almost certainly her experiences capture the emotions of many. Like Jake and the BYTs, Sasha attempts to live a life devoid of tragedy and tries to move on from the pain that she had suffered, but for her it can’t be done. Like Jake she is scarred both physically and emotionally, but unlike Jake we are able to see how entrenched the psychological issues are upon her personality, and the effects it has on her daily life.

What I meant earlier about The Sun Also Rises acting like a blend of Vile Bodies and Good Morning, Midnight can be summed up by comparing one another through something all books have in common, which is a heavy reliance on alcohol. If one was to read The Sun Also Rises alongside Vile Bodies one may be able to attribute the large quantities of Spanish wine being drunk to the urge to have a good time, to enjoy life and indeed being Hemingway-esque. This would be the visible 10% of the iceberg. However, if it was to be read alongside Good Morning, Midnight then the rest of the iceberg would be far more visible, the sadness of Jake Barnes’ life much more prominent. This is what I loved about The Sun Also Rises, how it truly captured the many levels of human emotion, and the fact that it could be read multiple times and each time feeling new. It’s not something you can accumulate by watching Any Human Heart, no matter how brilliant it is.

[1] Richard Aldington, ‘Review of Herbert Read’s In Retreat’ in Criterion 4 (1926).

[2] Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 2002), p. 154.

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