Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider (SA/2023)

 

I know there are those who will wax lyrical about the violent beauty of such, but, actually, there's always something profoundly depressing about encountering the blackened remains of an abandoned and burnt out vehicle. 

 

For criminal vandalism, involving the deliberate destruction of property, is more often than not merely a sign of social deprivation and crass stupidity. To romanticise such as neo-primitivism, an act of political insurgency, or a counter-cultural rejection of prevailing values, is often insulting to those of us who have to live with the consequences and pay to have the mess cleaned up.    

 

Having said that, there is something strangely haunting about a burnt out bike - perhaps because it suggests the supernatural figure of a ghost rider; i.e., one who rides a flaming motorcycle and whose flesh has been consumed by hellfire. 

 

But of course, I very much doubt that Johnny Blaze is now a resident of Harold Hill ... 

 

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Visits Harold Hill

My local boozer, The Pompadours - 

and some Lawrence scholars find the Sun Inn, Eastwood, a bit rough ...

 

 

Harold Hill is a long way removed (in every sense) from the fictional mining village of Tevershall, which Lawrence imagines in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

And of course, I'm no Oliver Mellors, the ex-soldier turned gamekeeper who strides through the pages of the above in his dark green trousers "with a red face and red moustache" [1], angry at the world. 

 

Having said that, sometimes when walking around the postwar housing estate on the far north-eastern fringes of Greater London that is Harold Hill [2], I'm tempted to tell the natives - whom my mother always disparagingly called Cockneys - something similar to what Mellors wishes to tell the working men and women of Tevershall:

 

"'I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yerselves! One shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves [...] Spoilt yerselves an' yer lives. [...] Take yer clothes off an' look at yerselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead.'" [3] 

 

Of course, I'd not say this with a broad East Midland's accent. 

 

And I can't blame the degenerate condition of the locals on years of hard physical toil - on the contrary, it's the fact that many of them don't work (or exercise) that's the problem; that they prefer vegetating on the sofa watching Netflix, eating junk food delivered to their doors, driving even the shortest distance, rather than walk a few hundred yards.

 

To paraphrase Mellors: Their spunk's gone dead - e-scooters and mobile phones and cannabis suck the last bit out of them. Which is a shame, but there you go. 

 

I won't bore readers with statistics, but the stats for the London Borough of Havering when it comes to things like health don't make for happy reading. Obesity, for example, is the norm; if the 18th-century Essex grocer Edward Bright were alive today and decided to ply his trade at Hilldene shops, no one would blink an eye at his great girth. 

 

People down south often like to joke that it's grim up north, but, believe me, it's fucking grim on Harold Hill too [4].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46. For a full description and character analysis of Oliver Mellors, see my post of July 2020: click here. 

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Harold Hill are reminded of the post published on 28 May 2016 entitled 'And No Birds Sing': click here. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 219. 

 

[4] And if you don't believe me, see the report in the Romford Recorder which revealed that whilst Havering is home to some extremely affluent neighbourhoods, six roads in Harold Hill have been classed by the UK government as among the most deprived in all England: click here.  

 

   

The Man at Number 6 Meets Constantine Cavafy

Cavafy by Lorenzo Mattotti 

The New Yorker (March 16, 2009)

My next-door neighbour - the man at number 6 - came from another land, across another sea. He did so, presumably, in the expectation of finding another city - a better city - in which to make a home and raise a family. 

He's ended up, however, here on Harold Hill and living in a two-up, two-down former council house; which must feel cramped when you not only have a wife and two young children, but your in-laws and a dog to accommodate. 

And so, he's decided to singlehandedly rebuild the house; extend the kitchen, convert the loft, add a front porch and a new drive, etc. This has meant two years of drilling, hammering, and cement mixing; i.e., two years of noise and dust and having to look out onto what was once a pleasantly overgrown back garden but is now a building site-cum-rubbish dump: Wherever I direct my gaze, the ruins are all I see.

I suppose, if it makes him happy to spend all his free time toiling away and aspiring towards not only a bigger and better home, but a bigger and better life, that's really up to him. Personally, I have no such desire or ambition and don't hope for elsewhere. I'm tempted to tell him that no matter what improvements he makes to the house he remains the man at number 6, with the same wife, kids, and in-laws:

'Tis the same streets in which he'll walk the dog. 
The same district in which he'll grow old;
and inside the same house he'll turn grey. 

Ultimately, if within your own small corner you can't learn to be content, then you'll never be happy anywhere in the world ...

See: C. P. Cavafy, 'The City', Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, (Princeton University Press, 1975): click here. 

Obviously, I'm riffing on this poem in this post and sampling lines from it. Readers should note, however, that I relied upon a new translation of the work by Maria Thanassa (2020) and not the one to which I link here.

Ana: the Little Match Girl of Harold Hill

Were Hans Christian Andersen writing his tale of The Little Match Girl today, rather than in 1845, then I imagine she'd probably be hawking copies of The Big Issue and wearing a headscarf, rather than selling matches bareheaded and barefoot in the street.

Either way, it's a cold and depressing way to try and earn a living and I can't help feeling sorry for the young woman, called Ana, who stands - rain or shine - outside Boots every day with her magazines and, in the circumstances, a remarkably cheerful manner.

Despite Nietzsche's warnings against the dangers of pity, I often return her greeting or give her a smile. And, although I don't want what she's peddling, I have bought her a hot chocolate and even a tub of Aptamil baby formula, as requested.   

And I've done so fully aware that this horrifies many people. Editors at the Daily Mail, for example, seem convinced that The Big Issue is now merely a front for Eastern European criminals; that Britain's homeless and those in genuine need have been replaced by immigrants already in receipt of generous state benefits

Maybe that's true: I don't know ...

However, whilst no one wants to be thought of as a soft touch, i.e., open to easy manipulation and emotional blackmail by those who beg on street corners and spin tales of woe, I would hate to become one of those hard-hearted individuals, lacking in compassion or kindness.

So, push comes to shove, I'd rather hand over a fiver just to be on the safe side; even at the risk of being taken for a bit of a mug. In the end, that money secures your own spiritual well-being, rather than their material comfort.

And, in my case at least, it also got me an Xmas card from Ana, who said she will keep me in her prayers and, more importantly, signed herself as my fryend.    


Note on the images:

The first is taken from the Disney animated short film The Little Matchgirl (dir. Roger Allers, 2006). 

The second is from the inside of my card from Ana - which, although intended to be festive, was actually a card of condolence, expressing the sender's deepest sympathy. 

Mules 1: Sex Kitten Shoes

Wandler handmade pink and orange leather mules

with 3" contrast heel and pointed toe

Available at Harvey Nichols: click here

Say the word mules to some people and they'll think of heterotic donkey-horse hybrids that hugely impressed Darwin for - amongst other things - their intelligence, memory, and powers of muscular endurance. 

However, for those philosophers on the catwalk, such as myself, with a mildly fetishistic interest in the history of female fashion, the word refers, of course, to one of the loveliest of shoe designs and surely a staple of every well-dressed woman's wardrobe; from celebrated French beauty Mme. La Comtesse d'Olonne, to Candace Bushnell's fictional alter ego Carrie Bradshaw.       

Backless and usually (but not always) closed-toe, the mule in its modern form was originally worn only within the bedroom; easy to slip on and easy to slip off. But when members of the French court, including Mme. de Pompadour (official mistress to Louis XV) and Marie Antoinette (the last and most stylish Queen of France), began to wear them en dehors de la boudoir, it kickstarted a new trend that has been with us ever since.   

As a man who knows more about women's shoes than most others, Spanish designer Manolo Blahnik once said:

'When a woman wears mules she walks a bit differently. It's very sexy; she has to find her balance. Madame de Pompadour in her mules, walking around Versailles, click! click! click! Can you think of anything more exquisite?'


II.

Perhaps because of their association with the bedroom - and the fact that that they always seem ready to slip off, leaving the foot exposed - mules have an inherent, playful eroticism. We see this, for example, in Fragonard's famous picture The Swing (1767), wherein a young beauty loses a shoe to the delight of her male spectators.   

But mules also figure prominently in the slightly darker corners of the porno-aesthetic imagination, as explored by artists such as Manet, for example in his scandalous painting of 1863 entitled Olympia, in which a confident young prostitute stares provocatively and without shame at the viewer, the nakedness of her flesh emphasised by a bootlace tied like a punk accessory around her neck and a pair of yellow silk mules, one of which she has casually kicked off.       

Finally, we must of course mention the so-called marabou mules of the 1950s, often made from plastic and decorated with feathers, as worn by sex-kittens everywhere (especially in America). In fact, as archivists at the Met Museum rightly say, no object better epitomises the trashy glamour of the time than the marabou mule.  

Amusingly, if you ever buy your groceries on Harold Hill, you'll notice young Essex girls wearing these fluffy symbols of feminine allure as they stroll round Iceland or buy coffee in Greggs.

See: Alice Newell-Hanson, 'In praise of mules, fashion's most perverse shoes', i-D (27 March 2017): click here to read online. 

See also a sister post to this one on mules as noble beasts of burden: click here. 

Reflections on the Death of a Sparrow (In Memory of Jodie Chesney)

A Trace of Feathers: Derridean Ornithological Absence 
(SA/2019)

I.

Yesterday was witness to an act of savage beauty as a sparrowhawk made a meal of one of the birds that live in the tangle of blackberry, honeysuckle and rose bush in the back garden, leaving nothing behind but a trace of feathers that gave rise to philosophical thoughts of presence and absence ... 

II.

The ontological terms presence and absence have a long history within Western philosophy, usually with the former being privileged over the latter, referring as it does to being in a positive sense; i.e., that which is directly at hand in a non-mediated manner and therefore linked to reality and to truth (the ultimate form of presence for Plato).

Derrida, however, famously deconstructs such thinking and shows how absense is not merely parasitic upon presence - is not merely a form of non-being there - and how presence is in fact always mediated and, indeed, reliant upon absence (i.e., being rests upon non-being, not vice versa).    

In so doing, Derrida is developing Heidegger's work on the metaphysics of presence, as set out in Being and Time (1927); attacking notions of origin, for example, and showing how the relationship between presence and absence is much more subtle - and much more playful - than many thinkers have realised.

For Derrida, representational absence is itself a form of presence; thus traces of feather, for example, speak not merely of a poor sparrow's death and absence, but also of their life and continued presence-as-absence. 

And, in a similar manner, we might suggest that the purple ribbons presently tied all over Harold Hill - on trees, fences, lamp posts, etc. - speak of Jodie Chesney's continued presence-as-absence ...    

III.

Nothing makes sense of the death of a sparrow - nor of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl murdered as she sat in a park with her boyfriend, listening to music. But, thanks to the work of writers such as Derrida, it's at least possible to think beyond a dreary binary distinction that assigned value exclusively to presence and made of absence something inferior, something false. 

Feathers and ribbons don't do away with or disguise the fact of death. But such traces provide poignant reminders of lives once lived and allow us to know that the dead are with us still ...

Thanks to Símón Solomon for suggesting a Derridean perspective on the subject matter of this post.

On Opening Heaven and Hell: A Boxing Day Post Dedicated to a Secular Saint, by Símón Solomon

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

I.

While it's probably safe to say that the philosopher Stephen Alexander is not en route to canonisation any time soon, the presiding presence of Torpedo the Ark may forgive me for divulging to his readers that he once indirectly referred to himself as Harold Hill's first secular saint.

Thus, on this day of all days, we wanted to pay our own deconsecrated tribute from across the Irish Sea to this prodigiously stylish, provocative and gifted writer, from whom - despite the prevailing disembodiment of the friendship in recent years - we continue to take much fractious inspiration and sometimes antagonistic pleasure, and to whose deliciously idiosyncratic platform we are delighted to be able to contribute as Gastautor and commentator on a (semi-)regular basis.

Stephen, though your name may never be dedicated to divinity (or even up in the lights we often feel you deserve), we hope that the pious vessel in your sights will be repeatedly holed but not wholly blown out of the water, lest TtA one day exhaust its irreverent purpose ...


II.

Though much of the detail of his namesake's biography is overlaid by theological propaganda, our main Biblical source for the historical St. Stephen, viz., the Acts of the Apostles, places him as a notable Hellenistic Jew tasked in his role as archdeacon with a fairer distribution of welfare to Greek-speaking widows. At the same time, with his practised penchant for signs and wonders, he was also said to have excelled in the rather attention-seeking art of enacting miracles, which quickly aroused the interest of the Synagogue of the Libertines, the Cyrenians and the Alexandrinians.

Clearly, there was only one way such subversive street theatre was going to end ...

As is the case with any saint worth his or her (pillar of) salt, the manner of Stephen's death infinitely transcends the significance of his foreshortened life. Accordingly, and in the traditional fashion, although it appears that he may just have missed out on early membership of the 27 Club, his timeless demise, as protomartyr of at least six denominations of the Christian church, was not lacking in gruesome glamour. 

Following blasphemy charges trumped up by the usual suspects, in which he stood accused of crimes against God, Moses and, more importantly, the Sanhedrin Assembly, Stephen's knockdown reminder while on trial that the chosen people had crucified the Son of God and less than life-preserving echoes of Christ's prophecies concerning the destruction of the Second Temple hardly screamed of an overwhelming desire to keep body and soul together.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his self-evident impatience to meet his Maker, however, Stephen himself was reportedly equanimous before his judges, with one report likening his countenance to that of an angel. Sentenced to the Biblical cliché of death by stoning, he faced the rock-wielding mob with prayers for his murderers and a divine vision to boot, rapturously declaring (in what was presumably not a piece of holy misdirection to facilitate a cunning escape) that he had 'seen heaven open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God!'

In Christian iconography, the St. Stephen is frequently depicted for obvious reasons with three stones, while holding a palm frond (signifying victory over the flesh) and a copy of the Gospels. Those to whom his patronage now extends comprise a hilarious miscellany that includes deacons, bricklayers, stonemasons, casket makers, people with headaches, and ... horses!


III.

In Ireland, St. Stephen's Day has also been known as Day of the Wren [Lá an Dreoilín]. In what appears to have been a ritual of atonement, groups of wren boys with painted faces would hunt and stone a wren to death, then tie the birds corpse to a holly stick and parade it through the streets, while a nominated hunter collected coins. Among numerous variants of the Wren Boys’ song, alluding to this act of ornithological regicide, one runs:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, 
On Saint Stephen's Day was caught in the furze, 
Although he is little, his family is great. 
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.

In its Celtic lineage, the associated myth derived from a Samhain sacrifice, in which the wren was connected with midwinter song and the dying year, and may also have been entangled with Druidic rituals. The Welsh warrior and magician Lleu Llaw Gyffes reputedly gained his (etymologically contested) name by killing a wren. On the Isle of Man, meanwhile, the hunted wren is an avatar of the shapeshifting queen of the fairies, Tehi Tegi, who was said to have drowned her suitors in the river and then turned herself into one to evade capture.

Among both the Norse and Christian traditions, the wren's association with treachery is likewise strikingly emphasised, in which one highly poetic legend conveys that, during the 8th-century Viking raids, as a troop of Irish soldiers entered an enemy camp under cover of darkness, the micropercussion of a wren nibbling breadcrumbs on a drum woke the sleeping warriors, leading to the invaders' rout.

In the case of St. Stephen, the story runs that, while attempting to conceal himself on the cusp of death - for it seems even martyrs, like Bee Gees, are not after all wholly indifferent to staying alive - his hiding place was revealed by a chattering wren.

For us, the way such symbolic narratives sew betrayal into the tapestry of these archetypal matrices of love and war, of soul and death, provides a kind of cold comfort at this chilly time of year, restoring the psyche to its sacrificial self-exposures, demanding our hunger for transcendence dance with deception, and darkening our enthusiasms.

The ecstasy of St. Stephen reminds us, whether we find our faith in God’s death or eternal life, of the art of dying as a summons to visionary existence. We know St. Stephen of Harold Hill is enduring his own considerable sacrifices now and we wish him every strength of spirit for the year to come, as well as much power to his writing elbow.

Author's Notes

For an Irish perspective on St. Stephen, see Rosita Boland's article in The Irish Times entitled 'A martyr whose day is set in stone', (24 Dec 2010): click here.

For further Biblical background, see the entry on St. Stephen in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: click here.

And on the Irish Day of the Wren, see Rose Eveleth's article in The Smithsonian Magazine, entitled 'The Irish Used to Celebrate the Day After Christmas by Killing Wrens' (26 Dec 2012): click here.    

Finally, readers will doubtless recall Stephen Alexander's own controversial post on this topic published on Torpedo the Ark (26 Dec 2013), entitled It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To). 


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

England, Our England: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Oikophobia

D. H. Lawrence by Fabrizio Cassetta (2015)

fineartamerica.com

It begins, writes Lawrence, the moment you set foot back in England: "The heart suddenly, yet vaguely sinks."

He would, I suspect, dismiss talk of oikophobia. For Lawrence explicitly says that what he experiences when arriving home is not fear, but, rather, a form of dismay; not least at the inoffensive nature of everyone and everything and the "almost deathly sense of dulness" that overwhelms even the gayest of spirits.  

England is the easiest country in the world to live in and full of the nicest people:

"But this very easiness and this very niceness becomes at last a nightmare. It is as if the whole air were impregnated with chloroform or some other pervasive anaesthetic, that [...] takes the edge off everything ..."

Ultimately, England is simply too cosy for Lawrence's liking; mildly warm and reassuring like a bedtime drink.

It's important to note, however, that Lawrence doesn't say this in order to jeer or look down on his fellow countrymen. In fact, it pains him to admit how England makes him feel: for "to feel like this about one's native land is terrible" - particularly when the bit of England that depresses him most is his hometown.

Eastwood, he says, fills him with "devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion". Which is pretty much how I feel too, when walking around Harold Hill; on the one hand, I want it to be exactly as it was when I was a child and on the other I want it to be razed to the ground.

In other words, oikophobia is an ambiguous condition that can give rise to violently conflicting feelings within the same breast; something that those who, like Roger Scruton, politicise the term and use it as a concept by which to attack those whom they regard as insufficiently patriotic fail to appreciate.

Thus it is that oikophobes like Lawrence, who set off on savage pilgrimages around the world in order to escape the familiar confines of home and experience otherness in far away lands amongst alien peoples, often end by concluding:

"I do think [...] we make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America - as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we are rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong."


See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I don't Like Living in London' and [Return to Bestwood] in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 119-22 and 13-24. 

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Pratt Barlow, 30 March 1922, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), letter 2480, pp.218-19.  

Readers interested in a related post on oikophobia and Roger Scruton's political redefining of the term, should click here. 

Ghost Town

Stephen Alexander (2016)

Ghost Town, by The Specials, was a great punk single and, thirty-five years later, it continues to powerfully resonate within the cultural imagination. Indeed, its haunting melody and stark lyrics came back to me earlier today as I walked past the now derelict, burnt out pub and former Harold Hill landmark, The Pompadours.

For I'm of a generation that does recall the good old days before the ghost town, when locals danced and sang and the music played in a de boomtown.

Well, that's perhaps pushing it a bit ... But, nevertheless, I do remember a time before the great closure of the pubs and clubs began; a time when there was a genuine sense of community and not that ersatz thing which politicians and people in the liberal arts and media like to extol the virtues of; a time when people knew their neighbours (without necessarily liking them) and would socialise with one another over the garden fence and across the bar of their local boozer.  

Of course, there are many reasons why the pubs are closing - not just here in Essex, but all over the UK at the astonishing rate of four a day. Just as there are many reasons why, for example, the homogeneity and solidarity of white working class life - which often revolved around the pub - is not only disparaged and despised, but slowly being demolished in the name of ethnic and cultural diversity.

When you return here - as I have returned - and experience the daily conditions under which people are expected to live, you begin to understand the visceral resentment and rage that characterises so much public and political discourse today; indeed, one does more than understand - one begins to sympathise ...    

Can't go on no more / The people getting angry ...


Ghost Town, The Specials (2 Tone, 1981), written by Jerry Dammers, © EMI Music Publishing / BMG Rights Management US, LLC    

Note: The Pompadours opened in 1959 and was one of nine pubs on Harold Hill. To be honest, it was always something of a shithole full of dubious characters and with a reputation as a difficult pub to manage; the sort of place neither of my parents would ever dream of setting foot in. It closed its doors for the last time earlier this year. A plan to demolish it and build yet more low-rise but high-density housing was rejected by Havering Council after opposition from local residents. The future of the site is now uncertain.     

And No Birds Sing

This could be heaven ...

Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.

To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex. 

Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.  

Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.

It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...

The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.

Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...