Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  Street makes no direct reference to Clare. His north-flowing ley line peters out a mile or so beyond Glinton: at Patty Clare's Northborough cottage? There is some mention of a conclusion at Robin Hood's Bay, ‘not far from Whitby Abbey’. A provocative coda that will have to wait for a future occasion. (Renchi is chasing geologist William Smith's limestone reef in that direction.)

  WELCOME TO BEDFORDSHIRE, A PROGRESSIVE COUNTY.

  Borders come and go. The sun climbs. Side roads are empty. We march along, stopping to take note of anything that confirms our theoretical progress. Renchi addresses a clump of daisy-like wild flowers on a steep bank at the edge of an extended village. ‘Greater Stitchwort,’ I pronounce (on the authority of the Ladybird primer). Red berries. Haws, rose-hips. Renchi snaps his shutter on a person who looks very much like my father: same set of jaw, the tilt of a man leaning into the wind. A self I don't recognise: older, stripped of pretension. I never saw my father with a rucksack, but my adult life has been a long wrestling match with burdens out of Pilgrim's Progress: lights, cameras, book bags, children. When there is nothing to carry, I feel that I'm cheating.

  RAILWAY SLEEPERS £15.95.

  A hunchback hooked over a wheelchair. He'd crumple without it. His forward-pitching momentum is just enough, when added to the pull of a tiny dog, to advance the old lady in the chair. She grips the dog's leash. The dog sniffs at the verge. The wheelchair tips, veers, lurches into Stotfold, a helmet-shaped settlement on the banks of the River Ivel. We can hear the acoustic footprints of the A1.

  40 MILES FROM LONDON TO STOTFOLD. BURGLARS BEWARE. OUR PROPERTY IS POSTCODED. (Notice designed, in red and yellow, to look like a book of stamps.)

  Churches: Norman, Saxon. Monuments. Leaded windows, blackened beams. Memorials to children: ‘Daughter and sister, aged 7 years, lent not given.’ Fields of barley, fields of rye. Banks of daisies. Water towers. We glug at plastic bottles. Renchi repairs his feet. An unpeopled landscape with broad paths cut through cereal fields for hikers who have business elsewhere.

  We cross the Ai, before Biggleswade, and feel wave-movements, ripples in the land: hillocks, woods. This is encouraging. We hear sheep but don't see them, perhaps they're lost in the high corn. There are no farmers, farm-labourers or livestock. We notice pig sheds, military detritus, bunkers swallowed in undergrowth. Agriculture is a top-dressing to disguise past and present airfields. Ballardian concrete in haze of summer heat. Abandoned hangars, limp windsocks. Corrugated outbuildings, smelling of vanished cattle. Crickets active in long grass.

  After hours of dreamlike walking, Renchi is aroused by the distant prospect of St Neots. But it's not St Neots, it's Sandy. There are still railways to cross, a Roman road to relish. Slavering dogs guarding empty properties. Artworks (tin peacocks) in places where nobody will see them.

  Clare inserted a footnote into his account of the walk: ‘The last Mile stone 35 Miles from London got through Baldeck and sat under a dry hedge.’ At Potton he knocked on a door to ask for a light for his pipe. Renchi requested a fill for our water bottles. Questioning villagers in this district was fruitless: ‘They scarcely heard me or gave me no answer.’

  Yellow hallucinations of early evening. Acres of Kansas corn. We advance on another mysterious hangar, another perimeter fence: JORDANS (‘Real Ingredients, Real Taste’). Breakfast of choice. The workers were at the back of the factory, in clusters, practising their smoking. Bored CCTV cameras watched them, watched us. We waved, they waved. A mesh fence made conversation difficult, but it was a relief, after two days on the road, to contact live humans prepared to acknowledge our presence.

  Clare headed for a pub called the Ram (‘looking in vain for the country mans straw bed’), while we pondered our choice of the Wrestlers at St Neots (a blind booking). And now, at last, my 1,000-mile-guaranteed-no-blister socks were wearing through their double layer. Invisible skin rubbed and puffed. Visible skin was tightened by the sun, the effect of two days blundering across England.

  I describe the approach to St Neots, in notes transcribed that night, as a zone of ‘busy leisure’. Shooting ranges. Golf courses. Four-wheel drives with kangaroo bars. Red sports cars taking the bends hard, leaving white trails of disturbed dust. We're hitting the wrong Ouse town: hard-living St Neots with its marina, rather than Bunyan's Bedford with its sects and secrets.

  There is plenty of town to get through before we reach the river. English dissent is a residual presence: Cromwell and his associates, soldiers, bible-punchers, republicans. Tip your cap to Hampden Way. (John Hampden, 1594–1643, Parliamentarian. One of the five members accused by Charles I of inviting the Scots to invade England. Took part in the Battle of Edgehill. Mortally wounded at Chalgrove Heath. Died at Thame.) ‘The King chastised us with whips, but Cromwell chastiseth us with scorpions,’ wrote the radical John Spittlehouse. His words are inscribed on a stone in Huntingdon. Renchi scrapes dog shit from his boots on a sign for Levellers Lane.

  St Neots conforms to nonconformity, liberties of the Ouse. Neot was a saint without portfolio. ‘He has baffled all researches,’ says Donald Attwater's dictionary. Possible association with Glastonbury? After death, it is thought, Neot's corpse was removed to a monastery at Eynesbury (we are plodding through there now, an official suburb). Neot had his apostrophe painfully amputated. Leaving: an imposing stone bridge. The usual squabble of coaching-inns. An ivy-choked Victorian vicarage. Monastery ruins. Boat yards. Generic restaurants.

  Feet gone, sunburnt, overdosed on Roman roads, cracked airfields, we need a haven. A bed. People. We need: the Wrestlers. Drug notices plastered around the entrance. Prohibition or advert? Early drinkers, the detritus of rubber afternoons, are varnished into place. They surface, from a voluntary catalepsy, just far enough to notice shapes at the periphery of vision. The drama of two men struggling across a darkened room towards the only vertical element.

  ‘You want to stay? Here?’

  Jaw hits puddled bar. No garlic available, so he makes a defensive gesture with a bunch of heavy keys. Then issues us with complicated instructions.

  ‘Red door. Alley. Mind the bins. Another door, right? Stairs. Go up 'em. Careful like.’

  One of the ladies, perched on a leatherette stool, unsticks her skirt and volunteers to act as guide; she needs the exercise. It looks like a long evening. Smirnoff (by the bottle). Garishly coloured mobile phones laid out along the bar like surgical implements. Cigarette bricks in cellophane wrappers. Plastic lighters: auxiliary thumbs. Flick flick flick. Black-and-white posters of Paris bohemia.

  Female drinker, slipping off stool, to landlord: ‘It's my birthday. What shall I do?’

  ‘Get pissed. Then shagged up the arse. Like every other Wednesday.’

  One of the phones goes off. The woman taps the rim of her glass with a chipped red nail. Chews ice. The landlord fires her cigarette. It wouldn't be fair to call them binge drinkers. To be a binge drinker you have to stop at some point. In the gloom of the Wrestlers, it is slow and steady. Like the slap and pull of the river. These are professionals, in the zone. Dedicated to soft focus.

  Our rooms aren't too bad. They have beds, nicotine-muslin drapes across the window. A pink tablet of soap: in which is embedded a black question mark of pubic hair. A bath would be good (available, on request, at the end of the corridor). Rinse out the evidence of a recent dog-washing ceremony, sink into sodden carpet, as into the peat of Whittlesey Mere. Feet squelch, up to the ankle. It's quite soothing. I may be able to limp into town, the pub doesn't do food (not even breakfasts). There is something decadent in the idea. Food takes the edge off serious drinking.

  Feverish, we stagger downstairs, out of the red door. (Behind which, as we hear, the Wrestlers is livening up.) Our evening is resolved at a Beefeater. Anywhere would do, in fearful anticipation of the next day's haul. Old grey stone: another bridge on which to lean, oily light on water. I gnaw on meat and imagine that it's fish; it might be, it might be. Renchi tries the vegetarian vegetables: peas and chips. And decide
s that, if he makes it back to Glastonbury, it will be raw food and a blender for the next few years.

  Ouse

  Emma Matthews is a painter, by instinct, training (Wimbledon Art School), and projected intention. She has arrived at a period in her life, early forties, when such practices can again be considered, attempted: studio time, space in which to work. And subject: the interrogation of memory. Frames of film, faded photographs: they will be challenged, stroked with paint. Vitalised. Friends, looking at the small panels in their pale wood frames, talk of Gerhard Richter. But it's not that. Not Germanic gravitas. Serialism. Newsprint retrievals: Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction. Objectivity. Richter told Jan Thorn Prikker that he kept photographs, potential art works, for years. Waiting. In limbo. He kept them ‘under the heading of unfinished business’.

  In painting from photographs Richter felt that he was ‘relieved of the need to choose or construct a subject’. He uses the word ‘appropriation’. He is alert to material that will enable him to exercise a particular technique, a way of distancing himself from the product of his labours. This would not be my understanding of Emma Matthews's recent work. Her heart is in a very different place. She rescues a landscape, a group of figures, part of a building, from the prejudice of oblivion. She puts a light source behind a blink of forgotten time, blurring boundaries, dignifying mess.

  I met Emma through her day job as an editor. She trained on film and adapted, very successfully, to the new technologies of tape (in its primitive form), laptop wizardry. Fast fingers, supple intelligence. She became Chris Petit's editor of choice, an important collaborator on television essays and experimental projects for gallery pieces and performances. My image of Petit on the road would always include Matthews as aesthetic or moral conscience; influencing material he will bring back, even when she is not physically present. Later, in the edit suite, shoes off, legs swinging, she will run his images, backwards and forwards, until they satisfy her rigorous standards. Petit lounges on the sofa with the crossword, sits up to approve the latest revision. Or creaks away to make a pot of tea, massaging the small of his back, taking requests for chocolate biscuits. In their north London bunker, daylight is excluded; they live behind metal shutters. Phone ringing constantly, change of property in the wind. Solicitors, agents. Chris paces, missing his small cigars, deferring to Emma's familiarity with the raw footage he has provided.

  Of course they both suffer with their backs. Ten hours at the machine. And another pass after the evening meal (which he prepares). Undoing the day's tentative rough cut. Back to zero. Voices are never raised, though silences are. The final version, never definitive, comes at a cost. Migraines. Repetitive strain injuries. Snatched meals. Too much strong coffee. Patchy sleep: recutting phantom memories of sequences that were never shot.

  The American film poet Stan Brakhage, so it is said, developed cancer from the dye in film; from painting directly on to emulsion, years of intimate handling: scratching, smearing, licking. Brakhage wanted to re-enchant industrial material, with its flaws and foibles, in order to recover that primitive, taboo-breaking excitement of early cinema.

  At the finish, Brakhage came back to drawing. His wife, Marilyn, called it ‘a process of self-searching and elucidation: elucidation of the nature of his illness, of his experiencing of it, of how it affected his perceptions, of the very essence of his being – and of his impending death’. With the guidance of a hypnotherapist, Barbara Julian, Brakhage ‘entered a state of deep relaxation and moderate-to-deep hypnotic trance… a borderline area between sleep and waking consciousness’.

  The tumour was darkness, everything else was light. ‘You can't touch me,’ Brakhage said, ‘I'm memory.’ The first drawing, derived from the sessions with Julian, placed the artist in an arid landscape. He was walking. He sat under a bridge, the river had dried up. ‘It's peace, but it's boredom.’ Before Brakhage entered the hospice, he saw his present body ‘as not matter but the energy within matter – as streaming with sparkling golden and silver light’.

  One cold, bright New Year's Eve, in a beach house on the South Coast, Emma let it be known that she had three immediate wishes: to be married, to have a child, and to show her paintings. One out of three isn't bad, I thought, I'd settle for that. There shouldn't be a problem, with her contacts, plenty of good will, in fixing an exhibition. The venue, when it happened, was a post-production facility, not far from Tottenham Court Road. The invitation said: ‘Lost Memories’. Emma attended the opening with her husband, Chris Petit, and her young son, Louis.

  Photography has been called a form of bereavement. Private openings in tight, packed galleries are wakes. Emma's exhibition was at cineContact; friends and associates spilled on to the pavement, one of those close Fitzrovia evenings. Tactfully hung, the paintings glow like warning lights on a dashboard, seen through layers of surgical gauze. Grafts of fresh colour on slivers of scenery that would otherwise fade into the fog of elective amnesia. Emma is fonder of luminescence than structure; a burn of hot reds through recessive blues and blacks. There is a residual dissatisfaction with the headlong momentum of film or tape; the requirement to fix a narrative, tell a story, when all too often narrative is redundant. Emma's panels are closer to poetry than reportage.

  Her early work, after art school, was ‘icon-like’. So she tells me. Flat, hieratic portraits built up with washes of glaze, floating skins of varnish. Before that, in the Islington school, down by the canal, she remembers constructing an idealised family group: father, mother, three children and a dog. ‘I was in love with the dog.’ Talking about it brings back the smell, the texture of stiff, grey, sugar paper. A smiling family of confectionary ghosts.

  She explains her technique. A moving sequence is slowed, stopped. A frame is chosen, captured. She picks out the detail on which she wants to concentrate. She grades colour, makes her print. The raw image is bathed in oil. There is a PVA (polyvinyl acetate) primer, paint, and then a Brakhage-like process of scratching, erasing. Richter's formal analysis with Brakhage's emotion. ‘During SB's final two months,’ wrote Marilyn Brakhage, ‘the sessions took the form of visualizing the body as an infinite collection of energy fields, in constant flux, pulsing and flowing. SB retreated from the transitory doings of his cells and metabolism into a sense of his secret self, the self behind the self, the self (or deep consciousness) unyoked to time and space.’

  There are images in the cineContact exhibition from an era before memory. A hospital. A drive across flat landscape towards a hill town with a cathedral: Lincoln. Her father the doctor. A young man, a dedicated professional. The hospital paintings are not derived from tape, but from a collection of old photographs found, by Emma, in a frozen-turkey box at the bottom of a wardrobe. ‘Memory,’ said the poet Michael Hamburger, talking about W. G. Sebald, ‘is a darkroom for the development of fiction.’

  A family group posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital. Conventional pieties of the period: white shirt, fiercely ironed tie, pipe. The woman's summer dress is fashionable again, the kind Emma might wear. Such serenity, family arranged on the grass in front of institutional buildings, tickles my paranoia; notions of animal experimentation, government-approved research, something nasty behind metal-framed windows sticky with new paint.

  When she discovered the cache of hidden snapshots, Emma was the age (or close to it) of her mother, back then. The woman on the hospital lawn. Unborn, Emma was part of the scene. Now she paints her adult self into this fragment of the past: a face in a dark window, caught like a penitent behind pink cross-struts. She is looking down at her father, her brother, her pregnant mother. She has returned from the future to eavesdrop on an episode beyond revision. An unrecorded stranger, a memory man, clicks the shutter.

  I told Renchi some of this story, about Emma, her paintings, the box of photographs, and how she paid for a gravestone for the church at Great Paxton. We leant for a moment on the bridge at St Neots, watching cruise boats and growling with hunger. Clare, in his poem ‘Reco
llections of a Ramble’, writes of sitting on the bank of a river and thinking: ‘if I tumbled in/I should fall direct to heaven’.

  The Wrestlers offering nothing more than a handwritten bill, daggered to the bar, we provision ourselves with Scotch eggs and plastic water. On the minimart monitor, we see fugitives, blanket-over-head runaways living rough. First light on an open road is something else, so English that it is not English at all. There are no hedges, mist hangs low over innocent fields. You have to walk on tarmac, the road's edge is rutted and treacherous. Long shadows fall towards the river. The sky is cloudless. We move towards a distant clump of trees.

  Then the cars begin, not many, but travelling at speed, in clusters. It's not yet seven-thirty. Amateur make-up artists experiment with lipstick. Smokers nuzzle comfort phones. Open windows deliver dead news with faked urgency. Unscathed, we climb through poplar avenues and designer-stubble paddocks. The view from the crest, so the book says, is the most glorious in England. River Ouse on one side, woods on the other. Parodically compact villages.

  The church of Holy Trinity at Great Paxton is down a shaded lane. Tower. Perpendicular arch. Three clipped yew bushes mark the path: broad-skirted, emblematic. We search out the relevant graves. It's not difficult in such a quiet, well-tended place. A granite block, the one planted at the time of the drowning. And the recent addition, Emma's gift to her sister.

  I leave the Baldock pine cone, in long grass, against the block. The grain of the stone is yellowed, lettering clear: ‘Drowned in/ the Ouse/ trying to rescue/ his daughter/ who lies nearby.’

  Renchi digs a feather into the soil, near the grave of Emma's sister: Ruth Constance Matthews, 1963–1970. There was a Wordsworth quotation, chosen by Ruth's mother: ‘What hast thou to do with sorrow,/ Or the injuries of tomorrow?’

  At the time when Emma held her exhibition in Newman Street, I'd started to retrace certain sections of the Clare walk. I decided to go south along the Ouse, between Buckden and St Neots; Emma said she would come with me, bringing Louis, her young son. We would avoid the road and stick with the river bank.