Passages and Jubilee
Oh hello
Now, each morning when I open the backdoor to let the cat out, I smell again the same smell that I used to smell growing up here in this city, a smell that is totally familiar like an ex’s perfume yet seems so vague in its referent (the smell of a city) that I wonder if it is a trick, the kind of trick I will only figure out years later when someone tells me that the smell I am remembering is just the smell of oak or the smell of uncollected rubbish or the smell of me. I walk around parks and sit in them. I look at brick buildings, small crowded balconies, poppies and roses everywhere arcing onto the streets in varying states of death. In Svetlana Boym’s The Future Of Nostalgia, she writes about the history of the term nostalgia as a psychological condition of longing for places built on imaginary relationships to them. She writes e.g. about soldiers returning from war and crying upon seeing rivers of their homeland that in fact, like mirages for the heart, they had never seen before. Partly, returning to this city is gripping me with a warmth and comfort that one can only pathologise as nostalgia. I’m walking in streets that have changed, that look all, I’m sure, different now, streets that I never walked on anyway and still, feeling calm connected; more at home.
Which is what I wanted. Before moving, I looked around for where I could find more stability, and with the decision making of a glitching character in a video game, I turned to here, to where I grew up. Desire, though, is (who said this?) both a lack and a solid. For this, my first email here, I wanted to write about Brits. Both of these artists were not people that I grew up with or even knew of until more recently. They are the kind of authors and directors that I would like to inform a new relationship to the city: a connection girded less by a longing for what I do not have and more for what drives and excites me: what sparkles, glints and, in turn, makes me.
Passages (1969) by Ann Quin
I keep thinking of a question in Passages, the third novel by the British 60s experimentalist, Ann Quin, a question posed by one of the main characters, a woman (that’s all we know) who is looking for her brother (who might be dead) and is accompanied by her lover (the other voice in the novel). The woman asks the lover with him, the lover, clutching her thighs: “What happens when something psychic becomes an exaggeration?”
The world in Passages seems on the brink of either transformation or collapse: what seems certain only is that, as the lover writes in his journal: “There is no compromise now.” It is a setting that in its state of movement, becomes unsupportive, unable to provide a wisened grasp of the wrist that a more structured and solid setting could. Instead, then, the woman resorts to inventing herself and the world solipsistically but without, I think, the pejorative sense that the word now wears. The woman dreams her life because there’s nothing else to do. But what happens when something psychic becomes an exaggeration. With her, as they say, main character energy, she is filling her life with fantasy, fantasies that are stretched and distorted but then, through living them out, through acting them over and over again become real like an accent into a voice. When the exaggeration—the joke—becomes her life, what is she, and what are we, to do then? This issue, then, about the shaping of yourself and your destiny occupies the novel.
In this imaginary world, we as readers experience the world and her life in a constant blend where sex, his body, their danger, the rock they are lying on, the room they are in, a bacchic ritual bleed together. That melding captures how we experience life in movement. There is, here, no separate chapter for finding the brother and then another on seeing her lover. The woman is always split, never focussed: “Wanting to take in his history while wanting to take him in her mouth.”
Although the present seems fictive in Passages, the past underpins them. The lover adds to the margins references to Greek myths as if to say, see, this is like that. See, this has happened before. This history drives them even if the characters’ relationship to it seems unclear. He writes: “Days like this are taken up with nostalgia—longing for some other climate, another person, another love, until they are all spread out like a vast geographical map. There are so many routes, they all lead me finally to the edge of where I am at the moment : in a room I know only too well, a woman I love, but hardly know, and a city where every street declares its defeat.”
The lover transcribes in his diary an exchange between her and him where he says, “You live with such frenzied intensity.” She replies: “Because there’s nothing else to do—I would be eaten up by reality.” Passages is about maintaining that frenetic pace to withstand a reality that seems dark, unhelpful, barely real. All the woman can do is run to find her brother or throw herself at her lover’s body. Racing like that gives her more solidity. The woman doesn’t know and is unsure how how how to know what is her what is him and what is just the rock they are fucking on. She asks:
“Is it my body I hold in my arms or the sea?”
Jubilee (1978) by Derek Jarman
What if, the question must be asked, Queen Elizabeth I travelled through time and visited England in the 1970s? What would she see? She would see rubble. She would see police killing cute bisexuals, an army veteran organising a bingo night, a developer turning their nightclub into car parks, and she would see punks holding guns, wearing leather jackets and tattooing LOVE with a knife onto their backs.
Jarman’s Jubilee is about PUNKS and stars punks, including Adam Ant (HOT) and Jordan who played Amyl Nitrate, and whose character was apparently based on Vivienne Westwood, which is relevant because Westwood did not like the film and made a tshirt which you can go and see in the V&A that contains a letter to Jarman that says, among other things, “Open T shirt to Derek Jarman from Vivienne Westwood JUBILEE I had been to see it once and thought it the most boring and therefore disgusting film I had ever seen.”
There is also Little Nell from Rocky Horror and Hermine Demoriane who plays a character called Chaos, and who was a tightrope walker, and, in the film, walks along a washing line singing Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien”. I’m giving you details like this so you can see how, if, at a party, under pressure, I might simply say: it’s iconic.
If Westwood considered the film a betrayal of the movement, I’m reticent to say that it is worth watching for its historical value, but, well, in the same way that watching Girls doesn’t provide you with a perfectly accurate capsule of 2012, Jubilee still offers something: a flair, a sense of a moment, of punk nonchalant excess, of grim fed-up-edness transformed into collective violence. Watching the film now seems startlingly relevant. The cast struggle with their principles, amidst the pressures of their capitalist hellscape, their personal lusting for success, and the comfort it might offer. Jarman glamorises the punks for their ideals and their communal spirit, and teases them, perhaps, for betraying those principles. What is cherished in the film is the rejection of a wet nihilism that finds salvation only in virality, but what occurs and what is portrayed as shake of the head inevitable is a capitulation of that collective ethic. The punks cosy up to money. Queen Elizabeth I returns home.
Love
Anne