Harold Pinter delivering his Nobel lecture via video to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/EPA

The Nobel lecture: Art, truth and politics

In his video-taped Nobel acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a ‘brutal, scornful and ruthless’ United States. This is the full text of his address

Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Prometheus and Pandora
Prometheus and Pandora – The Resistance
an ether-based puppet show
Saturday December 10th 8pm

Hands on, build your own sound circuits workshop – Sunday December 11th
Machine Project, 1200 D N Alvarado, Los Angeles,
CA 90026.
213-483-8761

Ladies and gentlemen see the Resistance perform the ancient creation/apocalypse/technological suicide myth of Prometheus and Pandora onstage inside their hand-built electronic Hatebox with screaming light-puppets

In a one-time, special to Machine Project performance, the Resistance has come out of hiding to unleash their ether-based puppet show onto the masses in a new, improved, and lengthened paradigm-shattering performance. There will also be two brief, yet informative, presentations. One on the myth of Prometheus and Pandora, one on the phototheatric uses of astable-mode timing ICs.

And!!! there will be snacks that may somehow hint at man’s misuse of pious technology. For more information about The Resistance’s Hatebox click here

LA FILM FORUM
at The Egyptian Theater
6712 Hollywood Blvd.

Sunday nights at 7:00pm
8 dollars
6 dollars students/seniors
free for Film Forum Members

Dec 11

THE FILMS OF JOSEPH CORNELL, PART ONE

Hosted by Jeanne Liotta

Essential cinema, fragments, and rarities:
– Cotillion (8 min)
– The Midnight Party (3 min)
– The Children’s Party (8 min, 1940’s-1969, b&w and color-tinted, silent)
– Cinderella’s Dream (date unknown, 3 min., color, silent)
– Mulberry Street (1956-/65, 9:00, b/w)
– Boys’ Games (1957, 5:00, color)
– Joanne, Union Square (1955, 7:00 b&w)
– Joanne, Xmas (2:00, color)
– Cloches a travers les feuilles/Claude Debussy (1957, 4:00, color, with sound on CD)

– PLUS: Four silent 16mm films on one reel from Cornell’s film collection (10 min):

– The Automatic Moving Company
– Up the Flue
– Metamorphosis
– Loie Fuller

These screenings are in conjunction with REDCAT

“…Curiosities and bits of life gathered from here there and everywhere”
-Joseph Cornell

The films of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1973) are as unique as his famous box constructions. Though rarely exhibited during his lifetime, these mysterious works nonetheless have had a deep and lasting influence on the world of avant-garde filmmaking . His entire body of film numbers some thirty-odd works, encompassing the incomplete and the fragmentary. It can be said that Cornell made two kinds of films in two distinct periods of activity: collage films, made by recombining found materials, and directed films,where he worked with cinematographers (including Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt and Larry Jordan) to document his fantasy/experience of wandering in New York. This programme of rarities concludes with a 10-minute reel of early films from the unique private film collection of Joseph Cornell, offering an insight into the sources, materials, inspirations and obsessions of the artist.
– Bradley Eros and Jeanne Liotta

In person: Jeanne Liotta, artist and filmmaker, has spent the last 7 years researching The Joseph Cornell Special Collection of films at Anthology Film Archives in New York, and together with Bradley Eros curated a series of rare Cornell films for the Cornell centenary in December 2003. She teaches at The New School University, Pratt Institute, The Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, and is presently Visiting Faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute.

The films of Joseph Cornell will continue with Part 2 Monday December 12 at REDCAT 8:00 pm

These films are part of Anthology Film Archives Essential Cinema Collection, a special series of films screened on a repertory basis consisting of 110 programs/330 titles, assembled in 1970-75 by the film selection committee James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, and Jonas Mekas. It was an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema. The project was never completed but even in its unfinished state the series provides an uncompromising critical overview of cinema’s history.

December 12, 2005
REDCAT
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
JOSEPH CORNELL:
FILM CONSTRUCTIONS AND FANTASIES

“As much as Maya Deren, the progenitor of American avant-garde film.” J. Hoberman

Famous for his unique shadowboxes and found-object collages, Joseph Cornell also made a remarkable collection of films between the mid-1930s and the early Ôø?60s. His landmark film Rose Hobart (1936, 19 min., b/w), possibly the first-ever experimental film made entirely from found footage, was profoundly influential in the 1950s for emerging filmmakers such as Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs. This program of rarely seen works–many of which are screened for the first time in Los Angeles–includes recently-discovered collage films as well as pieces shot by Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt and Larry Jordan under CornellÔø?s direction.

In person: filmmaker and film historian Jeanne Liotta

Filmforum is presenting a separate program of films by Joseph Cornell on Sunday, December 11. See lafilmforum.org.

Date & time General
Admission Students,
Alumni with
Affinity Card CalArts
Students,
Faculty and Staff
Mon 12.12.05, 8:00 pm $8 $6 $4

For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts,
please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Courtesy Trinie Dalton!

December 6-10 and 13-17
Tuesdays and Wednesdays 8pm
Thursdays-Saturdays 7pm and 9pm

Award-winning choreographer John Jasperse returns to The Kitchen with a new work for three dancers with a live score by Zeena Parkins. In Prone, Jasperse investigates the mechanics of perception, with the audience alternating between lying on the floor amid the dancers and sitting in chairs surrounding the space. Vibrations, shadows, obstructed views, and peripheral images combine to create an unexpected dialogue among sound, movement, sight, and site. Featuring performers Luciana Achugar, Levi Gonzalez, and Eleanor Hullihan.

Extremely Limited Seating $15

From the Dec. 5, 2005 New York Times

Up Close and Personal: Art at Eyelash’s-Length

By JOHN ROCKWELL

“Prone” is John Jasperse’s latest work, an elaborate 75 minutes of dance and scenic effects and perceptual alterations at the Kitchen. It’s a trip.

That’s because it recalls the 1960’s and 70’s, when we used to troop down to places like the Kitchen (in its Mercer Street and Broome Street incarnations) and lie on mattresses and engage in various outrÔø? art events, many involving nudity and eating and invitations to dream.

There’s no eating in “Prone,” only semi-nudity and no dreaming, unless you fall asleep. The title refers to the audience, not the dancers. The large, downstairs, black-box space at the Kitchen has been expensively reconfigured to accommodate rows upon rows of clear plastic air mattresses and attached tubing and lighting gear.

The original idea was apparently for the audience to lie prone throughout; the news release suggests that only the pregnant and infirm may avail themselves of seats around the perimeter. Now, the audience is asked to divide its time between lying and sitting. Those who choose to lie in the first half are given aromatic eyeshades halfway through, listen to odd sounds with heightened awareness and are then escorted by what could be called gentils organisateurs (as they call them at Club Med, another trip) from mattress to seat, with the prior sitter then led to the mattress.

Lying is more fun. That’s because it transforms one’s perspective and fulfills Mr. Jasperse’s stated intention of involving the audience directly into the dance. What looks mysterious and intense from the floor seems more prosaic from a seat.

The mysteries include the three dancers – Luciana Achugar, Levi Gonzalez and Eleanor Hullihan – in their curious costumes: gray shorts or brightly colored briefs or clear plastic miniskirts; see-through lace shirts or colored tops or gray hooded sweatshirts. They move among the mattresses, straddling them or cavorting in the spaces between them. Sometimes they interact directly with those lying or even sitting, staring deeply into their eyes or stretching and twisting across them. From the ground, the perspective is skewed: at one point, across two or three rows of bodies and mattresses, all I could see of the dancers was brightly illuminated hands and arms, wriggling.

All this is as much or more a scenic and theatrical event as pure dance; the actual movements don’t seem all that interesting. Mr. Jasperse does play to piquant effect with recurrent movement themes: clusters of the three with one lifted, or straddling in a row.

But as an overall environmental experience, “Prone” is more beguiling. Mr. Jasperse designed the whole production and the costumes and built the set (with help) and collaborated on the lighting with Joe Levasseur. There are reflective panels on the ceiling and draped lights hanging in a row. The motif of inflated plastic bags (in the second half a tumescent bag emerges, hissing, from each mattress at crotch level) is cute; there is a lot of humor here, despite the deadpan dancers. Zeena Parkins provides atmospheric music from her electronically extended harps, and fits right in visually.

Like most trips, this is a little inconclusive in the end, more sensation than meaning, more effect than substance. But the effects are amusing, sometimes evocative and nostalgic. ClichÔø? though it may seem to say so, “Prone” is a trip worth taking.

John Jasperse’s “Prone” continues through Dec. 17 at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-5793, Extension 11, or http://www.thekitchen.org.

London Review of Books

Vol. 27 No. 16 dated 18 August 2005

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair on London’s memorials

Research into the background of my wifeís family, the Hadmans, brought me up against an obscure wall in Kingís Cross Station. Annaís father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives summarised by uncertain dates and incompetent transcriptions of that surname. Church records had been chewed by rats, inscriptions on gravestones erased by wind from the fens. Most of the Hadmans never made it beyond a dayís walk from their starting point, the now disappeared settlement of Washingley (on the ridge above Stilton in Huntingdonshire). Two, we discovered, had ventured further afield. One, Oscar, booked passage for America. He registered his destination as 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unfortunately, his third-class ticket was for the Titanic. The other, ëHadman E.í, was recorded among the columns of the dead on the Kingís Cross war memorial. Heroic efforts by Anna, trips to Kew, Clerkenwell, days trawling the internet, established a connection. Hadman E. was Ernest. From Stilton. A railwayman in Peterborough, an ëacting porterí, Ernest died on the Somme in 1917 and is listed on the Thiepval Memorial. There was indeed a remote kinship with Anna. Her great-great-grandfather and Ernestís great-grandfather were brothers. Enough to leave her in tears and send her on an expedition to the station memorial. I needed to come to terms with this episode in my own fashion: by walking a circuit of Londonís mainline stations, checking on the visibility and continuing presence of the war dead. How does a preoccupied city remember them, the missing faces of a lost generation? How long do those memories survive the fret of contemporary life?

Stations and war: brass bands, flags, bunting, fumbled embraces. Refugee children with little boxes on string around their necks. Smoke, steam. Whistles. Troop transports. Pinched faces seen through the slats of cattle trucks. The physical layout of city stations, part civic boast, part open-doored barn, creates a microclimate of suspended anxiety: the urge to fall asleep on an uncomfortable bench, to eat food you donít need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied disbelievers. The laws of time and space are different here. The narrator of The War of the Worlds strolls down to Woking station to check the latest bulletins on the Martian invasion, news from elsewhere: the London evening papers, gossip with porters, rumours peddled by station casuals. Railway lines out of the grander urban cathedrals ñ Victoria, Waterloo ñ seem to connect directly with apocalyptic killing fields. They trench through heavy clay to emerge in the shock of battle. The city shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in alcoves. Ghost armies perch on temporary plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter Owenís strange First World War fantasy, The Cross of Carl (1931), in which underground trains shunt still conscious corpses from the trenches to industrial units, where they will be rendered into meat. Silver rails out of the capital double as telegraph wires. The hum of manipulated intelligence, into the provinces, country towns, brings noisy echoes of present conflicts. In a mood of communal hallucination, pals from choir or band or football club, labouring brothers, are induced to volunteer. They lay down the plough, the blacksmithís hammer, the slaughtermanís knife. Intoxicated with blood-and-flag rhetoric, tales of atrocities committed by a bestial enemy, they willingly march off. Dreams of posthumous glory. A memorial in the village church.

The Great War inflicted still unappeased psychic damage on 20th-century England: the shockwaves of Modernism, the fracturing of imperial pretension. News was unreadable. You could no longer trust official sources: far better to construct your own narrative from randomly chopped headlines varnished into Cubist paintings. T.S. Eliotís Waste Land zombies, flowing over London Bridge, eyes down, have just emerged from a railway station. The dead are scattered, unburied, unclaimed in France and Belgium. War memorials are not in place, not yet, to remind Eliotís city workers of what they have lost: fathers, brothers, sons. Publishing the pain, cataloguing the names (without vulgar forensic detail), was a necessary ritual of convalescence. Even memorials that now strike us as baroque, hysterical, were criticised at their unveiling for unnecessary realism. Death as death: so morbid.

So many. So many railway workers; faces gone, heat lost. Surnames that are no longer heard: Asplen, Ellege, Ellener, Ellum, Elvidge, Fairminer, Gilderdale, Gladders, Hawnt, Kedges, Markillie, Povah, Rasberry, Shawsmith, Shimelda, Shroff, Snoxell, Smotheringale, Spendiff, Waldie, Waterworth, Wellawise. On the Kingís Cross panels, they are present, all of them, alongside Hadman E. The names are here because the dead men, one uniform exchanged for another, are not. Individual bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ëThe government of the time,í Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ërefused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.í The fallen of Kingís Cross are uniformly capitalised: a plain design, black on grey. Memorials are small incidents of civic amnesia, a way of letting go. If you place such a thing on a high wall, nobody sees it. Iíd worked, years ago, shifting sacks of Christmas mail, at Liverpool Street, Kingís Cross and St Pancras, but I had no focused picture of the war memorials. A single day, 29 April 2005, would stitch the London termini together into a circuit of remembrance. Anna decided that sheíd like to come with me, some of the way.

As I crunched my muesli, I watched a drama being enacted just outside the window; a magpie was driving its beak into the belly of a mouse, which was alive but helpless, turned on its back, legs pedalling. Anna was delighted: one rodent fewer to poison. The bird flew up to the shed roof, the better to enjoy its morsel. A passing squirrel startled it. The dying or dead mouse fell from its grip and rolled down the mildewed slope.

London anticipates disaster. And, in that fearful anticipation, incubates it. Visible tanks patrol the perimeter fence, signalling the boundaries of risk: Heathrow, Bluewater shopping centre. American airforce personnel, it was announced, will not be allowed to step inside the M25. By asserting that future horrors are inevitable, politicians invite us to make an accommodation with present blight.

By 7.30 a.m. on this April morning, cruise cars are loud in the streets, performing the fake alertness of the pre-election limbo, shaking down recidivists, invading crack dens that relocate before the snatch squad has the sacrificial dealer banged up, sniffling in the cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged spectator. Now grander plans are afoot and we have the block developments, the dust and noise and cancelled rights of way, to prove it. All that is left, raw stumps heritaging the memory of the bridge, is a set of pink, circular pillars, topped by flat pedestals on which nothing stands. The pillars have been customised by inelegant spray-can signatures, the aerosol equivalent of the dogís upraised leg.

From the canal ñ the deleted Gainsborough Film Studios (revamped with waterfall steps and angular apartments), faded trade signs on brick (designed to be read from passing barges or trains) ñ we emerge on the heights of Islington: that famous view down towards the crazy, bat-chewed spires of St Pancras. An example of architecture intended to be fabulous, but unworkable. Grey spikes on red brick. A thousand Gothic revival windows with a yellow hard hat in every one of them. There is a residual nostalgia for grunge, smack, crack, skunk, discarded rubbers, black-glassed massage parlours, begging bowls, flea-bitten dogs, muggers, shunters, fastfood banditry, snoop cameras optimising car-fine revenue in the name of that corrupt god, ecology. The area stinks: of hair in hot fat, man-sweat, spastic movement. Of non-specific fear leaking out of surveillance monitors. The urban condition: suspension of reality. A multitude of travellers avoid touch and collision. They apologise. Or argue the toss with uniformed invaders of privacy. The whole mess is underwritten, yet again, by a notional futurology. The Radiant City that is still to come, Brussels-connected, Euro-buttered. And somewhere, behind all this, Antony Gormley has a factory-ashram dedicated to processing naked Gormley off-cuts which are required everywhere to validate oil-rich Cities of Culture: deserts, airports, highways, retail parks, museums and malls. Gormley is not a sculptor of consoling monuments, a grief technician healing trauma. He is a hands-on mystic, a philosopher of otherwise unconsidered spaces: roadside mounds, riverbank platforms. He works ahead of the next development. Challenged about the obsessive reproduction of his own body shell, he replies: ëI want to confront existence.í

We canít get at the memorial wall: a stacked trolley has been parked in front of it, brightly coloured bundles of todayís giveaway publication. free launch issue! A TV guide that morning commuters are unwilling to accept. Tourists, staggering under John Bunyan packs, are reluctant to add to their burdens, but suspect that it might be compulsory. They take the magazine, sniff it, and bin it as soon as their benefactor has moved on. Rucksacks are SAS-issue, Bergens last seen on Falklands War footage: travel is now a military operation, an endurance test. Most of tonightís television schedules, it appears, are given over to the Hitler franchise. He may have lost the war, but heís walking away with the ratings. Two and a half hours of Hitler in Colour, followed by Uncle Adolf (a ëfact-basedí drama focusing on the F¸hrerís clammy relationship with his niece Geli Raubal). BBC2 is offering The Nazis: A Warning from History. Otherwise, itís all snooker. And repeats of Dadís Army.

The panels advertising the war dead are invisible to through-shuffling station users, clients of apathy. The false ceiling doesnít help. Nor the perch of CCTV cameras keeping vigil on the permanent queue for the cash machine. Search the list for a lost relative and you are bang in the middle of the surveillance frame. Cameras are spiked like hedgehogs. Anybody withdrawing money, buying a railway ticket, is guilty. You are in the stationís memory loop, on tape: part of the involuntary cinema of metropolitan life. This occulted corner is designed to be restless, to keep you moving. It bristles with the ëSecurity Awarenessí notices that signify a contrary condition: the impossibility of free transit. Exhausted travellers spurn the memorial plaque: 11 columns with around 86 names in each.

The point of the conveniently located information kiosk is to soothe panic by establishing a small island of calm in an ocean of chaos. There are no porters. High boards, with mythical destinations, click and spin like fruit-machines. The nature of the information that the laminated informers are allowed to give out is a secret: they canít tell you what they donít know. And they donít know what they do tell you. They are conduits; relaying, to correctly delivered personal applications (in English), smooth and unflustered evasions. They offer therapy, analgesic reassurance, not hard facts.

ëFire?í said the man, affronted. ëWhat fire?í The woman, younger, knew something about it. ëAsk Wally,í she suggested. But weíd done that, sought out the stationís longest-serving uniform, in our earlier quest for the placement of Hadman E. Donít trouble Wally again. His local knowledge is a badge of honour. The infamous underground fire, from 1987, shames the place; bad times best forgotten. We slither down the ramp towards a labyrinth of subterranean corridors. ëThere was a fire,í the woman shouts after us. ëThe station burnt to the ground.í

We find no trace of this still potent fable. Plasterboard panels disguise earlier walls. There is no obvious plaque, no memorial to that loss of life. But, as we emerge into daylight, into Euston Road, I spot a mature functionary, younger than Wally, a man standing very still. A rare official who knows exactly where he is. The man explains: the memorial to the Kingís Cross disaster has been removed, put into store. Refurbishment. If we search hard enough weíll find an information poster: a memorial to the memorial. The fire on the Piccadilly Line escalator, on 18 November 1987, killed 31 people. The plaque has been taken to Acton, the London Transport Museumís depot, where it can be viewed, by arrangement, on ëopen weekendsí. The fire memorial, we are promised, will be returned. ëIt will be reinstated on completion of Project in a public area of the station.í And there is one thing more: ëWe will employ experts to reinstate the name of Mr Alexander Fallon on the plaque, previously identified as unnamed victim.í

Fires, rail crashes, bombs and blitzes: the mainline stations, unconsciously, have become our museums of melancholy. With the passage of time, monuments lose their original function, of giving place to the honoured dead, and become street furniture, obstacles, curiosities. Decommissioned memorials are offered for sale to private collectors on the internet. Or they are removed to the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, a theme park of redundant symbols: lions, bears, eagles. There is even a ghostly white, blindfolded man who Peter Ashley thinks might be a late tribute to soldiers executed for walking away from the battle.

The next station, on our walk to the west, leaves us frustrated. The marzipan-and-betel-juice grandeur of St Pancras is impenetrable, ring-fenced, security-guarded. You can visit the old station on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. And of course I do. In recent times, the vast corridors, decaying public rooms and dramatic staircase have been a favoured set for fashion shoots and music promos. The Spice Girls were launched here, and a dank basement was converted into an opium den for Johnny Depp in the film version of Alan Mooreís From Hell. The war memorial remains off-limits while the conversion takes place that will magic the former servantsí quarters into luxury apartments for the Manhattan Loft Corporation and the rest into a flagship Marriott hotel. St Pancras is not about going anywhere, not now: itís about architecture ñ once admired, later despised, now restored. Itís about the Channel Tunnel Rail Link: yet another grand project. ëThe largest transport hub in Europeí, so the brochures tell us. The station was bombed in 1917, but the trains kept running. Our mistake, it is evident, is in living in the crease between the antiquated fog of a city that blundered along (privileges for the privileged) and a city that is promised, but which never quite arrives (leaves on the line).

When the monstrous makeover is completed, the twin stations, eco-park, repositioned gas holder, hotels, canalside flats and developments will make this ëone of Europeís most accessible locationsí. Accessible to hype, fast money, Olympic dreams and every cell and splinter group of international terrorism. Because now the terrorists, like other businessmen and corporate foot-soldiers, bond at white-water rafting sessions or convenient gymnasiums. For the moment, in the lethargy of future boasts and current frustrations, we join a straggle of flustered passengers carrying bags down a ditch between building sites. Red and white plastic barriers are conceptual artworks moonlighting as blast-deflecting shields. Hurt buildings have been bandaged for elective cosmetic surgery. Wind puffs gauze like the last breath of a dying man, puffs red dust around our feet. There are no memorials in the temporary station. Present wars are unmentioned and old wars forgotten. A ëSecurity Policy Statementí promises full CCTV coverage of public areas and the ëphysical securityí of all plant and equipment.

Negotiating passage to Euston, the last of the Euston Road triad, a Sickert among stations, we inspect the steroidal and broken-backed Blakean geometer by Eduardo Paolozzi, on his plinth in front of the British Library, in the pertinent shadow of the Novotel. Naked Newton (sponsored by Vernonís football pools) is the true architect of this warped vision. Here is a proper symbol for the corporate city, Blakeís Jerusalem reimagined by a committee determined to cover every cultural shift and marker. The giantís compasses make their terrible calculations in the dirt of building works. In his prophetic poem, Europe, Blake writes that it is the ëmighty Spirit . . . from the land of Albion, namíd Newtoní who alone has the power to sound ëthe Trump of the last doomí.

The courtyard of the British Library is a grazing ground for muggers: dozens of harmless and woolly academics, waiting to be let in, clutch very obvious laptops, software in soft bags. They have adapted to the concept of the forum, the civic space dressed with its sculptural prompts. They sit where they can, on low walls, on the curved stone benches of a bijou amphitheatre dressed by eight Gormley rocks: The Planets. The Gormley zone validates the development, a cultural imprimatur: serenity, medieval cosmology making its treaty with contemporary physics. Planets as humours, as our guides and mentors. Human dust led to acknowledge its own mortality, the infinite spaces within the smallest cells of our bodies. Body parts are pressed into Gormleyís cannonballs, his rocks on plinths; arms, legs, hands. The eight stones are like calcified lumps recovered from the ashes of Pompeii or Herculaneum. Living traces imprinted on basalt.

Beside the amphitheatre is a box hedge, in which is contained a gold-red tree, a Japanese acer; a tree of sharp-edged coins. You canít approach the tree through the maze of the tightly clipped hedge; it is closed off, solitary. This tree, too, has its plaque; it is a living memorial, planted on 12 June 1998: ëTo commemorate Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflicts this century.í The plaque quotes from Frankís diary: ëI see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy me too.í

At this point, my pedestrian anecdotes of what was found at Euston, Marylebone, Paddington, Victoria, Charing Cross, Waterloo, London Bridge, Liverpool Street, became suddenly redundant, overtaken by the events of 7 July, the four London bombs. With four more to follow, exactly two weeks later. Explosions seemingly orchestrated by Newtonís compasses: north, south, east, west. Contemplated in this setting, alongside Gormleyís Planets, the numerology was disturbing. The original expedition, recording the names of dead railwaymen, the erasures, was a hallucination, a sleepwalkerís fugue in the lull before the attacks on London which would use Kingís Cross as the trigger for a malignant chain reaction.

By 14 July, transport was moving, the Number 30 bus trundled up the hill from Kingís Cross as I walked down, once again, to the station. There were more pedestrians, certainly, more rucksacks, but bus passengers were as stoic, preoccupied, chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry Potter, a device for blotting out the view from the window. A weapon, a comforting weight in the lap. Potter makes use of Platform 93/4 at Kingís Cross: trainee wizards have to learn how to pass through the solid barriers between platforms 9 and 10. They are capable, I suppose, of circumventing surveillance systems. The invisibles of the real city do not appear on CCTV until they are dead, until it is all over and a suitable fiction of the past is being edited by politicians and judiciary.

The normal queues of transients, many being ostentatiously frisked by dozens of yellow-jacketed police, or by station security in gooseberry-custard tabards, were infinitely extended by mourners. They waited patiently, with plastic water and floral tributes, for their turn in the small garden of remembrance that had established itself around a tree in a fenced-off corner of the station frontage, between Euston Road and York Way. Despite the sombre aspect of the witnesses, this multi-faith shrine felt Mexican: a mass of conflicting colours, adapted football shirts, written-over flags, pink bears, white dogs. Sunlight dazzled on cellophane. The trunk of the sturdy whitebeam disappeared into a mound of banked flowers. A woman in a Red Cross uniform stood beside the tree with a Kleenex box held discreetly behind her back. At the point of entry, further boxes of two-ply tissues were stacked, ready to cope with an outpouring of confused emotion. An unnoticed accident of railway architecture, a suitable nowhere, was the sanctioned memory site, a cloister of mummified flowers. The death of Princess Diana was the template for public grief in the city. A fence, protecting a royal palace, buried in carnations, lilies, roses, professionally packaged, or lavender bunches picked from private gardens. Now this generally off-limits walkway was the focus for ranks of cameras which were forbidden access, held back; interviewers interviewed each other, talked to the police, yawned, waited. The faces of the missing, some serially reproduced, were flyposted on plasterboard and the glass partitions of bus stops. In phone boxes, portraits of the vanished competed with cards for prostitutes. Some were slick laptop productions, others as crude as punk-era fanzines. ëCan You Help?í One sad triptych of video-grab memories, highlights in a lost life, displaced a tattered flyer for the now forgotten tsunami disaster.

Shortly before midday, I return to the plaza of the British Library. A gang of men, shirtless, loudly tattooed, uttering very audible obscenities, are playing pitch-and-toss in the Gormley amphitheatre. It lends itself very well to this activity. Nervous tourists steer around the sunken pit and make for the open-air cafÈ. But then, quite unexpectedly, as the two-minute silence is announced, the gamesters freeze and draw themselves up as if on parade. The tourists, bemused, are caught midstride. They are Lowry figures, black against the red brick, the chequerboard squares. London is unused to such silence, no squad-car sirens, ambulances, drills; the Euston Road in gridlock stillness without the undertow of frustration and peevishness, phone-babble, honking. The stillness of something sucked from the atmosphere, a breath taken and held. Two minutes, then, is a long, necessary time: in which to experience Gormleyís projection of the emptiness of our bodies, the difficult mechanism of standing firm on a piece of moving ground.

This seemed a day to circumnavigate the Channel Tunnel Rail Link building site, the flattened and protected acres around the stations. Familiar loops at the back of Kingís Cross and St Pancras have been off-limits for years; only glimpses from trains on the elevated North London line give a sense of the progress of this immense work of civil engineering. Rookeries such as Somers Town have long ago vanished and the dust heaps are an urban memory invoked by fresh piles of rubble, giant cranes. Marooned and disregarded, at the secret centre of all this activity, stands St Pancras Old Church, on its mound above the now submerged and piped Fleet River. The developers and consortiums and quangos associated with the grand scheme held many private and semi-public meetings, discussions, presentations. They were careful not to appear as earth-rippers, mindless exploiters of the fabric of the city. Every new block had its eco-park shadow, every piracy an artist in residence. The poet most deeply implicated in the visionary geography of Kingís Cross was Aidan Dun. His long meditated cycle, Vale Royal, was published in a handsome limited edition in 1995. Dun was invited, and indeed paid, to address the developers. ëKings Cross,í he pronounced, ëhas exerted a magnetic attraction down the centuries. The artists, the poets have made this forgotten place royal with their presence.í

Given Dunís poetic manifesto, based on a reading of Blake, an interpretation of the pattern of hills and rivers, the events of 7 July can be seen as the inevitable consequence of our refusal to remember, our communal amnesia. Blakeís city of gold, its pillars aligned with London topography, has been wilfully set aside. The legends of Chatterton and Rimbaud, of Shelley, their association with Old St Pancras, are forgotten. Dun recognises that pastoral invocations of the Fleet River, its swimmers, cattle, fishermen, are no more than nostalgic engravings hung on the locked church in the teeth of the coming storm. ëThe bitter-sweet stench of the combustion of child-flesh/ floats through London streets.í He sees a repeated pattern of sacrifice deriving from our refusal to recognise the originating myths of this spurned site. ëThe poisoned flower of a military necropolis,/with perfumes of sulphur.í

The church on its mound now appears as a slightly embarrassed pensioner, hovering at the outer limits of the development zone. A protective wall of green has been erected by the Channel Tunnel Rail Link operatives, who also provide a ë24-hour helplineí along with a skirting of that ubiquitous red and white plastic: more blast-deflecting shields. A protected but half-hidden enclave, shady and attractive to picnicking urban transients. Iím drawn in ñ as I was, frequently, in the days when I worked as a railway postman. I went into the church for the first time on 16 May 1973. I made a note of the fact, of my viewing of St Augustineís sixth-century stone under the altar cloth, the pattern of plain crosses. ëThe church,í I wrote, ëis part of that northern rail. It drinks from ancient Christian sources.í A week after the first bombs, I have come back, by chance, at the one hour when the doors are open. Incense, taped chanting, dim light; a young woman kneeling, absolutely still, beside the rack of burning candles. She is Czech and leaves a message in the visitorsí book about how she finds consolation here. Private rituals are enacted with none of the theatre of the Kingís Cross shrine: the flowers, shirt-offerings, colours. The church is stone and sand, everything bleached and smoky. Two men march in together. One, smart in a striped shirt, buys his candle, drops to his knees, makes his gestures, leaves. The other, filthy, tattered, angry, borrows the price of his candle, slumps, drops his head, staying in place for a few moments before reeling out. In the parish room, he kicks against the toilet door. The walls of the church are dressed with engravings, watercolours: Old St Pancras as it never was. The most unexpected icon is a photograph of the Beatles, posed in the frame of the west door. Ringo, George and Paul lounge against the toothed Norman arch, while John lurches at the camera, his raised fist a blur. Itís my belief that this shot derives from a session with the war photographer Don McCullin on 28 July 1968. It is referred to in the reference books as the ëMad Dayí. The posthumous troop moved on a strange, random trawl across London, a version of the dictated geography of Aidan Dun or William Blake. St Pancras Old Church to Old Street Roundabout to Farringdon Road to Wapping Old Stairs, where Lennon lay on the ground and played dead.

St Pancras was a child martyr who gave his name to numerous churches, a hospital, a railway station. He is pictured on a wall-hanging in the sacrament house of the Old Church (from which the tabernacle was stolen in 1985). In his left hand he holds a Byzantine cross, an extension of the tau cross. An Islamist website claimed the bombing had made of London a ëburning crossí ñ with Kingís Cross Station as the pivot, the gathering point from which the bombers embarked on their deadly missions. A failure on the Northern Line underground service ruined the conceit.

A green-shirted, ponytailed gardener, spotting me looking at the faded gravestone tribute to ëone of the few Persons who came out of the Black Hole at Calcuttaí, gives me the full tour: John Soane, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the Hardy tree. Building work now, as at the time of the construction of the railway, is causing havoc. Tombs are splitting, monuments leaning drunkenly, holes appearing in the earth. You could, stepping carelessly, tumble into a vault. The fabric of the city cannot be shaken, bored into, trenched, day after day, without cost. It is not always as banal as a Tesco superstore collapsing into a cut-and-cover railway tunnel. London is deafened, red-eyed, traumatised. Making the best of it. We are telling our stories to the camera as a public confession. Victims replay horrifying incidents as a form of exorcism. Accused men are watched and recorded by instruments designed to make no moral judgment. The city is paralysed while contrary fictions struggle for credibility.

Back on the canal, returning home, there are more walkers than ever, more bicycles. Nothing disturbs Londonís sense of the absurd: an entirely naked black man exercises on a bench, stretching, bending, grunting, as he looks across the water at the unresolved development zone, the eco-garden and the cranes. Beside him, a middle-aged woman sits eating her sandwiches, ignoring the sweating man, folding down the corners of her tired Harry Potter (reread to oblivion in preparation for the coming event). As I approach Hackney, I record a black, newly stencilled slogan: fallujah london. bombs = bombs.

It wasnít easy, but I persisted. I had to see the memorial to the Kingís Cross fire in the London Transport Museumís depot at Acton. The functionaries at this hangar were pleasant, helpful but somehow damaged: like combatants removed from the front line. ëMy back,í said the milky-eyed man who led us to the aisle where the two memorial tablets were stored. The depot is an Ikea warehouse of transport memorabilia, docketed, wrapped and hidden away. The storeman fetched a stool so that I could photograph the slate panels with their 31 deaths. Andy Burdett, B.A. (Hons), Jane A. Fairey, B.A. (Hons): academic distinctions added to the scroll. Mohammed Shoiab Khan, Rai Singh, Ivan Tarassenko. The lettering is plain; the memorial, funded by the Kingís Cross Disaster Fund, is protected by layers of plastic sheeting. The slabs will stay in this quiet place, this store, until the development at the station is complete.

The depot is uncanny. We are free to wander, free to examine whatever takes our fancy among the shrouded and unwitnessed exhibits, the preserved fragments of an earlier London. There are bucolic, Metroland lithographs by Lawrence Bradshaw and John Mansbridge. A black and white photograph of passengers on the upper deck of a bus: all white, women with tightly permed hair, men with white shirts and ties, no luggage, no burdens. Another era, so remote and self-contained: a lull between wars. Then there is an extraordinary device like an upended torpedo with a door in its side. This grey metallic husk is a bomb-shelter for one or two persons, members of staff only. The shelters were kept at ëvulnerable sitesí, so that railwaymen could enjoy the experience of being buried alive in a double coffin with an escape hatch.

Deep red buses gleam, their windows shine. Immaculate antiques like the 236 to Leyton High Road, by way of Highbury Barn, Queensbridge Road, Hackney Wick. London Transport is perfected at last: it doesnít go anywhere. The horror of a collapsing system, the nightmare journey to reach Acton from Dalston Kingsland, is refuted by this citadel of wonders. We stroll down empty Underground platforms, a cinema of exemplary objects and no script. J.G. Ballard, in an essay on the film director Michael Powell, suggested that drama in the ëseriousí novel of the future would ëmigrate from the charactersí heads to the world around themí. No interior monologues, no social satire: absurd and cruel happenings reported without emotion. This seems to predict the steady stare of the full-face snapshots on the Missing posters; the soft-focused video-pulls of suspects running, stumbling, ducking: in movement. Footage stitched together from mobile-phone improvisations. First you notice the camera on the rooftop and then the bomb goes off. The new fiction of the city is edited from unauthored fragments, while the self-serving fantasies of politicians are left to decay in obscure sheds and sponsored warehouses. Down on these virtual platforms, we go past the Crossrail prototype, past clean, cool trains that will never leave their moorings. And then Anna, who dislikes underground travel, notices that the sliding doors to one of the compartments are open. She hesitates, steps inside. Sheís not alone. Others have preceded her. Dummies. The dead-in-life. Figures used to test bomb blasts: they are dressed, posed, cryogenically frozen. Among all of these stalled trains, in the silence of the vast hangar with its rounded roof, these are the only passengers, waiting patiently for doors that will never close. Summer dresses, accurate in every fold and pleat, in colour and flowered pattern, are made from plaster. Hair is too luxuriant. The vamp at the door, standing, even though there are plenty of free seats, is scarlet-mouthed. Eyes like a cat. A soldier sits, trying to make sense of a map of the underground system. A woman, grinning hideously, points at the floor. Another autistic smiler, open-necked shirt, grey suit, reads a Festival of Britain brochure. A real Londoner, on the razzle, splash of American tie, combs dead hair. They are, in the low light, more than realistic, but there has been a miscalculation: their feet donít reach the ground. And here they remain, before the show begins or after it is finished, the ultimate audience. The ones who sit and smile, without memory, or time, or words. The ones who have no obligation to make sense of the city that contains them.

Iain Sinclairís new book, Edge of the Orison, traces John Clareís escape home from an asylum in Epping Forest. It will be published in September.

New York Times

By JEFF GERTH and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 – Titled “The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq,” an article written this week for publication in the Iraqi press was scornful of outsiders’ pessimism about the country’s future.

“Western press and frequently those self-styled ‘objective’ observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation,” the article began. Quoting the Prophet Muhammad, it pleaded for unity and nonviolence.

But far from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied, the article was prepared by the United States military as part of a multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends, military contractors and officials said.

The article was one of several in a storyboard, the military’s term for a list of articles, that was delivered Tuesday to the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm paid by the Pentagon, documents from the Pentagon show. The contractor’s job is to translate the articles into Arabic and submit them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing the Pentagon’s role. Documents show that the intended target of the article on a democratic Iraq was Azzaman, a leading independent newspaper, but it is not known whether it was published there or anywhere else.

Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.

In addition to paying newspapers to print government propaganda, Lincoln has paid about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month, a person who had been told of the transactions said. Those journalists were chosen because their past coverage had not been antagonistic to the United States, said the person, who is being granted anonymity because of fears for the safety of those involved. In addition, the military storyboards have in some cases copied verbatim text from copyrighted publications and passed it on to be printed in the Iraqi press without attribution, documents and interviews indicated.

In many cases, the material prepared by the military was given to advertising agencies for placement, and at least some of the material ran with an advertising label. But the American authorship and financing were not revealed.

Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said Wednesday that they had no information on the contract. In an interview from Baghdad on Nov. 18, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman, said the Pentagon’s contract with the Lincoln Group was an attempt to “try to get stories out to publications that normally don’t have access to those kind of stories.” The military’s top commanders, including Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, did not know about the Lincoln Group contract until Wednesday, when it was first described by The Los Angeles Times, said a senior military official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Pentagon officials said General Pace and other top officials were disturbed by the reported details of the propaganda campaign and demanded explanations from senior officers in Iraq, the official said.

When asked about the article Wednesday night on the ABC News program “Nightline,” General Pace said, “I would be concerned about anything that would be detrimental to the proper growth of democracy.”

Others seemed to share the sentiment. “I think it’s absolutely wrong for the government to do this,” said Patrick Butler, vice president of the International Center for Journalists in Washington, which conducts ethics training for journalists from countries without a history of independent news media. “Ethically, it’s indefensible.”

Mr. Butler, who spoke from a conference in Wisconsin with Arab journalists, said the American government paid for many programs that taught foreign journalists not to accept payments from interested parties to write articles and not to print government propaganda disguised as news.

“You show the world you’re not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility,” he said.

The Government Accountability Office found this year that the Bush administration had violated the law by producing pseudo news reports that were later used on American television stations with no indication that they had been prepared by the government. But no law prohibits the use of such covert propaganda abroad.

The Lincoln contract with the American-led coalition forces in Iraq has rankled some military and civilian officials and contractors. Some of them described the program to The New York Times in recent months and provided examples of the military’s storyboards.

The Lincoln Group, whose principals include some businessmen and former military officials, was hired last year after military officials concluded that the United States was failing to win over Muslim public opinion. In Iraq, the effort is seen by some American military commanders as a crucial step toward defeating the Sunni-led insurgency.

Citing a “fundamental problem of credibility” and foreign opposition to American policies, a Pentagon advisory panel last year called for the government to reinvent and expand its information programs.

“Government alone cannot today communicate effectively and credibly,” said the report by the task force on strategic communication of the Defense Science Board. The group recommended turning more often for help to the private sector, which it said had “a built-in agility, credibility and even deniability.”

The Pentagon’s first public relations contract with Lincoln was awarded in 2004 for about $5 million with the stated purpose of accurately informing the Iraqi people of American goals and gaining their support. But while meant to provide reliable information, the effort was also intended to use deceptive techniques, like payments to sympathetic “temporary spokespersons” who would not necessarily be identified as working for the coalition, according to a contract document and a military official.

In addition, the document called for the development of “alternate or diverting messages which divert media and public attention” to “deal instantly with the bad news of the day.”

Laurie Adler, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Group, said the terms of the contract did not permit her to discuss it and referred a reporter to the Pentagon. But others defended the practice.

“I’m not surprised this goes on,” said Michael Rubin, who worked in Iraq for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004. “Informational operations are a part of any military campaign,” he added. “Especially in an atmosphere where terrorists and insurgents – replete with oil boom cash – do the same. We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs.”

Two dozen recent storyboards prepared by the military for Lincoln and reviewed by The New York Times had a variety of good-news themes addressing the economy, security, the insurgency and Iraq’s political future. Some were written to resemble news articles. Others took the form of opinion pieces or public service announcements.

One article about Iraq’s oil industry opened with three paragraphs taken verbatim, and without attribution, from a recent report in Al Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. But the military version took out a quotation from an oil ministry spokesman that was critical of American reconstruction efforts. It substituted a more positive message, also attributed to the spokesman, though not as a direct quotation.

The editor of Al Sabah, a major Iraqi newspaper that has been the target of many of the military’s articles, said Wednesday in an interview that he had no idea that the American military was supplying such material and did not know if his newspaper had printed any of it, whether labeled as advertising or not.

The editor, Muhammad Abdul Jabbar, 57, said Al Sabah, which he said received financial support from the Iraqi government but was editorially independent, accepted advertisements from virtually any source if they were not inflammatory. He said any such material would be labeled as advertising but would not necessarily identify the sponsor. Sometimes, he said, the paper got the text from an advertising agency and did not know its origins.

Asked what he thought of the Pentagon program’s effectiveness in influencing Iraqi public opinion, Mr. Jabbar said, “I would spend the money a better way.”

The Lincoln Group, which was incorporated in 2004, has won another government information contract. Last June, the Special Operations Command in Tampa awarded Lincoln and two other companies a multimillion-dollar contract to support psychological operations. The planned products, contract documents show, include three- to five- minute news programs.

Asked whether the information and news products would identify the American sponsorship, a media relations officer with the special operations command replied, in an e-mail message last summer, that “the product may or may not carry ‘made in the U.S.’ signature” but they would be identified as American in origin, “if asked.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Kirk Semple and Edward Wong from Baghdad.

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