notes on robinson crusoe

chapter 1

Crusoe is the son of German immigrants. He’s second generation. His parents already stranded on an isle - only, as his father makes clear, happily so. His father urges Robinson to enter the “middle station” in life, which is where he has landed up, working in merchandise. His father stresses that it’s better to be neither in the upper nor the lower classes. Robinson, however, wants to see the world and ignores his father’s advice. He embarks on a ship. The year is 1651, not that long after Shakespeare’s Tempest. The shipwreck was already a key trope. Apart from the Tempest, there is also Pericles, and countless others. The shipwreck as the agency of destiny, precipitating change (likewise in the Odyssey). Of particular note to an island culture; Crusoe’s first journey is from Hull to London, although this too ends in a shipwreck, which is a forbearer of the shipwreck to come. 

chapter 2

Slavery. One imagines that Defoe is running the full gamut of contemporary paranoias. That of being on the other side of the slave trade must have been high in the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps what this shows is the awareness of the obscene nature of the condition of slavery. No doubt, many incorporated slaves into normality; but the phobia that “this could happen to me” suggests an awareness that slavery wasn’t an act of god; it was an institution which involved the oppression of fellow humans. Am trying to put my finger on a contemporary idea that exercises similar hold on the imagination, and the one that seems closest is that of the immigrant, from Africa or Asia or Central America. (Once again the trope of the shipwreck.)

chapter 3

So this chapter possibly lays waste to my reflections above. Crusoe escapes from slavery and makes his way to Brazil, where he settles down as a plantation owner and makes a lot of money, planting tobacco. There are two strands to this section of the story. Firstly he experiences loneliness as an immigrant. He feels himself to be on a desert island (did his parents feel the same way when they arrived?) and his wealth means little to him. The other is that he accepts a commission to go and buy slaves from the African coast, at the behest of his fellow plantation owners. Knowing that the plan is to exchange fripperies for humans. Defoe doesn’t seem to offer any kind of judgement on Crusoe for this action, which is taken more in a spirit of adventure than action. He cannot resist the lure of another voyage, after four sedentary years. The chapter closes with another shipwreck, this time one which will land him on the desert island, somewhere in the tropics. Is the shipwreck retribution for his slave trading? It doesn’t appear so. If this is what Defoe intends, the message is subliminal at best.

chapter 4

Arrival on the island. We enter a more technological chapter; albeit one which is driven by the resources Crusoe rescues from the ship. The process of recovering items from the ship takes up much of the chapter. Crusoe salvages all kind of tools, including weapons and gunpowder. In a sense, he is a colonialist, a Pizarro or a Cortes, only one with no apparent empires to conquer. He arrives on uncharted shores with slender but advanced resources, sufficient to offer him a degree of security. Technology is his saviour. There’s also an issue with the timeline; the second half of the chapter relates, briefly, the construction of his camp, which takes over a year and very few pages. Time has ceased to have much relevance. There’s surprisingly little about how he produces food: a few goats are killed and there were provisions from the boat, but as yet no detail regarding crops or diet. 

chapter 5

The first half of the chapter feels like filler. Defoe offers Crusoe’s diary, which merely repeats what has occurred in chapter 4, as though he was being paid by the page and needed to pad things out. Half way through the chapter, he more or less abandons the diary exercise, and returns to the first person narration. Here, the issue of food is addressed, with more details regarding his hunting expeditions as well as a segment on his discovery of agrarian agriculture, when the seeds from sacks he has thrown out germinate and grow months later. He has a minor religious episode which he then mocks; Crusoe’s ambivalence with regard to religion appears to chime with his belief in modernity. In a sense, Crusoe, the castaway, might be regarded as the exemplar of enlightenment man: a believer in technology above faith. He’s also a romantic, addicted to experience above comfort. An earthquake briefly disconcerts him, but then becomes the motivation to reconsider his living arrangements. There’s very little ‘dark night of the soul’: his restricted circumstances encourage his creativity and his belief in his ability to conquer nature and survive.

chapter 6

Then all of a sudden, as though Defoe is aware of all the potential criticism of Crusoe’s lack of faith, he gets religion! The chapter starts with a reversion to the diary format, which is then put on hold as Crusoe gets seriously ill (an illness he treats with tobacco and rum) and then goes on a long dissertation where any doubts about his christian leanings are supposedly put to bed. This extended confession feels slightly off-kilter, almost as though the writer is responding to voiced or unvoiced criticism of his protagonist’s lack of faith. It’s one of the least intriguing chapters, which holds no real surprises.

Chapter 7

A chapter largely dedicated to agriculture and exploration of the island. Crusoe’s religious enthusiasm seems to wane. There is a moment as he discovers the island’s variety and wealth when he sounds enamoured of it for the first time, taking on a colonial air, declaring that he could imagine himself the lord of this manor. 

Chapter 8

This chapter is effectively split into two parts. The diary structure is cast aside and Defoe offers a description of Crusoe’s explanation of the island. He goes to the other side (the west) from whence he can see what he assumes to be the mainland of the americas in the distance. He calculates this as being somewhere between Brazil and the Spanish speaking lands. He also identifies, somewhat surprisingly, penguins. All of which would put him at a far more southerly latitude than the tropics where one had assumed he was up to now. This side of the island is more fertile than his side, which leads to a reference to Leadenhall Market, something which lends a vertical link to London (not a city that Crusoe knew all that well, although Defoe would have done.) The second part of the chapter is given over to his crop of wheat and his struggle to learn how to make bread out of it. He notes in this chapter that he has now been three years on the island, time flying by rapidly in the narrative. 

Chapter 9 

This is the boat chapter. Crusoe’s dreams of escape suddenly take hold (after three years) and he seeks to resuscitate the old boat which is beached, with no success. He then goes on to make what he describes as a large canoe out of a vast tree, something that takes him months. However, the canoe is too heavy to move. He can’t get it to the sea, in spite of his best efforts, even though it’s only a hundred yards away. is this the first moment when we perhaps start to think that Crusoe doesn’t really want to leave the island, after all? For all his protestations that it’s impossible to get the boat to the shore, this is all down to his stupidity? It’s as though he’s enjoying the adventure rather more that he suggests. 

Chapter 10

Somehow the boat makes it to sea. In the opening two pages. Crusoe sets out to sea, with the intention of circumnavigating the island. Any idea of making it to the mainland is discounted. We are now eight years into the story, the timeline becoming harder and harder to follow. The circumnavigation almost leads to disaster as strong currents drive him out to sea. The dramatic need for obstacles is apparent. Crusoe overcomes the obstacle, (if he didn’t there would be no story), returns to shore where he is greeted by his parrot. The second half of the chapter deals with Crusoe’s goat management tactics. The history of humanity as an agricultural project once again. Milk and cheese and meat and hides. 

Chapter 11

Crusoe now states he has been on the island fifteen years. Finally he comes across the first trace of another human- a footstep on the beach. He has overcome every obstacle in his way and his narrative is crying out for a twist. Crusoe the hoarder of capital comes to the fore, as he does everything he can to protect his goods. He is consumed by paranoia that others will seek to pillage his store and kill him. As a result he spends the remainder of the chapter constructing more and more elaborate defences. The mere idea of the presence of another soul is something he sees primarily as a threat. 

Chapter 12

The other looms larger now. Crusoe discovers a beach littered with human skulls and signs of fire. He assumes that cannibal savages have been using the island as a kind of picnic venue. He starts to go a bit mad, entertaining fantasies of annihilating the ‘savages’ in all kinds of ways, roaming the island armed to the teeth, then hiding away, talking about living in the “constant snare of the fear of man”. Then he has regrets about his prejudices, comparing this to the actions of the Spanish: “that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people”. A strange side-note which gives an insight into contemporary attitudes towards the Spanish conquista, whilst at the same time revealing the contradictions and intellectual gymnastics which surrounded the whole process of colonisation. Finally in the chapter, Crusoe discovers a wondrous cave, which is the perfect safe space, eclipsing his years of work to construct fortified defences. The cave offers him great satisfaction; it is the safest place in the whole wide world. 

Chapter 13

Again a chapter divided between two separate incidents. In one, the cannibals return, provoking fresh paranoia in Crusoe. In the second part, a Spanish galleon founders on the rocks offshore. He hopes that there will be survivors, but there are none. He actually makes it to the ship and rescues a dog, along with large quantities of treasure. One thing that struck me, reading this chapter, was the way in which Friday has yet to appear. We’re 25 years in to his stay on the island and over two thirds of the way through the book. The trouble is that when Friday appears, the story takes a sharp twist. It will cease to be a survival story and become a buddy story or even a love story. Which doesn’t appear to be what Defoe wants to write, no matter how much Crusoe might protest that he longs for company. We start to think - of course the ship doesn’t have any survivors, and of course he never meets one of the ‘savages’ or rescue one of their victims. It would screw with the narrative. 

Chapter 14

As though reacting to the need to move his tale along, Friday finally appears. Two years pass between the previous chapter and this one, years marked by paranoia and fantasies of capturing the “cannibals” and converting them into his slaves. Finally, bizarrely, Crusoe starts to contemplate the notion that if the ‘savages’ are capable of crossing the sea from the mainland to the island, then perhaps he might be capable of doing the same, but this thought, (which we know won’t lead anywhere because we by now suspect that Crusoe has no intention of leaving the island if he can help it), is interrupted by the appearance of Friday, who he helps escape from said cannibals on one of their periodic feasting visits. His first thoughts regarding Friday are that he is not too ugly, with comments about skin tone and his nose, and that he would make a fine slave. The Edward Said Orientalism thesis has a variation: there is clearly a subtext running throughout the novel regarding the matrix of slavery. Crusoe is himself a slave at times, his eventual isolation comes as a result, (as he meditates upon in this chapter), of a failed slaving trip, and when a human finally appears his first thought is that this would make a fine slave. Without as yet seeking to draw any conclusions as to how Defoe finally comes down on this issue, one thing that seems clear is the centrality of the issue within the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps also worth noting that the slave trade itself was one of the prime movers of globalisation. The other side of this it seems to me is the way that Crusoe’s fate mirrors a capitalist drift towards atomisation within society. Crusoe is a prototype of Mersault or Joseph K; a determined outsider from the outset who struggles to square his individualistic instincts within a societal structure, only to find via the device of the shipwreck a convenient get-out-of-jail card (which is also a go-to-jail card). 

Chapter 15

Crusoe gets to know Friday. Which means, more than anything else that Crusoe gets to indoctrinate Friday into the ways of Christianity and enquire about how easy it might be to escape from the island. It’s finally defined more precisely where the island is: in the carribean, not far from the mouth of the Orinoco, only 40 miles offshore. Crusoe takes Friday to the high point of the island and when Friday sees the distant mainland, he identifies it as his territory. Crusoe explains that England, a country he can but have a distant, nostalgic memory of now, was part of Europe: “I described to him the country of Europe, particularly England, which I came from; how we lived, how we worshipped God, how we behaved to one another, and how we traded in ships to all parts of the world.” Within a chapter of Friday’s arrival, the end already feels in sight, with Crusoe showing him the boats he made so many years ago, and Friday suggesting that the bigger one might do for a journey to the mainland.

Chapter 16

So, Crusoe and Friday make a boat. But they don’t just leave. Instead, Crusoe prevaricates. He can’t leave until it’s the right season. He has to wait. He actually initially tells Friday he should go without him. He really doesn’t want to leave the island and he’d rather he was on his own again, but Friday refuses to leave without him. So Crusoe takes his time and makes ‘preparations’. Which are then interrupted by the arrival of another party of cannibals, come to feast on the island. Crusoe and Friday attack and overwhelm the cannibals, in the process freeing two prisoners, one a Spaniard, and the other who just happens to be Friday’s father. In true colonial style, Crusoe now declares he has three subjects, with three different religions. However, one wonders how this is going to tally with the protagonist’s Garbo complex, his need to be alone: four men on his island is not a sustainable situation. 

Chapter 17

Neither is 20. Crusoe’s push-me pull-you situation is repeated. After putting off departure from the island for another six months or more in order to grow crops, he gets rid of the Spaniard and Friday’s father, sending them back to the mainland. Travel between mainland and island now seems so regular it’s as if there is a shuttle service, but still Crusoe remains. When a boat appears on the horizon, it isn’t them coming to take Crusoe and Friday away; it’s a group of British mutineers. Crusoe and Friday liberate the mutineer’s three hostages and succeed in overwhelming the mutineers without too much trouble. However, Crusoe now has the problem of yet more people populating his island, his solitary idyll coming to a definitive end. 

Chapter 18

Crusoe would now appear to have multiple options for leaving the island. He doesn’t leave. Defoe spends the chapter giving a convoluted boy’s own account of the plot to overwhelm the mutineers and take back control of the ship. Friday is barely mentioned. The most interesting aspect of the chapter is that Crusoe insists that some of the worst mutineers are given the option of staying on the island, rather than going back to England and facing the gallows. He has no option but to leave, but he ensures that his legacy, his feverdream, will continue to be lived, vicariously, through the prisoners who will inherit his legacy.

Chapter 19

And then he finally is gone. After 28 years on the island, he returns to England on the boat. But he doesn’t stay long. Almost straight away he heads to Portugal to find out what happened to his Brazilian lands. The good news is he’s rich. He gives a long account of his finances, contemplates going back to Brazil but decides against it, and sets off on his travels again, looking to go back to England via land. 

Chapter 20

The final chapter is constructed around a long description of Friday fighting a bear. Was Defoe in any way conscious of the metaphor? The wily Carib out-thinking the lumbering giant. In the end we don’t learn anything about the fate of Friday. The closing pages describe Crusoe’s decision to travel again (after having married and had children?). This includes a return visit to “his” island, where he finds the Spaniards and the convicts have somehow muddled through, still alive. In addition some women have come to the island and there’s now some twenty children living there. A thoroughly modern representation of the colonised nation state in miniature. Defoe promises that there will be more adventures in the next instalment, the second volume. 

foucault, truth, work, aesthetics

"I know that knowledge can transform us, that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call truth doesn't decipher anything) but that if I know the truth I will be changed. . . . Or maybe I'll die but I think that is the same anyway for me. . . . You see, that's why I really work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. . . . This transformation of one's self by one's knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience."

—Michel Foucault, The Minimalist Self, 1982 interview by Stephen Riggins, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984

'will of the people' according to John Stuart Mill

“The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

the eclipse

It’s a Summer’s evening. The Eclipse is a Tudor fronted pub, black beams, white plaster. Inside it has a low ceiling and a tiny bar. Tables always at a premium. It has its regulars, who prop up the bar and have their own tankards. Although it looks like a village pub, this is a city, albeit one which froze in size around the time of the Crusades, and The Eclipse still has an edge to it, a place from where late at night drunkards will spill out onto the streets keeping the locals awake. Outside, there are twin benches either side of the door, set into to the fabric of the building.

That’s where we are. It’s around seven pm. We’re drinking lager, because aged 19, it’s what everyone drinks. There’s only the two of us, myself and a man called James, known at school as Muppet, who will go on in life to become a long-serving employee of the Bank of England, a reliable dad, a resident of Surrey. All these things are probably discernible in his frame and demeanour now, to the soothsayer, but at this point in our lives he still carries other possibilities around in his back pocket. We’re both negotiating our way out of childhood, on holiday from university, back from the growing-up wars. Our friendship runs deeper than any we have at university, but it’s also at its zenith. These are the last things we’ll truly share, after six years of school. For the next decade we’ll remain in each other’s lives, slowly drifting apart, the ties that bind, the common interests, eroded by time, geography and the atomization of the late twentieth century. Because really there’s no reason why James and I shouldn’t still be meeting and talking Economics until we’re old men, cozy in the complicity of the conversation game. But we won’t and we don’t and that’s just how it is.

This particular evening there’s an edginess around me and there’s a reason for it. My girlfriend, the one from University, is not with me. She’s gone back to her stomping ground, the wilds of Hertfordshire. Only, on this day, she’s meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. His name is Masa. He’s Japanese. He’s a multi-millionaire who was part of the Japanese Olympic skiing team. He lives in New York. A week after she met me, she took down the photo of him that lived on her wall. Destined to be together, until I appear. They are meeting in London. At his hotel. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere on Park Lane.

I’m too self-absorbed to be really worried. She and I have been together a whole academic year, we’re about to move into a little house with a yard with roses in a place called Dunnington. We’re playing out some kind of fantasy of coupledom which we both need and which is already turning sour. Nothing will interrupt this sequence, I know, and even if something were to, I would recalibrate my horizon, suffer the crisis which will arrive sooner or later, the world would have shrunk, but then the world is expanding all the time anyway. 

Although the truth is I’m not even contemplating any of this. I’m just edgy. On adrenaline and lager. James, because he knows me, picks up on my edginess. I explain the context. Perhaps he asks if I’m worried or not. I don’t remember. James says something along the lines of: “It’s good {or unusual} to see someone so passionate about things.” His thesis doesn’t quite ring true. Later others arrive and the evening changes or becomes more drunken. For the next three years every time we’re back together in our hometown and we go out it feels like the end of an era.

I never learn what happened in Masa’s hotel room and I never force the issue. There are things you know in the heart which are more important than the things that are actually lived. As decreed we will spend the next two years of our lives together in a house with a blue door and a yard with roses. Sometimes he sends her envelopes stuffed with money. 

For two years we fight a lot then we split up. She goes to New York and marries Masa. James has a child called George. James and I drift apart. The Eclipse is still there. To the best of my knowledge.

the duke of edinburgh

Back in the Duke, a pub that I love as much as any other. Even if these days it feels like a young person’s pub. Perhaps it always was and I’m just harking back to the old days. But it’s also the football pub and has been for twenty years or so. That kind of continuity generates affection. The existence of constancy make the passing of time more bearable. There’s noise. There’s chat about John McDonnell and the flaws of the Labour party and Mark Grief and Benjamin Markovits and Updike too and being a father for the first time and all the rest of it, because that’s what Thursday nights are about. 

The Duke has always stayed open later than normal pubs, back in the day it used to have a 1am license, or maybe it just did lock-ins. At one point, late in the evening, around 10.45,  a couple come and sit at the table next to us. They are young and have something stylish about them. Maybe I notice they don’t seem to be talking or maybe I don’t. I head to the bar to get a round and I have to get around the young man, who makes no effort to let me pass. HIs hair is neatly cut and he wears a smart coat. He’s slouched in his seat. He seems to enjoy the fact I have to climb over his bag and his legs to get out. The young woman rolls her eyes. When I come back I ask him to move his bag. He does so, but he seems disinterested in anything. 

Shortly afterwards they get up to leave. The woman walks out of the front door. The man goes to the loo. He comes back and he looks lost. He sits down for a while in a chair on his own. He gets up and looks around as though he’s looking for her, but she’s long gone. He sits down again. Periodically he gets up and walks around and then comes and sits down again. As I leave, I see him at the bar, buying another drink.

It makes me a tad sad, to see this couple go through this before my eyes. I imagine all the times I might have been drunk and obnoxious and the night ended badly and this makes me sad too, for the nights that ended badly, and also for this couple, who will have to wake up tomorrow and do that thing that people do as they try to put the pieces back together again. 

Or so I thought. Because as we walk to the tube, Phil, who also noticed the couple, says they were probably a Tinder date. He says there was a moment, a couple of years ago, when I was away, when the pub became infested by tinder dates. It is, after all, a young person’s pub. Awkward couples trying to connect. According to Phil, the woman tonight probably walked out and will never see her companion again. Which, oddly, made me even more sad. The idea that the couple in whom I had invested my past errors were not even a couple. Just a random, algorithmic event, which couldn’t even bloom for one night. 

the insularization of england

One of the themes in this debate was precisely the relationship between England and the Continent, between England and France, as well as, on a more symbolic level, between England and Italy. The rejection of quantitive verse based on Greek and Latin models in favour of rhyme led to a declaration of intellectual independence from the continent. “Barbarous” became a positive word, a sign of pride. … 

What one might call the insularization of England was however a process, not an event, a long process involving self-reflection that took place on many levels. As I have tried to show the defence of rhyme played a minor but distinctive role in it.

from No Island is an Island, Carlo Ginzburg

pozole

Yesterday I went to a mexican restaurant in Poland Street with some friends. There was pozole on the menu and I said we had to share it. Pozole is a stew, made with pork and maize and anything else. It’s a Michoacan speciality. When Willy and I stayed in Santa Fe, whenever there was a communal event, there would be a vast cauldron of pozole on the go. It was considered a great treat. Something struck me, on the bus on the way home. It went without saying that there would be a plate of pozole for us too. Even on the very first night we arrived, one of the strangest nights I’ve ever known, when we found ourselves in a large courtyard garden, with over a hundred strangers, whose language we didn’t speak, having followed the band around the town for an hour and a half. Willy was filming, I was drifting around in my aimless fashion. People smiled at us. There was never any questioning of why we were there. After what seemed like an hour of recitative prayer, and then the unusual dancing, the pozole was handed out on small paper plates. This generosity was repeated on many occasions during my short stay there. The action of sharing was their normality. So it came instinctively to me, in the restaurant, to order the dish, so that we too could share a bowl of pozole between us. 

lou salome writing to rilke 20/03/1904 on the occasion of the Russo-Japanese war

Dear Rainer,  What a comfort it is to hear you speak of our war in this way... no one understands that Russia, however involuntarily, stands in for Europe against Asia in this conflict - always forced into this middle position where it must endure the collision of East and West on behalf of all, as it did earlier in the time of the Mongols.... but what is truly tragic seems to me that its own deepest destiny... is almost exactly the opposite, namely, to fight through towards a synthesis, towards a spiritually fruitful union between Eastern and Western culture, instead of prolonging that fierce uncomprehending split which, for the rest of Europe, will probably last forever...

Bicester Village

Extract from a guidebook to Britain, 2018

It takes no more than 45 minutes to arrive at Bicester Village by train from London. Marylebone Station offers information about the village in Chinese and Arabic. This is the post-European world. Once you arrive at Bicester Village, there are more signs in various languages. The station is neat and modern. It backs on to a carpark and the defining feature is a tax-reclaim office. The path to the village itself has been landscaped with due diligence. Given the season we visited there are traditional representations of the British reindeer in the parks, wearing woolly jumpers due to the time of year. These representations will alternate with the seasons. In the Summer there is a depiction of the famous British band The Beatles, wearing traditional 1960’s costumes. As you walk to the village, skirting another carpark, there’s a view of fields in the distance and an Anglo-Saxon church spire. These details are kept at a respectful distance from the village itself, as a homage to old England. The church might even have been constructed at the same time as the village, in order to provide suitable views for the visitors. Bicester Village is laid out in the traditional grid system. Its half-dozen streets are narrow, with gabled buildings. It is architecturally perfect. This perfection is enhanced by the fact that no-one lives here. Each of the one-story buildings contains a shop of some kind. Only the most respected, long-standing brands are present. The ones that are most associated with the timeless beauty of the classic British village. Swarovski, Polo, Hugo Boss, etcetera. This village is in so many ways perfect. It delivers the authentic British village experience whilst allowing you to purchase your favourite shopping items, safe in the knowledge that before you leave the village you can already claim back VAT tax on all purchased goods. There are many cafes where you can purchase traditional croissant for breakfast or other classic British dishes for lunch. Some eating establishments remain open until 8pm. They are staffed by kind-hearted European young people who have come from afar afield as Slovakia or Ireland to enjoy the experience of being working British villagers. These young people are kind and spend all of the day practicing their smiles. As you shop, do not forget to enjoy the experience of promenading through the old-world streets of Bicester Village which have been designed to enhance your pleasure of the shopping experience in a traditional British village, allowing you to experience both the excellence of the British consuming experience and the quiet pleasures of traditional Britain, the land of Stonehenge, smurfs, kings and queens and the opium wars. 

where are the europeans? (brexit and the british stage)

For all the gnashing of teeth from the literati, it’s not as though the British theatre world has done much to embrace Europe over the course of the past 3 decades. Whilst many a US author (Shinn, Shawn, Mamet, Norris etcetera) has had their day in the sun, the roll call of living European writers who aren’t Irish who have had successful productions is pitiable. It’s a struggle to think of a single playwright who has broken out. The odd play is staged, but Europe’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights remain unknown by the average British theatre practitioner. Noren, Fosse, Lagarce, Bernhard,  Koltes, Bebel, Loher… Ask most theatre practitioners and it’s doubtful they will have come across any of them. For most, Europe still means Brecht, Chekhov and not much more. Any attempt to open cultural vistas, to effect an exchange between the UK and its continental European colleagues has been negligible. Is this because these writers and many more are not much kop? Of course not. It’s probably due to a combination of imaginative and commercial reasons, due to a reluctance to seek out a horizon that doesn’t offer a backstage pass to Hollywood and its rewards. The introspection of the British cultural world, with the privileged linguistic space it believes it occupies, is no more than a reflection of mainstream political practices which have helped to create the circumstances under which the vote of 23 June was effected. 

It’s perhaps worth trying to focus on a couple of the great success stories of British theatre over this period. Firstly, take Sam Mendes, an Oxbridge contemporary of the Cameron gang. Mendes, on the back of his Oxbridge productions, broke through as the great white hope of British theatre in the late 80s. His take on the classics was seen as fresh and invigorating. He soon became the heir apparent to the generation of Hall and Nunn (a generation which it might be said entertained rather more intellectual curiosity). In 1990, Mendes took over the Donmar in Covent Garden. The Donmar had all the trappings of a fringe theatre, subversively planted in the heart of a booming new commercial area, Covent Garden. It had the potential to become one of the most radical, exciting theatre venues in Europe. Instead, it became a space dedicated to astute commercial practice. A thriving ‘boutique’ theatre evolved appealing to an elitist audience. Mendes maintained his reworking of the classics whilst also starting to mine the hyper-lucrative medium of the musical. As a creative theatre space, the Donmar never really got going. Mendes left and ended up directing Bond movies, whilst forming his own transatlantic company which does - you guessed it - classic texts with well-known stars. A more conservative approach to theatre would be hard to imagine. Theatre is always a trade-off between artistic and commercial instincts; Mendes’ career shows where the British emphasis has lain. Texts which might be seen as ‘difficult’ need to wait however many decades is required before they can get the imprimatur of ‘classics’ and be sold to the public on that basis. The notion of theatre as a process of intellectual investigation, an investigation which includes a dialogue with an audience, has been shelved. 

Mendes’ career is only one strand in recent British theatre history. It could be argued that the Donmar has an obligation to meet the bottom line and to put on shows that please the punters. However, it might also be suggested that this is to miss the point of culture, which is not to be a merely commercial vehicle, but a means whereby societies can begin to define themselves and also interact with other cultures. The Royal Court is a theatre which has ostensibly sought to embrace this point of view. Over the past three decades it has consolidated its position as the leading new writing venue in the country, not just for British writers, but also for writers all over the world. Indeed, the Royal Court runs its own “international” department. The exact brief of this department is sometimes hard to gauge. At times it seems like a post-colonial enterprise, as ambassadors from the British writing establishment are sent out to help “develop” playwrights in other countries. On the other hand, it could also be argued that it offers a point of cultural exchange, allowing British audiences to get an insight into what’s going on theatrically in the wider world. 

There are two major problems with the Royal Court’s approach towards international writing. Firstly, as part of its remit is to “develop” writers, this means it tends to work with writers who are still at a formative point in their careers. Much as the idea of Thomas Bernhard attending the Royal Court’s international residency tickles the fancy, the conditions under which the residency is run mean it would never have happened. Great writers don’t require “development”. They need their plays to be staged. However, the Court is more inclined to use the gaps in its scheduling for international writing to promote those writers it has invested in via its international outreach work. This leads to the second problem: that in its avowed mission of ‘development’. The Royal Court has effectively turned its back on the most important plays and playwrights currently writing. It doesn’t want to show the best; it wants to showcase its own good intentions. As a result, one of the few theatre spaces in the capital which might have had the energy to tackle the work of the major contemporary playwrights of Europe and beyond, has failed to do so. Look at the list of plays staged in the main house over the past thirty years and the number of plays from Europe is negligible. The greatest opportunity for dialogue theatre offers - staging plays of significance by great writers - has been forfeited. 

The writer understands that it is unfair to condemn the lack of European theatre within our (European) theatres at the door of either the Royal Court or Sam Mendes. Rather, these two examples have been cited as indicative of how our theatres would appear to have turned their backs on the continent long before 52% of the British population chose to follow suit. This only matters in so far as we choose to believe that culture matters. Had the Court and other British theatres been awash with productions of European playwrights it might not have made the slightest of differences to the political climate. However, if one chooses to believe that culture can have an effect, for better or for worse, on a nation’s consciousness, then it might be reasonable to suggest that the introspective, anglophone attitude of British theatre, regarding itself more as the 51st state of the United States than an active player within a European community, might be at the very least worthy of quiet reflection on the part of our theatre practitioners at a time when the cultural value of belonging to Europe has been so bitterly rejected. 

groucho club writing exercise

There are 17 people seated at a long walnut table in the Georgian room which looks out over Dean Street. At the head of the table is the writing tutor. On either side of the long table, her students. It’s Wednesday, half way through the week-long course. The course contains many writing exercises: dialogue and its framing; the historical novel; the use of images as a writing prompt; etcetera.  For this session the chosen topic is time. How the writer conveys time within their writing. The tutor hands out a postcard to each of us. The exercise will be to write a brief piece which incorporates two timelines, one of which could be a memory. We will be given approximately ten minutes to write. 

My postcard is a photograph of a man, cut off at the waist, wearing walking boots, striding down a road. I turn the postcard over and discover that the postcard is promotional material for a shop called the Natural Shoe Store. A shop which is five minutes walk from where we are. Down the stairs, onto Dean Street, turn left at Old Compton Street, cross Shaftesbury Avenue, take the street that leads to Seven Dials, then walk up Neal Street. I know this because I used to work in the Natural Shoe Store. For the best part of a year. Over twenty years ago. The summer of the Italy World Cup; the summer when Annie Lennox and Pavarotti and that bloke from Eastenders and a hundred others came through the shop. When I met Arita and Steve. When Sedley and I began our shirt business. When I’d stay in Sedley’s father’s flat the other side of Oxford Street. A time when you could still drive into town and park round the back for free. All of that and a thousand other memories, stacking up, vertiginous. 

I felt distress. I had no inclination to write but I felt as though I was obliged to write. I picked up my pen and wrote.

There’s a room full of people. They’re writing. They’re dispensing. Letter by letter, thought by thought. A youth walks through the room. In his hand he holds a pair of shoes. The morning light catches the wooden shelves. Neal Street dust flickers with its invisible energy. Daylight. The youth kneels. He holds out the shoes, black sandals, leather strapped, cork soled. He says: If you treat them well they will last you twenty years. Twenty years later he is one of the writers, whittling time like a stick. Marks on a page. Memories collapse in on him like an imploding house. Dust flies. Emptiness is all that is left. A blank space. The client looks at the youth. The client tells him: I don’t need to try them on. I know they fit. I’ll take them.

It didn’t take me long. I’d started after everyone else and finished first. I stared out of the window. Women in a third floor room on the other side of Dean Street were applying make-up to each other’s faces. They gazed at themselves in mirrors which I couldn’t see. 

The tutor stopped the exercise. She asked people for their reactions. I wanted to share mine with the group. I made an attempt to speak. I used words like ‘weird’ and ‘freaky’. The tutor said the exercise had more to do with the image on the card than anything written on the back. I wanted to explain that I knew that but that the biographical connection of the card which she had given me in order to do an exercise about time was too strong to ignore. One of the other students, about my age, understood. The class moved on. Some people read their pieces out. I didn’t. Soon enough we would be given the next writing exercise to perform. 

memorial to #71

We got back from Berlin at around 2pm. It had been one of those trips. Getting to the airport at 8am only to find that the flight was delayed an hour and a half. Getting to Luton and buying bus tickets only to find that the bus was delayed by half an hour. Traffic. A grumpy bus driver. A tiff. Rain. The typical comeback comedown.

When I got home I checked my mails or something. Within twenty minutes there was a knock at the door. Two women from the tenancy company asking if I’d seen my neighbour. It’s been about six weeks now I’ve been back in the flat and I haven’t seen head nor hide of him. A few weeks ago my former tenant came round to pick up his post and asked if I’d run into him. When I said I hadn’t he said he must have gone away for a bit. It’s been years since I lived in this flat and I have a vague memory of a man who was quite kindly but who I never got to know. 

I explained to the women that I hadn’t seen him. They started shouting through the letterbox. There was no reply. They seemed concerned. About half an hour later, C told me that the police had arrived. I looked through the peephole at the very moment that a policeman kicked the door in, surprisingly easily. It was, indeed, like a cop show, seen through a fish eye lens. A little later I opened the door. There were four policemen and the two women. The most senior policeman said that, unfortunately, he had to inform me that my neighbour was now deceased. Again, he asked if I’d seen anything and again I explained that I hadn’t been living here long and hadn’t seen my neighbour since I’d been back. 

About an hour later I looked through the peephole again. Two men were lugging a body-bag out of the flat. They were struggling and telling each other off, like angry removal men. 

When we left the flat later to watch the football, the smell coming from next door was overpowering. The sickly smell of death. The smell we read about in the papers when they talk about massacres; in countries gripped by war; when planes fall from the sky and crash on the earth. This smell, the most universal of smells, the smell that unifies all mankind, from babe to veteran, was completely alien. As though to show how us how inured we have been to that which it means to be alive, which is to die. Inured through the accident of history, through luck, through the privilege of living in times when death is a stranger.

I wondered how long my erstwhile neighbour had been dead. It was presumably weeks. As we left the building, Jose, the Spanish concierge, made a comment that they only find out you’ve died when you haven’t paid your rent. It’s true. This is the anonymous city, where no-one notices your absence, where your death will go unheralded, if you haven’t managed to convince people it’s worth something. Death has a currency like everything else. 

I trust he rests in peace, the unknown neighbour who has now moved on.

beneath the plough and the stars

It’s seven in the morning and for some reason I am awake. The night ended in Doyle’s about four hours ago. Young people were falling over each other dancing to James Brown whilst we finally wrapped up the conversation and decided to head for home.

Dublin has a lot of bars and my friend promised we’d end up in one of them. He promised a quiet nook somewhere, in a beautiful bar. There’s nothing wrong with Doyle’s but it’s neither quiet nor beautiful. Which given the context of the occasion is probably far more appropriate. 

My friend is called Sean Holmes. He’s a theatre director. I’ve known him for many years and seen many of his shows, although less of late. Last year, he came to give a workshop in the city were I live, Montevideo, Uruguay. At the end of the last night of the week, in the Plaza Independencia on the way back to the hotel, he said: “Why don’t you come to Dublin? The Abbey’s doing the centenary of the 1916 Uprising and for some reason they’re inviting lots of English directors over for it. I’m going to do The Plough and the Stars.” Standing in the plaza, Dublin and next year seemed a long way away. Nevertheless, a few months later here I am for one night, in time to catch the show’s first preview.

We go for supper before the event In a restaurant called The Winding Stair which overlooks the Liffey. Sean seems relaxed. The first preview is the moment the play finally confronts its audience. It’s opening night by any other name. He tells me that O’Casey’s play is “their Hamlet.” On the fourth night of the show’s opening run, in 1926, there was a riot. The rioters were widows of men who’d died in the 1916 uprising, who didn’t like what O’Casey had to say about it. With Jon Bausor, the designer, we speculate about what it would take to provoke a riot in a theatre today and decide it’s probably never going to happen again. 

In Montevideo, Sean had been giving a workshop with the playwright, Simon Stephens. Collectively, they were tackling the big issues of why people write plays and why they then choose to stage them. One of the exercises that Sean did involved investigating how you transform the theatrical space so that it feels as though the play being staged is actually happening in the same room, or physical space, as the audience. A great deal of theatre looks to separate the audience and the play; Sean was looking at how to integrate them. 

The Plough and the Stars is a play rooted in the geography of Dublin. Dublin’s not the most complex city, geographically. Within a single afternoon, I’d begun to get a handle on it. When O’Casey’s play talks about O’Connell Street, even I know where that is. For the audience, the play has some of the criteria of a video diary. The way in which people mercilessly film or photograph their lives, documenting their actuality. The Plough and the Stars is set in the actuality of Dublin’s geography. A local audience watches it with their own images of this world to hand. It’s not remote, it’s tangible. The only thing distancing the audience from the play is that it’s set in the past. 

Plays set in the past run the risk of being museum pieces. Audiences sometimes prefer this. They enjoy watching a play and feeling as though it belongs to another time; that they are cultural tourists. This might be a valid approach but it doesn’t have much to do with Sean’s exercise about making the audience feel part of the space. In order to achieve this, the director has to find a way to ‘de-museum’ the play. To make it feel contemporary.

We get to the theatre around 7pm. The theatre is sold out. The audience is a mix of young and old. There are several school parties. The doors are not opened until 7.20, ten minutes before the show is due to open. The spectators are crammed into the lobby by the bar. The Abbey is a gloriously unreconstructed seventies space. It wears its heritage lightly on its sleeve. This doesn’t feel like an audience which has come in a spirit of veneration. 

The first image in the production is a girl, aged about 14, wearing a Man Utd top. She approaches a microphone and sings, in Gaelic, what I later learn is the national anthem. The girl is of Pakistani descent. She speaks with a clear Irish accent. She’s the child of immigrants. The audience applaud her as she coughs her way through the song. Dublin, like many a contemporary European city, is a melting pot. One of the languages that I heard recurrently walking around was Portuguese Brazilian. Everyone’s here, on the edge of Europe. Dublin is no longer the white, classically Celtic city of O’Casey’s day. The production reflects this from the off. 

Having said which, modern dress is not the most radical of devices. The play uses costume wittily throughout, but the key tools in the director’s unlocking of the text are song and surprise. The character of Jack, Nora’s husband, might be said to be underwritten. Jack has one big scene before he goes off to join the militia and another midway through the battle of the Easter Uprising, the backdrop of the play’s second half. This is all the actor is given to convey what kind of man the husband of the play’s tragic heroine really is. The first scene between him and Nora has to communicate their passion. The scene begins naturalistically, then, suddenly, the actor grabs a mike. Hang on, you think, what’s the microphone doing on stage? This might be modern dress, but no-one has a microphone sitting around in their living room. The actor leaps out of naturalism. He sings a vivacious, sexy love song. Everything about their relationship, their desire, comes to life. The audience aren’t looking at a character from a great play. They’re looking at a man showing off for the woman he loves. 

This play between naturalism and non-naturalism creates the space that Holmes uses to remind the audience: we’re all in this theatre together. This theatre in this city. Which is the city of the past and the city of the future and the city, crucially, of the now. The rupture takes the audience out of the bubble of history and lands them in the here-and-now. The play isn’t talking about long-lost figures. It’s talking about the audience’s contemporaries. Music, humour, and the courage to break the moment, help to release the power of a play which is describing things that happened a hundred years ago. It makes them happen now, upon the stage, in Dublin, all over again.

In the interval I step outside for some air. Young people walk past, talking and laughing. They look like they’ve stepped out of The Plough and the Stars. 

It’s only the first preview. The play isn’t “finished’ yet. There’s more work to be done. Only today, Sean and Jon decided to rip out most of the set’s backdrop, locating the scenes on a larger, emptier stage. There are discussions about the speed at which a tower falls, whether a pram would be better as a shopping trolley; how to stage the final scene. These discussions carry on in Doyle’s until gone 2 in the morning. Director, designer, associate director, all thrashing it out. The play is still coalescing. The various aspects of stagecraft - acting, sound, lights, design, language, music - are being honed and refined. I will never see the finished version. But I have already seen enough. To feel as though O’Casey’s complex vision of the seminal Irish revolution is alive and kicking, as relevant to the Abbey’s audience today as it was when it was first produced in this theatre, ninety years ago. Enough to see that the audience and the actors are, indeed, sharing a common space as they explore the play together.

+++

At the curtain call, the actor playing Jack brings on an Irish flag and drapes it over the scenery. He has not been asked to do this. Sean is not too sure what to make of it. Given the importance of symbols in the play, it's not a negligible action. It’s reminiscent of the way a footballer might drape himself in his nation’s flag after having won an international tournament with his European club. There’s a pride in origins at play, a pride which is reflected in a kind of benign nationalism, which reminds me of my other adopted home, Uruguay, where this kind of gesture might also occur. On the other hand, were it to happen on a British stage, the semiotics of an actor bringing on a Union Jack for the curtain call might be perceived to be less innocent. With the audience having left the theatre and the stage bare, someone observes: nice to see us celebrating the role of the Ivory Coast in the Easter Uprising. The actor has placed the flag the wrong way round. The Irish flag, placed the wrong way round, becomes the flag of the Ivory Coast. 

Thursday, 10.03.16

london notes

Feb/ March 2016

• London air on a February morning: slices like an unseen dagger.
• Black kid being picked up by 7 cops at London Bridge.
• Latino having serious skype chat with novia on overland.
• I keep expecting to run into people i know. #montevideohead
• In the imperial war museum there is an interactive sub-Schwitters political photomontage workshop. Giant cut outs of  Obama/ Trump/ Merkel/ Blair & co are available for pre-teens to rebrand with their slogans. War is evil. Peace is good. Trite speakthought in a proto-libertarian brainwash. There are no anti-monarchy or pro-putinist options. The language of protest is reduced to a child's dribble.
• The Romanian busker on the tube is so angry he shouts at his two younger companions. He plays his sax like it’s a machine gun. People cringe before his anger. No one gives money.
• 2 Argentines at the bar in the Ritzy being told by the waitress that uni in the UK is very expensive. She asks how much it costs in Argentina. The young man looks at her and says...ah, it's free -
• In Punta Arenas, towards the end of the world, we came across the story of Ernest Shackleton, intrepid and vanquished arctic explorer. Walking down the hill from my sister's obscure corner of London to Sydenham station, I pass one of those big old houses with a blue plaque. The man who lived there was the explorer himself. A world so big and small all at the same time.
• 2 pubs face one another at the Limehouse end of Commercial Road. One is The Royal Duke. The other The Royal Duchess. Both duke and duchess are shut now. The guillotine has fallen.
• My friends move into a new house. Bought by her stepfather. To get them on the property ladder. Shortly after, the stepfather starts receiving letters. 3 or 4 a week. Demanding that the sender is paid the full value of the house, which is legally his. He threatens to have my friends evicted. They report this to the police. The sender now lives in a psychiatric hospital. 20 years ago he lived in the house, which he lost in a messy divorce. He keeps an eye on land registry records. Every time someone new buys it, he tries to claim his old house back.
• Big man in homburg on train, looks a bit like Churchill: "Damascus would have us." His companion: "I bet they would." Later in the conversation I realise they are talking about weapons sales. The last thing I hear is the other man, younger, looks ex-services: "You weren't there for the meeting with King Abdullah, were you? I thought he was jolly good."
• T is an actor. He was hired to do an advert for Italian cornflakes. He was flown to Nepal for the shoot. Himself and a girl eating cornflakes against the backdrop of Everest. the Italians treat the Nepalese like servants. They spend a couple of days setting up. The morning scheduled to film the wide with the mountain it's foggy. The next day too. The next as well. The mountain refuses to cooperate. The following day they get out the green screen. Everest will be added in in post.
• Sitting in the window at Curzon Soho, a portly figure on a bike goes by. There is something familiar about him. It is the mayor himself. Five minutes later the cafe space is swathed in the irrefutable odour of shit.

mariátegui on rilke

Este juicio es fundamentalmente romántico e individualista. Supone que la obra del poeta se alimenta exclusivamente de su experiencia personal. De la riqueza y extension de esta depende el valor de aquella. El poeta es concebido como un mundo cerrado en el que se va sedimentando, poco a poco, lo bello. Pero este juicio tiene el defecto de que no nos explica sino un parte de la poesía. No abarca la totalidad del fenómeno… El poeta sumo no es solo el que, quintaesenciados, guarda sus recuerdos, convierte el individual en universal. Es también, y ante todo, el que recose un minuto, por un golpe milagroso de intuición, la experiencia o el emoción del mundo. En los periodos tempestuosos, es la antena que condensa todo la electricidad de una atmósfera henchida. 

ensayos literarios, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, 1927, Lima

PATAGONIA NOTES

===

PUNTA ARENAS 1

The world changes depending on where you are. This overly-obvious truth never the less feels more true than ever here, in Punta Arenas. Next stop South is the South Pole. The tip of the continent of Antarctica reaches out so that it looks like it’s trying to touch Patagonia. Punta Arenas has been the base for many of the great Polar expeditions. In front of the port there are boards which include Scott, Peary, Admunson and Shackleton. Not to mention a whole host of other names from other countries whose fame hasn’t made it to the Anglo-Saxon world. It’s the middle of Summer and it feels like the edge of Winter, which is the permanent state of this outpost. If Summer is like this, you can’t help thinking, shivering in the biting wind, how can they survive Winter. You look South and realise the icecaps are almost within reach. The official name of the district is Región de Magallanes y Antártica Chilena. Legally speaking, we’re there, in amongst the icebergs, in a land of immense, dazzling whiteness.

Due East, more or less, are the Falkland Islands. Our taxi driver used to be a sailor and spent time there. He says there are two big islands and hundreds of little ones. On every one of these little islands there lives a British couple, who fly the flag and share their island with lots of sheep. He says the pubs open at ten in the morning and shut at eleven at night and the police fine you if they catch you drunk at 11.30. There’s nothing else to do there, so everyone drinks all day, but god help you if you’re caught drinking after closing time.

On the roof of Punta Arenas fire station, there’s a Croatian flag. The fire brigade was founded by Croatians in 1902. There’s also a Croatian club called Sokol. The immigration to this part of the world was diverse. The cemetery contains a Scottish quarter, an English quarter and a host of Eastern European sectors. Croats, Slovenians, Slovaks and more in amongst the more typical Spanish and Italian stock. A sign in town celebrates the Slovak novelist Mateo Bencur, who ended up going back to live in Croatia, where he wrote two nostalgic novels called Patagonian Travels and The Call of the Mother Country. Patagonia is as good a place as any to start over. You can imagine a whole load of Croatians arriving at the end of the world at the start of the last century, thinking, you know what, this town really need a fire brigade. Later we come across another fire station, founded by Germans. There’s probably one for every nationality that ever emigrated here.

===

TIERRA DEL FUEGO

We leave Punta Arenas around 8 in the morning, driving North East to take the ferry at Punto Delgado, the mouth of the Magellan Strait.. The wind is getting up and the guide is worried that the crossing will shut, as he later finds out happens around 1pm. The crossing takes no more than a breezy 20 minutes: this is the narrowest point in the Magellan Straits. The approach on the other side is cluttered with Argentine lorries taking petrol from the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego north. They have to cross Chilean territory in order to return to Argentina. When the ferry shuts down due the to strong winds which are typical of the Summer months, the backlog of lorries trying to cross builds up incrementally.

Tierra del Fuego is an island, separated from the continent by the Magellan Straights, named after the man who found a passage through them in 1520. He never landed on the inhospitable island. He first named it Tierra del Humo, having seen smoke from native indian fires. When he got back to Spain, the king decided the name Tierra del Fuego was more evocative. The Chilean half of the island is far from beautiful. It’s low, flat, scrubby.. Further south, the cordillera continues its march towards Antartica and there are forests, but here it’s a bleak Lear-like heath. The wind sweeps the land like a lawnmower. The few, sparse trees are stunted and the grass sways in a vast, hypnotic emptiness.

After being driven for almost 2 hours, seeing little, we arrive at the Western coast in a Bay called the Useless Bay (Bahia Inutil), as it’s too shallow for boats and therefore good for nothing. [Wikipedia: “The bay was named in 1827 by Captain Phillip Parker King, because it afforded "neither anchorage nor shelter, nor any other advantage for the navigator.””] We’ve come to see a colony of King Penguins. There used to be a lot of King Penguins on Tierra del Fuego, but like the indigenous population, they were exterminated. About a decade ago, an enterprising fellow decided to bring them back. He set up a penguin colony, which is protected and thriving. It’s funded by the £12 every tourist has to pay to visit.

When we step out of the van, the wind is challenging. As we walk down to the coast it becomes even more so. The penguins stand around, an odd mix of noble and gawky, observing us. The wind does not appear to affect them. For us, the wind is a scourge. Never have I known a wind quite like it. It makes standing up a challenge. Not an intermittent challenge; it’s a constant one. Relax for a second and you’re in danger of flying off the earth’s handle. The wind whips its way off the coast, announcing without any doubt that this is not a place meant for human inhabitation. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it feels like to be at the Pole. Or Mars, come to that.

We all sway about a bit. The penguins, who are on the other side of a stream, continue to observe the humans’ pathetic attempt to incorporate themselves into this ferocious landscape. Finally, having taken about a million photos each, we retreat back to the safety of the van and head towards the Chilean capital of Tierra del Fuego, Porvenir. Porvenir has a population of 5000. It is categorically not a tourist town. We’re taken to a cheap and cheerful place where we’re served sizeable guanaco sandwiches. The return ferry has been delayed an hour, which gives us time to walk around the town. However, this is a town where walking is a feat not to be approached lightly. The wind is a little less fierce than at the coast, but not a lot. We stagger around the low-rise streets, with houses made out of prettily-painted corrugated iron. There is a seaside promenade, but you’d need a constitution much stronger than mine to enjoy it. Places like Bridlington or Scarborough seem tropical in comparison with Porvenir.

The guide takes us to the museum. We learn about the two different native tribes who used to occupy this land. The Yahgan lived off the sea, using their canoes as second homes. The Selk’nam lived off the land, hunting guanaco. There’s a statue depicting them in a  small park. Four figures walk barefoot, wrapped in animal hides. These people occupied the land for over ten thousand years. There is a way of living in the wild nature of Tierra del Fuego, but the secrets have vanished with the tribes. They were hunted in the early twentieth century, when the land was given over to sheep farming. The sheep drove out the natives’ traditional food supply, the guanaco, so they started hunting sheep instead. As a result, the sheep barons paid people to hunt them. Hunters were paid at first upon presenting a pair of ears, but later they had to supply a head. The most famous hunter was s a Scot, Alex McLennan (nicknamed Red Pig), whose fitting fate is described in Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Chatwin also writes about another Brit, Thomas Bridges, a missionary who later become a landowner himself. Only Bridges, far from hunting the Selk’nam and the Yahgan, did all he could to preserve their culture. He complied extensive dictionaries of their languages and sought to offer them a safe haven on his land. It may have been a doomed endeavour, but the contrasting stories of Bridges and McLennan say a lot about what it is to be British. No matter how far you go, travel always seems to take you back to where you came from.

The ferry was due to leave at 7pm but ended up leaving at 8.30. This included a twenty minute wait in the biting cold as not one but two broken down cars were towed off. The towing involved a four wheel drive driving onto the ferry extremely quickly, executing a neat three point turn on deck, a rope being attached and the breakdown towed off. Except that the second time this happened, the  rope broke. Then, as if by magic, the broken down car started working again. We stood around in the wind, once again, watching the pantomime. Finally we boarded and the ferry headed off. The ferry was packed. A British man started telling a Dutchman about how terrible the Piccadilly Line was. As it got out into the current, the ferry began to pitch and yarl more and more impressively. Apparently, when sailors finally discovered the way round Cape Horn, the Southernmost tip of the Americas, they preferred going that way as the Magellan Strait seemed even more dangerous. I’m sure the minor paranoia which more than one person on board was experiencing as the ferry fought against the current would have seemed absurd to a hardened sailor, but the crossing helped to give some idea of what the early navigators faced as they tried to find their passage around the Americas, through to the Pacific, in this cruel but astonishing part of the world.

{Thought: a visit to Tierra del Fuego is a kind of anti-tourism}

===

PUNTA ARENAS 2

There’s a woman speaking English in reception. I’m upstairs eating breakfast. I can hear her but I can’t see her. Her accent is weird. It’s fluent English with an accent I’ve never heard before. A kind of rarefied posh (Lady Di) mixed with Kiwi mixed with something coarser or earthier. The woman starts telling the receptionist about how many Chileans there are working in the islands. I realise she’s from the Falklands. The thought crosses my mind that the Falkland Islanders are like the King Penguins. A breed you hear a lot about but never see, unless you travel to the most inhospitable places on earth. She asks the receptionist if he’d like to visit the Falklands. The reply is ambivalent.

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FUERTE BULNES

The first stop, an hour or so South of Punta Arenas, is Puerto Hambre. Port Hunger. In 1584 a group of 300 settlers arrived here. Their objective was to establish a community that would safeguard the territory for the Spanish crown. On a mild Summer’s day, it’s a beautiful, if chilly spot. The settlers arrived in March. Every month the hours of daylight change radically. At high summer dawn arrives at 4am and night around 11pm. In midwinter, dawn arrives at 11am and night falls around 3.30 pm. Within weeks, the hours of daylight would have begun to evaporate. The settlers, trying to build a home in a land where nothing grows, must have felt as though the night was closing in on them. The wind and the cold and the darkness and the emptiness. The odd glimpse of distant mountains through rainclouds. Dolphins and whales passing by like freemen in the Straits whilst they were trapped like lifers. By the time the British adventurer Thomas Cavendish arrived, three years later, all that was left of Puerto Hambre were the fresh ruins of a failed endeavour.

A little further up the coast is Fuerte Bulnes, founded 300 years or so later, in 1843. This is a classic Wild West fort, made out of timber, rebuilt in the 80s to the exact specification of the original plans. The guide points out that whilst the location is spectacular, offering commanding views of the strait, it was a grim place to be stationed, with the nearest fresh water 5 kms away as well as being brutally exposed to the elements. The fort has a history of mutiny and rebellion, eventually falling into disuse, before it was rebuilt a first time, as a historic monument, in the 1940s. Whilst the rest of the world was at war, the Chilean army made a historical reconstruction of a 19th century fort. Recently a state-of-the-art museum has been opened next to the fort; the juxtaposition of the high-tech museum with the bare-necessities fort feels like a fitting metaphor for the way in which the country has developed in the course of 150 years.

There’s a lookout at the far end of the fort. As ever, we were pressed for time. The tours try to squeeze more in than they can and you don’t get the time to savour the place. All the same, I managed to slip down to the waterfront. The Magellan Strait continued towards the Pacific. To the East lay Dawson Island, where the Pinochet regime sent its political prisoners. In the distance was the Darwin mountain range, the last, seismic gasp of the Andes. The water was calm and kind. Great tree trunks, deunuded of all flesh, lay scattered and whitened on the shore. Small birds, far too tame for their own good, flitted about just out of reach. Twenty kilometres further on, off-road, lay Cape Froward, the Southernmost point on the continental land mass of the Americas. It wasn’t the end of the world, quite, but it felt tantalising close, as close as the birds which continued to hop around as though man was as tame an animal as they were.

I reached down and picked up some flints as a momento. The craggy shore is slowly fragmenting , as it has for millions of years. The flints were sharp and felt comfortable in the hand. When I got back to the hotel, I placed them on the table. Hours later, I looked at them again. They looked like tools. Perfect tools. Tools which are as well designed as an iPhone or a Ferrari. And, in their heyday, far more valuable.

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LA VICTORIA & THE BEAGLE

If you go past the vast tax-free Zona Franca, past the garage and the statue to the Selk’nam on the road to Puerto Natales, you come to a small park where there’s a re-creation of Magellan’s ship, La Victoria, as well as Darwin’s Beagle (still in construction). The most striking thing about the Victoria is how small it is. Fifty sailors, at least, various animals, and captured natives crammed into a space not much bigger than a two bedroom flat, adrift on the ocean, heading into the waters which defined the word ‘uncharted’. When they got to the Magellan Straits, one of the Admiral’s other boats in the flotilla turned round and deserted, hot-footing it back to Spain. Bowie died last night, the news was there when I woke up this morning. If I was looking for a connection between his death and our visit to the ship today, it would be found in the lyrics of Major Tom. The only way you can begin to capture the sense of complete alienation the voyagers must have felt would be to imagine floating in a most peculiar way, in a blue planet earth, with the stars looking very different, each and every day.

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PUNTA ARENAS 3

An antiques shop in the middle of town has a sign outside, inviting tourists to come in and browse. The man working there is friendly. He tells us it’s his mother-in-law’s place. He’s a journalist by trade. He shows me his book of photos of Patagonia, illustrating all the things we’re not going to see. The nature shots look astonishing and it’s clear that you need to try and spend more time down here to get to know it better. Everyone asks us if we’re going to Torres del Paine, the vast natural park that’s a five hour drive away, but the truth is we don’t have time to go there for more than a day, which doesn’t seem enough. We mosey round the antiques shop, looking at an old wood burning stove and other curiosities. There’s a sizeable metallic object in a cabinet. The journalist gets it out for us to look at. It’s part of a British helicopter, which made a forced landing at Agua Fresca during the Falklands War. Chile supported the British, in a neutral sort of way, and allowed the helicopter, which was in trouble, to land. The story goes that the helicopter was destroyed, but not before a local got to it and cut off part of what might be a propeller. It’s for sale for a comely £90. I say only a crazy Brit would want to buy it, and the journalist adds - or a crazy Argentine. He’s happy to let me take photos of a little bit of lost history. He tells us he’s been to the Falklands, showing us the pictures in his book. There’s a weekly flight from Punta Arenas, which means you’re compelled to spend a week there before you can come back. He seemed to think that a week was plenty long enough.

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A professional type, North American, sits writing emails on his Macbook Air in the Cafe Chocolate Baeriswyl, the finest purveyor of hot chocolate in Punta Arenas. Taped over the camera on the laptop is a small strip, cut from a post-it note. On this strip is the following slogan, handwritten in biro: “It’s always right now’.

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