I had considered a musical seance. I was taken with the idea of putting spectres of the beloved dead, into war with the Starbucks Siren. It doesn't matter how big the opponent is. All that matters, is what we create.
Yes, this is the True Poetry. Like I had read of (and questioned) in Grave's The White Goddess.
True Poetry that would gash the epidermis. The purpose...the why, for all of the things arted up into being.
This is a life work. I suspect and have noticed results, and this is both wonderful and frightening. Meanwhile Lonelady was brewing with similar ingredients....to immediate and entrancing effect. If you're reading this, you're probably familiar with Julie's Scrub Transmissions...if not, here.
Julie, to no surprise, had picked up on a thread of hope and meaning...cast from a distant spool, somewhere within the new labyrinth of the city. Manchester has never cared about it's people...from conception, to the present, it has served only the idea of metastasizing industry and commerce. The industrial revolution, began here....Moloch's holiday home.
But....the re-assertion of magic came with the city's death as an industrial force. Suddenly, this place was not a factory any longer. It was a graveyard...a peculiarly angular Pere La Chaise (evident in Lonelady's songs, should you care to listen). And more...it became a ruin....the importance of the ruin on the British psyche cannot be under-estimated...the Romantics clashed against the arrival of the modern, by venerating the ruin. A ruin invites the Wild Adversary back to the table...negotiation is now taking place betwen the urban and the rural..and consequently, the human and the non-human (in terms on consciousness, in terms of agency). Here we can venture and linger. Here, the danger is older and purer...but it is a place of communion.
Lonelady expressed this comunion by cementing her art into the landscape. This, the very definition of intrinsic meaning...where there is nothing, one creates. And yet, as I re-traced Julie's footsteps, I became yet more convinced, that there was an extrinsic meaning here...and that solitary, now dead transmission, represented the terms of dialogue with an environment, that was at once newly born, and threatened with inevitable extinction.
A temporary anullment then. But...the chance exists to make contact and forge something longer lived, than the spectral beauty of Manchester's abandoned past (the land trumps always). Left to our own devices, we were able to make something of ourselves within the wreckage. Lo and behold, art of intense, sometimes dreadful beauty. The city cares nothing for the ants that serve as its arterial life force. But, as Julie identified, it is not the city we seek, but the liminal places, bordering on the lands of the wild and the dead. Where we are at terms with forces that knew us intimately and might know us again, if we are brave enough.
Yes, this was a trip. This was a megalith witha groove. I could get into that all day long. With Scrub's passing, we are left to reflect upon the vanishing of the inspiration which forged the music...which perhaps forged all of the music and art that flourished here, finally, like flowers in exceedingly good compost.
We are all at Work here. What are you going to do?
