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Notes on places
The Moorgate tree ceremony
When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they had been wont to get rain and sunshine.
As I recollect the day, it was very early on a Sunday morning in the early 2000s, sunny and most warm, the City streets empty of traffic and people. I had walked down City Road and was on my way to the river, intending to walk along the Thames to Kingston. I crossed the road at the junction of Moorgate and London Wall, where the recently completed Moor House looked pristine and alien against the backdrop of the Barbican’s Seventies brutalism. The developers had installed an oval patch of lawn between the road and the building, a gesture, which was all the space allowed, at landscaping. An oak tree, a survivor from an earlier time, stood on one side of the lawn.
For some reason, when I got to the other side of the road, I glanced back. I saw a woman, middle-aged, with bushy grey-blonde hair, holding a bulging carrier bag, approach the tree. She stopped a few feet in front of it and put down her bag. Then, unhurriedly, she took her clothes off. That halted me. There was still no traffic on the road, no one else about, and she was either unaware of me or didn’t care.
Once she was fully naked, she stretched her arms wide above her head and took a couple of steps closer to the tree. Her attention was solely on the oak, and I could see that she was speaking to it. Was it some kind of charm or incantation? I wanted to get closer to listen, but feared I would break whatever strange spell it was that held us both there, lone people in the middle of a vast city. I had a camera with me, but dared not take a picture. It would have been intrusive, sneaky, profane even. And I began to feel uncomfortable with my presence there: I was a voyeur and, however fascinating the sight before me was, I didn’t want to be a voyeur. So I left that tree lady to her ceremony, whatever it was and whatever it meant, and went on my way to the river.
Notes on reading
Wessex, Mercia, and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
In a speech given in 2002, Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park fame, coined the term ‘the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect’. He explained the notion as follows:
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I know those feelings of exasperation and amusement well. I still roll my eyes when I recall the prominent Times journalist referring, in one of his columns, to Albert Camus as ‘the nihilist philosopher’. Clearly, if he’d even bothered to read Camus — itself a moot point — he hadn’t understood him.
But it’s not just the newspapers. I bought the BFI DVD of David Rudkin’s 1974 TV play Penda’s Fen not long ago. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a cult film among the English-eerie/folk-horror crowd. I have to say, I found it disappointing — didactic, disjointed, and replete with the stiffest of acting.
Anyway, the link to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is this. After I’d watched the film, I started reading the DVD’s accompanying booklet. I was hoping to understand just why Penda’s Fen is so highly regarded and what I was missing. There’s always a sense of emotional and intellectual insecurity when a work of art that’s been praised to the skies fails to move or engage you. But in the first part of the elucidatory essay, written, I can only assume, by a credentialed intellectual, the play’s setting was said to be the West Country.
In fact, the setting of the film is Worcestershire, which is the West Midlands, not the West Country. I stopped reading at that point. If the bloke couldn’t get a simple geographic detail right then I wasn’t interested in his opinions on what Penda’s Fen was all about. It may seem a trivial point, but if a critic is elucidating a version of England and Englishness, it behoves him to nail the place — and, as importantly, the spirit of the place. Mercia and Wessex are not the same. Will I remember that exasperation the next time I read a BFI booklet? Probably not. The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect will have kicked in by then.
[Still image from Penda’s Fen © BBC]
Flash fiction
Bovine epistemology
‘On behalf on the Bovine Philosophical Society, Addington branch, we wish you to know that the finest minds of the countless generations of our clan have examined and debated an apparently simple question, year upon year, decade upon decade, century upon century, without conclusion or resolution. The lack of a satisfactory answer may be because of the limits of our bovine intelligences, or to the fundamental intractability of the problem — after all, not all epistemological questions can be conclusively resolved. So we want to ask you, stranger behind the fence: Is the grass really greener on the other side?’
[Photograph taken in Addington, Surrey.]
From the photo album
Folk art, Clacton-on-Sea
