david toop

Things To Come and Gone*

July 2020

Land sank inexorably upwards, raptured into the vast heavenly dish, and as we walked back over Cley Marshes, late afternoon in November 2004, I noted to the west an image that provoked four lines of poetry after the event:

Birds, pouring in a smoking cloud
from one corner of the sky,
to choke the fading
sun

There had been some hope of seals but my experience has been that seals appear when least expected. The same may be said of poetry in my case. The difficulty of separating earth from sky from water, the extent of them and their dispersing forms as bare autumn light seeped away as it had threatened since midday, all conspired to kick away the devious nature of rambling thought and reduce it to a single image.

My knowledge of this region was anyway sparse, not exactly replete with images. In the mid-1960s my sister and her husband moved to Norfolk, where they settled for some years in Poringland. I would visit with my parents and by that time, as a rebellious teen obsessed with jazz, blues and the violently cathartic writings of Antonin Artaud, I resided in images and atmospheres of my own conjuring, barely taking in the character or lack of it in what appeared to be an indifferent commuter dormitory. In the evenings I would take a bus into Norwich, hoping for excitement. One evening in 1965 I waited patiently, then finally gave up on hearing a live performance by New Orleans clarinettist George Lewis, a survivor from the earliest days of jazz. Descended from an enslaved Senegalese woman who had been transported to Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, Lewis had been visiting England since 1957 and in the year I failed to see him, he appeared on the BBC television series, Jazz 625, playing with Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band. Lewis died three years later. Why he was delayed that evening I have no idea, probably the notorious A11, but I was too shy, too closed up in my own world, to ask and besides, it was not, in those days, my kind of music. I was there because for a teenager in the mid-1960s any music was better than no music.

During the following summer of 1966 I hitchhiked with my girlfriend (as we used to say), Sally, from Ware in Hertfordshire to Poringland. The lifts came surprisingly easily, lorries transporting or collecting agricultural produce maybe. We stayed with my sister, sleeping in separate beds because this was still the conservative 1960s, but during a visit to Great Yarmouth we ventured into a chilly sea if only to touch each others yearning bodies under cover of the opaque water. In a second hand bookshop I found and still possess a signed copy of Mary Benedetta’s book, The Street Markets of London, illustrated with photographs taken by László Moholy-Nagy, the multi-practice Hungarian artist closely associated with the Bauhaus and the School of Design in Chicago. Prohibited from working when the Nazis came to power because of his status as a foreign citizen living in Germany, he moved to the Netherlands and then in 1935 to London, where he supported himself and his family with design work, photography and film, including an experimental contribution (mostly unused) to Alexander Korda’s film of Things To Come, written by H. G. Wells.

Wells depicts a dystopian world of total war, in which the weapons deployed spread ‘wandering sickness’ or a more familiar sleeping sickness. Famously, the film concludes with the dilemma of progress versus stability: “All the universe or nothing.” In a scene of desolation, a single page from the National Bulletin, dated 1966, is carried by the wind and caught up in the branches of a tree, and so we learn that the wandering sickness is “a new fever of mind and body.”

Wandering sickness is also evident in Moholy-Nagy’s photographs of London’s street markets of the 1930s: men and women of Indian, Chinese and Afro-Caribbean descent, trading or shopping alongside the white working class, the Jews, the Spanish, the Gypsies. Like Moholy-Nagy himself, they suffered from the wandering sickness for a reason, a civil war here, a pogrom there, religious persecution, economic collapse, hope and opportunity and, as a backdrop to it all, the imminence of total war.

Another who suffered from the wandering sickness was W. G. Sebald. Unbeknownst to my sister and her husband, he took up residence in Poringland in the 1970s, self-exiled from Germany and destined to wander the lanes of East Anglia until his death in 2001, car crashed on the road between Poringland and Norwich. His literary method, from which I may well have consciously and unconsciously borrowed, if only because it solves a problem of how to deal with physical and conceptual movement in the context of the writer’s isolation, was to offer gentle scrutiny of a scene – “To landward,” he wrote in The Rings of Saturn, observing the narrow iron bridge that crosses the river Blyth between Southwold and Walberswick, “there is nothing but grey water, mudflats and emptiness” (illustrated by a photograph of nothingness) – then extrapolate from a random fact connected to the scene, in this case the narrow-gauge railway train that runs across the bridge, according to local legend originally built for the Emperor of China, ingeniously spinning this doubtful fact into a web of many pages giving account of Chinese dragons, the Forbidden City, the Taiping rebellion and the final dissolution of the Chinese Empire, at which point, after some inconclusive philosophical ruminations we find ourselves on land again, walking toward Dunwich, a scene of rippling reeds to the right, grey beach to the left (illustrated by a photograph of emptiness), perhaps with faint echoes of Brian Eno’s On Land album, with its specific references to this terrain, hovering at the periphery of our hearing.

Easy to imagine, is it not, dragons and serpents inhabiting the watery flatlands of this region, their sinuous curves indenting the marshes and coiled into tight memories of ancient fears? Also, how close are nightmares of less identifiable monsters crawling out of the sea onto shingle beaches under cover of darkness. One hot July day in 1992 I found myself in the magistrates’ court of Great Yarmouth, awaiting my turn as expert witness for the defence of a record by Swedish death metal band Dismember. Customs & Excise had passed judgement on certain lines in Dismember’s songs – “Smiling at the memories when I slaughtered the whore”, for example – deciding them capable of corrupting and depraving the nation, so they should be prevented from crossing its borders. Along with their fruitless efforts to prevent me taking the stand (because I would say that songs are fictions and fictions permeate all our lives and because opera, country, blues, rock and any other musical form with which the magistrates might be familiar is saturated with violence), the prosecution worked hard to ensure that Dismember’s vocalist/lyricist could not give evidence. This silencing of a key element was on the grounds that the purpose or intention of an author is immaterial, as if horror were a living, migrating thing, thrashing its evil body autonomously in air, without regard to its creator (who would have said, given the chance, that his song was based on a real incident of murder that took place in the apartment block where he lived, spoken through the imagined mind of the murderer, which is, after all, how songs, plays, novels and films work). Waiting for the trial to begin I spoke to the only Dismember fan in the courtroom, a quiet young woman named Helen who had dropped in while her mum went shopping. I wonder if Helen, probably now in her mid-forties, was corrupted and depraved, and if so, to what degree?

Many years later, a warm Sunday afternoon in September 2012, I walked along the beach of stones from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness in the company of harp player Hélène Breschand. We had come to Aldeburgh to rehearse and give the first performance of my opera, Star-shaped Biscuit. The bell-ringers of Aldeburgh Parish Church were attempting a full peal, a test of concentration which must exceed 5,000 changes or permutations in the order in which the bells are rung. As we returned from our walk, the bells suddenly came to a sudden stop, leaving in their wake a silence that invited many questions. In searching for answers to these questions later that day I found myself immersed in bitter online disputes about the bells, incomers and weekenders complaining that their leisure time in the expensive peace of coastal Suffolk was being ruined by these infernal durational exercises.

It was in Snape Maltings and Aldeburgh that I conceived of this opera whose central character would be a woman (and her two ghosts), the last survivor of catastrophic floods caused by rising sea levels. The reed beds that seemed to whisper invitations to walk among them and become forever lost or drowned; the grey sea that rolled slowly onto shingle as if beckoning and hypnotising the foolishly curious; both of these distinctive features of the East Anglian terrain, its liquidity and misty infinitude, inspired the atmosphere of my opera and made links in my mind with the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, particularly Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho, the Bailiff. MIzoguchi was profoundly influenced by the Noh theatre, as was Suffolk composer Benjamin Britten, though his was a lesser, more exotic infatuation. Britten had witnessed a performance of a Noh play – Sumidagawa – in Tokyo, 1956, where his reaction shifted rapidly from laughter to serious engagement. As Britten understood, the severe minimalism of Noh, its evocation of a flat, infinite landscape haunted by ghosts and demons, is capable of migrating to East Anglian atmospheres with little adjustment of mood.

The morning after my opera performance I walked with my daughter and her partner along the beach from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness, a return journey. At one point we stumbled across what seemed to be the decapitated head of a dogfish, its downturned sad-clown mouth apparently expressing some deep melancholy or disappointment with the world, even disgust. Nobody who sees my photograph of this creature is able to believe that it was once a living being. If not an artful glove puppet, then it must be a marsh monster, caught between sea and land, fish and human, living and dead.