The Coming Dust
On the significance of my alarm changing from 'Here Comes the Sun' to 'I drink my coffee by the grave of William Blake'. Or, how culture is a great way to turn your back on others
The Coming Dust
Sometimes the world we think we know, our very own version, is the one that shatters most completely. Not shattered in the ways of the glum faces on news programmes making their single tragic visit to media depiction. These feel worse through broadcasts from grainy suburbia as they flicker between the HD perfection of well-lit studio presenters, with invited guests and make-up. Not that, no, that is a mediated version of shattering. Like an art gallery offering mediated versions of art or culture, the walls hemming it all in. More importantly, and equally successfully obscured, keeping everything else out. In this case, in these sometimes, shattering when the world feels entirely different today than it did before. And all the attempts to define the breakage are so obviously false or clear attempts to uphold a preferred version of reality.
I thought that, at 5am, as the alarm started. I thought that while also wondering why the Alexa machine had swapped Here Comes the Sun by George Harrison for Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake by The The. I do not know the answer for that change, it is not a conspiracy, I am sure of that. I think.
Often enough the first thing I think sets the pattern for the day. I say pattern, but this is the randomness of the thoughts as dreams end and eyes open and the two merge. And then what? I was listening to the special inauguration special of the Gabriel Gatehouse podcast The Coming Storm yesterday, while painting a second coat of decking oil to the laid out wood at the foot of the back garden. The whole series has been about the revelations of conspiracy and the uncovering of this other band of miscreants that form Q Anon and so on and on, over two series and a special inauguration episode. It has been a great listen, as the Radio 4 escapades themselves both uncover the roots of conspiracy and often enough find they are there, the things that lead to the strange growths through the paving. This can be, as yesterday’s listen, about denials of US biological weapon research labs in Ukraine that turn out to be real, as yesterday. It can be meetings, it can be all kinds of this and that. As I notice the pain in my knee as I paint more expensive decking oil on wood I know will soon be battered by rain and wind and dry it all out soak it and cover in algae once again, I think; ‘Wow, these people are so busy, I am so uselessly occupied’. I am not sure if I should be thinking this, maybe I should be more responsive, send frequency vibrations around some closely networked network of people, record outrage and prepare a response. I came to Gatehouse yesterday, after I thought he had finished last year, from Americast, and also realise I probably came to them via Mr Gatehouse in the first place. And now the world I am seeing is curated and made in Radio studios by people that would not talk to me in the street, coffee shop or anywhere. I would never be involved in their world, they never would let me near it. And yet, because of my heritage, my education and cultural exposure, I still consider the radio studios, the voices of public schooling, the location on dial or DAB, as the very places that knowledge does come from. And being not allowed in is not an accident. There is a world that expects to be there, represented, and I am in another one that should expect to not be. I understand that and live with it and partly the surprise is how much the new world is generated by a shift in who should be there, talking, being heard. Except, they are pretty much the same people after all. The same lineage, schools, universities, clubs and backgrounds. It is just these are from a different set of opinions. Bad billionaires, but they say they love the poor and see their struggle. It is also what the good billionaires say though. It can get quite confusing. As with both, try not to look unlike them or come from other places that they do not frequent, perform, appropriate, acculturate, ingratiate, or school at. Good billionaires will have you cleaning their place while they are being busy doing important things that do not involve you. Bad billionaires will have you loaded on a plane and ferried over some border or another.
The Coming Storm suggests action and lots of it. Just not yet. In fact, beyond the nature of the discussions, this is very much like politics and nation making has always looked. People talking, policies that cause pain to poor people and a rage of opinion that makes the everyday feel a painful experience. Opinions, and these now weaponised with some odds and sods of news and reality. Thing is, the crumbling edifice seems to be threatened now by the new people in town but they are doing what all their predecessors seemed to do. Manipulating the facts and making a monster seem either scary or cute depending on who they are talking to. No doubt a lot of fascists here, they love power. I never thought it was any different in the 1980s when the Thatcher crowd thought they had the right to do what they liked so long as it had a flag draped on it. Not just the plumparati and clown villains in parliament, but the everyday Thatcher clan on council estates and at the football, supermarket and pub and who disappeared when she lost and returned whenever they found a space. Mainly anonymous, like the message board on any local newspaper, they congregate there. Lost and angry, but not for long and never really consistent. They do look like fascists, some of the stuff they come out with, but they are actually just bored and only pop up when their back aches or they miss out on some overtime or their pension is late. And they love the past, nostalgia, they put it all there, their happiness. Having a bad day, they seem to ask? Remember the mills, the marches, the misery made melodious in factory frivolity. Come see the show, we have wrinkled out the hunger and made it colourful and bright. There will be a poet too, in braces and a cap, remembering the old days when we danced to the repetitive beat of the loom or the drill or the shaft wheel. They do not know anything about it though, they were not there. And when they could, they left. That’s according to the other side of the opinion battlefield. They offer little other but do make sure that any comment made is already authentic and authenticity is gold for them. And all of this, the racket, is effort. It takes a lot of effort to make a mark, to create a culture, to sustain it. But that’s not what this is. This is people that said they left and moved abroad rather than live in this town. They espouse a world view where it is better to just buy a flat in Spain and grumble to the no-longer-local rag over eggs benedict and coffee. And a waste of the time they could have spent learning a little Spanish and leaving us to create a new here. La vida es asi!
Maybe this whole post comes from my alarm call, of Matt Johnson and his decaying London and William Blake replacing George Harrison and the simple pleasures of a sun that comes for him even if it never quite makes it here. It will, Spring has sprung*.
The thing is, the concern is, I know the sense of frustration. I feel it, just not in the same ways and to the same people. There is a sense of a world denied us, but not of nostalgia and some fabulation created in any earlier decade than this one. No, an awareness of how the art and the culture of places around us are beyond only a certain few. Access to participation that seems always another group of folk, a defined and identifiable group that are most notable in that they never include me. I would not mind that so much – actually I would, and I do – but there is also a denial of the absence of us, of me, of working class and less than affluent people. I tried to get some matinee tickets for the Carol Churchill plays at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. On paper (virtual, website paper) these are available at £10 in the pay what you can offer. They never ever seem available, never have I seen this. It might be a whole network of the careful and the organised come together and ensure these are snapped up on the very day they are released, but still, if that is the case, only a tiny few are seeing what is on offer. I have paid before, but £30 - £40 a ticket is now beyond me, and so the frustration is tangible. I know, in a world on fire, not affording theatres is hardly an issue. Except it might be, it is just a long, long, long line of a lifetime where one set get to see everything and the most of us do not, barely seeing anything. It is a recipe for division and the awareness of other worlds becomes the awareness of a small group that then solidify in their acceptance of and engagement with these arts. They define what it is, their opinion is not only all that counts, their opinion is all that exists as nobody else is going to see these things. The veil over the denial is that the theatres and the art venues welcome and strive to make access possible for all. They should, too, given the subsidies the remaining venues rely on being funded by all of us. But this is often a line of expert over the masses, we the masses need to only know the importance, keep supporting, but don’t bother coming because it’s not for you if you cannot afford it. I get this not affording thing, the weakness is mine, all of that. People need paying, the world does not owe you a living and so on. But where is the option for art or creativity if these are denied and specialised?
I know Carol Churchill is showing because of a review in an online magazine, The Mill. I get the free version only (I know, stop it with the tiny violin) but they said the last good thing on was Taste of Honey. I saw that, pre-redundancy, it was magnificent. It is local, too, written by Shelagh Delaney, set in Salford, the challenges of the region and the period. But the period is sixty years ago! I watched this as a film, when it was still a work of history, in the 1980s! We loved it, talked about it at school for ages, because – and this is important – it had northern accents, working class images and worlds we recognised. I was also looking on the website for writerly help, they have it and they proclaim it loud and proud. A part played to recognise local talent. Except, the help is closed right now, the writer in residence part of the website was last updated in 2023. Maybe there is no interest? Well, the Bruntwood Play competition, which shut in January and is a great competition by accounts of all that know these things , boast over 2000 entries. Two thousand plays, actually hundreds or so more but that is the number of writers and submitters. Completed, finished and submitted plays. Yet, the same people are going to watch the same plays as they have been watching for sixty years. Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Shelagh Delaney, Alan Sillitoe, all of them brilliant but what about now?
Yes, it is probably my fault I chose education and working class community colleges and earned too little, researched and wrote about the weaknesses of institutions and then got made redundant too easily. And that too eats away at me, I am gaslighting myself I think. William Blake got there, inspired poets two hundred and fifty years later, made a mark, rioted, stormed a prison, created, wrote and never bent his knee. It is important to know Blake existed, and Matt Johnson, and to start to think it is important I exist too. The link is not just coffee.
What about now? I think that what is important is places to play at plays, a stage and writing and not already needing to have been on an MA – who has ten grand to pay for an MA, and to live and to eat and to do all that is necessary like go to see plays and writing? I do not know but I know it is not me. Maybe the Royal Exchange should be less royal and more exchangeable, a place where we can have an hour in the morning to do some stuff, tread the boards, have a look around. Write in the place of performance, perform in the place of the writing. Scruffy no marks like me, no accolades, no lineage. But words aplenty, and ideas and thoughts and voice.
*This piece was written on 25th February 2025.