Tracking the Cami de Cavalls: Goat track or natural phenomena?

Finally, in stalking through the dense, spiney undergrowth to get closer to the Thekla Lark I happened across what appeared to be a small print of a cloven hoof. The print, although vague and open to question, was impressed into a patch of bare dry earth between two patches of scrub and appears to show the impression of hoof cleats. There was only one track, although given the difficult condition of the substrate this is not unusual, and if indeed the shape depicted in the photograph is a track and not a simulacra of a track created by natural phenomena the most obvious suggestion would be that it was made by a feral goat.

Summer Solstice

In celebration of the Summer Solstice and the long white evenings with their blazing yellow meadows I post Stefan Georg’s hymn to the solar titan Hyperion. Hail. Hyperion

Ich kam zur heimat: solch gewog von blüten

Empfing mich nie .. ein pochen war im feld

In meinem hain von schlafenden gewalten,

Ich sah euch fluss und berg und gau im bann

Und brüder euch als künftige sonnen-erben:

In eurem scheuen auge ruht ein traum

Einst wird in euch zu blut der sehnsucht sinnen ...

Mein leidend leben neigt dem schlummer zu

Doch gütig lohnt der Himmlischen verheissung

Dem frommen ... der im Reich nie wandeln darf:

Ich werde heldengrad, ich werde scholle

Der heilige sprossen zur vollendung nahn:

Mit diesen kommt das zweite alter, liebe

Gebar die Welt, liebe gebiert sie neu.

Ich sprach den spruch, der zirkel ist gezogen ..

Eh mich das dunkel überholt entrückt

Mich hohe schau: bald geht mit leichten sohlen

Durch teure flur greifbar im glanz der Gott.

I journeyed home: such flood of blossoms never

Had welcomed me ... a throbbing in the field

And in the grove there was of sleeping powers.

I saw the river, slope and shire enthralled,

And you, my brothers, sun-heirs of the future:

Your eyes, still chase, are harboring a dream,

Once yearning thoughts in you, to blood shall alter ...

My sorrow-stricken life to slumber leans,

But graciously does heaven's promise guerdon

The fervent ... who may never pace the Realm.

I shall be earth, shall be the grave of heroes,

That sacred sons approach to be fulfilled.

With them the second age comes, love engendered

The world, again shall love engender it.

I spoke the spell, the circle has been woven ...

Before the darkness fall, I shall be snatched

Aloft and know: through cherished fields shall wander

On weightless soles, aglow and real, the God.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones: Painter at the gates of dawn

In collecting paperback editions of Robert E Howard one is exposed to some pretty piss-poor artists, if indeed one can grace them with that title. For every master such as Frazetta or Kelly there are dozens of lesser skilled bunglers who’s work is both an embarrassing eyesore and a challenge to the patience of even the most committed collector. But amongst the dross and shoddy, gaudy rubbish I discovered a jewel so lustrous that it shone brighter than the sun at midnight.

On the cover of the Zebra Books anthology of Howard’s stories stood a warrior, head thrown back in triumph and shield uplifted in salute. Everything about the illustration spoke of an artist that understood form, character, art and life. In place of the technicolour beefcake barbarians of the Frazetta copyists stood a figure that embodied power rather than violence, litheness rather than massiveness and was possessed of the same dark, brooding intelligence that ran through Howard’s heroes. Here was an artist whose work did not just provide a cover for a cheap book but complimented the stories inside and raised that book from the ordinary to the fantastic.

Jeffrey Jones was born in Atlanta on 10th January 1944, studying geology at Georgia Tech before moving to New York to pursue a career as an artist and illustrator. When Jones arrived in town in the winter of 1967 the iconic covers Frazetta had painted for Ace Books were all the rage and publishers were searching for new people who could deliver something similar – having previously sold black and white strips to horror comics such as Eerie and Creepy Jones was well placed to supply a ready market and found a rich source of work for several years to come.

Between 1968 and 1976 Jones painted over 150 covers for genres of fiction as diverse as fantasy, romance, detective stories and spicy fiction. Jones’ work of the late 60s and 70s is full of strong flowing lines that are at the same time loose and direct. Her paintings show the same reverence for the human form as the illustrations of William Blake and share with Roerich the efficiency of a muted and restrained palette, used to masterful effect in evoking atmosphere and emotion. Indeed many of Jones paintings from her book cover days show a stylistic heritage with the early, folkloric paintings of Nikolas Roerich - such as “Guests from Overseas”, “They haul them along” and “The Sword of Valour”.

At her best Jones’ work transcends the narrow bounds of book illustration or fantasy art and is able stand side by side with the masters of any age. In the painting “Dragon Slayer” we find a languid femme fatale as beautiful and vulnerable as any Pre-Raphaelite heroine - although infinitely more erotic - reclining on a couch with the head of a serpentine dragon in her lap. Silhouetted against the gauzy backlight a figure approaches with sword in hand. The image is charged with sexual tension, full with an ageless and eternal symbolism and could have been exhibited alongside Khnopff or Delville in any salon of the fin de siecle.

In “Avatar” a dramatically posed male figure stands erect and hieratic beneath the horns of a crescent moon, his face raised in the ecstasy of rapture as a billowing cloud of interlaced female figures rises to the night sky. We do not know if we are witnessing a dream, an invocation or a moment of revelation. The image combines the eternal archetypes of the masculine and feminine, transfigured through the lens of an unearthly sabbat. There is both motion and stillness, peace and the frisson of fear in the painting, which swirls in front of the viewer like smoke rising from a secret fane.

I love the way that Jones captures a moment of emotional energy and freezes it beneath a painterly gaze. Whether it be embracing lovers or a charging chariot Jones’ work is charged with passion and depicts an eternal, crystalline moment. There are many competent draughtsmen, many painters who have mastered colour and tone but few who can compose a painting so that it looks like a moment of frozen wonder.

The best artists can make our souls sing with the beauty and glamour of their vision. Looking at the work of these few we are swept away to far off places where the dreaming world collides with reality, where the fields we know – to use a phrase employed by Lord Dunsany – are subtly changed by secret magicks and mundane things are revealed in their true, halcyon forms. Jeffrey Catherine Jones is one of these few - her eye pierces to the heart of the mystery and her hand reveals the innermost lights of masques, rituals and revels that we would never have otherwise seen. We feel that we truly are witness to a drama played out by gods and men. She is, as Frank Frazetta proclaimed, the greatest living artist.

Jones now works both in sculpture and landscape painting. A selection of her recent work was displayed on her own website which unfortunately appears to be no longer online

www.ulster.net/~jonesart/ A selection of Jones illustration for the pulp paperbacks of the 1960s and 70s is archived at www.vintagepbks.com/jonescovers.html A detailed article outlining Jones career and her major publications is available at www.bpib.com/illustrat/jonesjf.htm An interview with Jones conducted in 2004 is available at www.sequentialtart.com/archive/july04/jcjones.shtml

Lutra lutra

Not so long ago otters were thought of as mythical creatures, similar to basilisks and unicorns, so rare were they in the waters of lowland Britain. In the second half of the twentieth century the population collapsed under the pressure of pollution, persecution and habitat loss and by the end of the 1970’s it is estimated that otters were absent from 94% of their former range. However, things are changing. Tougher legislation on agro-chemicals and pesticides has lead to cleaner water and laws also now protect both the animal and its habitats with the result that otters are re-colonising Britains waterways for the first time in decades. Indeed otters have recently been sighted in central London - meaning that we may have to accept the phenomena of urban otters raiding our garden ponds just as we have come to accept the urban fox raiding our dustbins. I’ve never seen a wild otter up close – just a quiet splash and a small bobbing head as they dip out of sight. Neither have I found either track or sign of otters, although my brother-in-law tells me that he has seen them in the middle course of the Wear and the lower stretch of the Browney whilst fishing, so I began to think of places where I could track and possibly watch otters and the place that came to mind was Hamsterley Forest. Hamsterley is a 2000 hectare working forest in the south west corner of Durham, lying between the catchments of the rivers Tees and Wear. Large stands of mature spruce predominate but a mixed woodland of beech, oak, sycamore and rowan spreads along the valley bottoms. Hamsterley is only a 20 minutes drive from my house but it’s somewhere I rarely visit and arriving one Sunday morning I realised why! The forest receives 150,000 visitors each year and it looked like most of them had decided to go on the same day as me. The car-park looked like Tesco on Christmas Eve. As I got out the car a bunch of kids kicked a football against the side of the café and a boy on an electric scooter buzzed along the road. It really wasn’t what I wanted from a day in the woods but I resolved to get as far away from the crowds as quickly as possible and a few minutes later I was heading for my first search site. In researching the trip I had scoured the OS map and Google Earth finding over twenty miles of riverbank within the forest that could possibly support otters, from the broad lower reaches of the Bedburn beck to the smaller tributary becks further west. It was plain that I was only going to be able to search a small section of river bank in any one day so I decided to concentrate my efforts on the largest watercourse first. The Bedburn beck is actually a small river, fast and rocky. I had planned to track up its southern bank as that side was more heavily wooded and, I assumed, a more likely location for holts than the more frequented and open north bank. As I cut off the path into the undergrowth along the river side a pair of grey wagtails flew back and forth along a small shingle shoal, their yellow and grey plumage shining in the sun. The previous 24 hours had seen many heavy downpours of rain and the Bedburn was running brown and peaty, lapping in white waves over the thickly mossed rocks. I was hopeful that the recent rains would increase the chances of find good tracks and the substrate immediately along the river bank showed the most promise. Here and there small micro-beaches of sandy gravel had formed in the lee of large rocks and root boles and it was on these areas that I concentrated – looking for a slide mark to show where the otters entered the river, for feeding signs that showed which species they were preying on or for a territorial spraint to show others who this part of the river belonged to. The river side was slippery and steep, I often had to traverse and scramble along overhanging rocks and cliffs, using branches and roots for handholds as I moved along to the next likely patch of ground. On one of these spider-like scrambles along the rivers edge a wren darted out from the steeply overhung bank and lighted on a rock in front of me, squeaking and hopping. If it was trying to decoy me away from its nest it needn’t have bothered – try though I might I could not see hide nor hair of it in the shadowy depths of the roots hanging over my head. On an area of gently sloping river bank with easy access to the waterside I had my first breakthrough – a small dark coil of fresh otter spraint deposited neatly in the middle of a flat rock. So carefully chosen was the deposition site and so flat and round the stone that it looked like the scat had been set in the middle of a dinner plate. The spraint was approximately 3cm in length, dark in colour and still quite fresh. When broken up the spraint showed an olive green colour and had a mild, flowery smell. There were several small fish bones in the spraint but overall the consistency was slimy and soft. This was an encouraging find, with so many miles of riverbank to check and no information as to which areas might yield the best results it was good to know that I was at least in the right area. Otters are strongly territorial animals and the ranges of competing dog otters do not overlap, although females may have their range wholly within that of a male. The size of otter ranges varies depending on the amount of food available in the area – on a small narrow river like the Bedburn the range could be several miles long. I continued up the river, climbing over fallen trees and mossy rocks as a Dipper ducked and dived under the water upstream from me. At points the river cliffs were so sheer and mossy that traversing them was not an option and I was forced to climb out up the steep sides of the river bank and rejoin the bank further upstream. I was loathed to leave the river and potentially miss a sign but I consoled myself that it was unlikely that an otter would leave any sign in such steep and inaccessible places. Further up stream I came to a place that looked like a very likely spot. A narrow slide down the muddy bank was clearly visible and a tree root had been rubbed bare and shiny where the slide crossed the edge of the bank. Getting down on my hands and knees, trying to get as low a view of the ground as possible I could see disturbances and the transfer of specks of sand and gravel amongst the mud. Here and there the tiny pin-points of claw marks were visible and in another spot several meters ahead a narrow incision in the sand showed where a claw had sliced into the river bank. It had rained very heavily during the night and this incision was fresh and distinct, indicating that it had been made earlier that morning. The tracks were heading up a steep muddy bank away from the river into the woods and on this muddy bank I found a very clear and almost complete otter track showing 4 of the 5 claws, with both the digital pads and metacarpal pad showing in good detail. This track was almost 10cm long and seems to have been a right fore foot. At the top of the muddy bank the tracks disappeared into the woodland floor of leaf-litter and pine needles. There were a few small specks of sand to mark where the animal had passed but nothing I could use to follow the trail. It crossed my mind that somewhere in the woods close by the animal may have its holt. I scouted around in a wide semi-circle from the bank - under roots, rocks and piles of brush but found nothing. Back on the river the Dipper was still flying from rock to rock, keeping a constant distance from me, its quick darting flight a mockery as I lumbered and laboured from rock to rock. After three hours I had gone about a mile – at this rate it would take me another 60 hours to do a first check of all the becks in the forest. It was clear that locating the otter hot-spots was not going to be a quick or easy project but I was pleased that my first trip had come up with results. I cut away from the river, back up into the woods to see what could be seen but quickly decided that Hamsterley Forest on a Sunday in May was not for me. The paths were crowded with bickering families in matching tracksuits, grannies in sun-hats and ramblers with nice clean boots. I must have looked a site as I emerged from the bushes, my trousers wet and dirty from wading up the river and kneeling in the mud, a slight aroma of otter scat hanging about me, because I got some very strange looks from the other pedestrians – as if a man dressed in green and brown clambering up a river cliff was in anyway unusual. On the way back to the car rugged extreme-sports types blasted by on mountain bikes, their sunglasses and helmets making them look like overgrown insects. Half a dozen youths on scrambler bikes roared along the trails and as the broad-tailed silhouette of a buzzard circled slowly in the distance decided that the next time I visit Hamsterley it wouldn’t be on a weekend.

The Watch-tower

In the summer 1916 the war was not going well for Britain and her allies. The early spring had seen the French caught between the hammer of von Falkenhayn and the anvil of Verdun and on 1st June the British army began the Battle of the Somme, an offensive that would scar the folk-memory of the nation for a century to come. August of that year found Dunsany recovering from a wound at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry, where his regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was garrisoned during a furlough in their duties on the Western Front and in this respite from the fighting he would find time to write a short introduction to his newest book. In the preface to Tales of Wonder Dunsany reflects the mood of despair and grief that must have echoed around war-torn Europe. He speaks of living in days in which life is cheap, days in which the civilization of Europe has almost ceased but Dunsany, tired and war-weary as he is, does not sorrow for the dimming of the lamps. Rather he lifts his voice in grim embrace of the naturalness of war, of the justness of sacrifice so that songs may return and dreams bloom again after “this terrible ploughing”. Dunsany, a patrician of the ancien regime for whom sacrifice and duty were the signifiers of his caste does not flinch from the knowledge that if others are to have the joys of Athens then he and his comrades must first run the gauntlets of Sparta. There is a school of thought, marginalized and faintly heard, that sees World War II in it’s European theatre not as the titanic Good Vs Evil struggle portrayed by a thousands films and TV sitcoms but as a decades-long civil war that raged to consume the whole continent. Not a war of nations but a war that saw men of all nations turn on themselves and others in the name of ideas. A similar revision of the Great War could be applied – a war in which forces of tradition fought against forces of modernity regardless of flags and kings and this secret war, waged as much on paper as in trenches, would see figures such as Dunsany, Junger, Evola and D’Annunzio call for a halt to the headlong rush away from the ancient, organic communities that had sustained Europe for so long. Men born into an order that was blasted away by the war would perhaps find on returning to their homes that they had more in common with their former enemies than they did with the new world that would rise from the mud of 1918. Such ideas are of themselves dangerous and incendiary, that an Anglo-Irish peer could see in a German aristocrat and an Italian Baron a kinship and community of thought that could not be found within their own society, because they strip away the certainties of belonging that are found in the shams of nationality and ask us to look into the uncertain and changing depths of our hearts. Make no mistake, I am not suggesting that Lord Dunsany could have had any sympathy for the totalitarianisms that arose out of the wreckage of Europe but then, ultimately, neither did Junger or Evola. Hitler and Mussolini were as coldly modern and cynically futuristic as any Henry Ford or Lord Rothschild and in draping themselves in the robes of Tradition Both National Socialism and Fascism simply hastened the destruction of the orders and traditions that they claimed to uphold. For Dunsany in that bleak summer of 1916 it must have seemed that the world he knew and loved was fast fading from memory. He would continue to believe in the return of those “joyous free things” that delighted his soul but amongst the stories contained in Tales Of Wonder are also tales of caution. In the warnings of the spirit of a Provencal watch-tower we can see the enemies of old Europe massing again beyond the walls, manifestations of immemorial fear but does the threat foretold by the spirit still come from the Saracens of the Al-Andalus or has the torch of destruction been passed to newer, more insidious barbarisms? The Watch-tower I sat one April in Provence on a small hill above an ancient town that Goth and Vandal as yet have forborne to "bring up to date." On the hill were an old worn castle with a watch-tower, and a well with narrow steps and water in it still. The watch-tower, staring South with neglected windows, faced a broad valley full of the pleasant twilight and the hum of evening things: it saw the fires of wanderers blink from the hills, beyond them the long forest black with pines, one star appearing, and darkness settling slowly down on Var. Sitting there listening to the green frogs croaking, hearing far voices clearly but all transmuted by evening, watching the windows in the little town glimmering one by one, and seeing the gloaming dwindle solemnly into night, a great many things fell from mind that seem important by day, and evening in their place planted strange fancies. Little winds had arisen and were whispering to and fro, it grew cold, and I was about to descend the hill, when I heard a voice behind me saying, "Beware, beware." So much the voice appeared a part of the evening that I did not turn round at first; it was like voices that one hears in sleep and thinks to be of one's dream. And the word was monotonously repeated, in French. When I turned round I saw an old man with a horn. He had a white beard marvelously long, and still went on saying slowly, "Beware, beware." He had clearly just come from the tower by which he stood, though I had heard no footfall. Had a man come stealthily upon me at such an hour and in so lonesome a place I had certainly felt surprised; but I saw almost at once that he was a spirit, and he seemed with his uncouth horn and his long white beard and that noiseless step of his to be so native to that time and place that I spoke to him as one does to some fellow-traveller who asks you if you mind having the window up. I asked him what there was to beware of. "Of what should a town beware," he said, "but the Saracens?" "Saracens?" I said. "Yes, Saracens, Saracens," he answered and brandished his horn. "And who are you?" I said. "I, I am the spirit of the tower," he said. When I asked him how he came by so human an aspect and was so unlike the material tower beside him he told me that the lives of all the watchers who had ever held the horn in the tower there had gone to make the spirit of the tower. "It takes a hundred lives," he said. "None hold the horn of late and men neglect the tower. When the walls are in ill repair the Saracens come: it was ever so." "The Saracens don't come nowadays," I said. But he was gazing past me watching, and did not seem to heed me. "They will run down those hills," he said, pointing away to the South, "out of the woods about nightfall, and I shall blow my horn. The people will all come up from the town to the tower again; but the loopholes are in very ill repair." "We never hear of the Saracens now," I said. "Hear of the Saracens!" the old spirit said. "Hear of the Saracens! They slip one evening out of that forest, in the long white robes that they wear, and I blow my horn. That is the first that anyone ever hears of the Saracens." "I mean," I said, "that they never come at all. They cannot come and men fear other things." For I thought the old spirit might rest if he knew that the Saracens can never come again. But he said, "There is nothing in the world to fear but the Saracens. Nothing else matters. How can men fear other things?" Then I explained, so that he might have rest, and told him how all Europe, and in particular France, had terrible engines of war, both on land and sea; and how the Saracens had not these terrible engines either on sea or land, and so could by no means cross the Mediterranean or escape destruction on shore even though they should come there. I alluded to the European railways that could move armies night and day faster than horses could gallop. And when as well as I could I had explained all, he answered, "In time all these things pass away and then there will still be the Saracens." And then I said, "There has not been a Saracen either in France or Spain for over four hundred years." And he said, "The Saracens! You do not know their cunning. That was ever the way of the Saracens. They do not come for a while, no not they, for a long while, and then one day they come." And peering southwards, but not seeing clearly because of the rising mist, he silently moved to his tower and up its broken steps.

Children Of The Grave: The End Times of Jack London and Cormac McCarthy

Our civilization is obsessed with its own demise. Perhaps this has been the case since the first civilizations arose from mire; we can see the systems and processes that support and nurture our cosseted and comfortable existence in all their fragility and we are very well aware of their weakness and potential for failure. This is as true of the modern world where supermarkets have available only a 3-day supply of foodstuffs as it was in pharaonic Egypt that depended on the annual flood of the Nile. Human progress may be represented by an upward curve but as the curve gets steeper so the potential for the fall becomes all the greater. In reading Cormac McCarthy’s post-modern novel The Road I was struck by some similarities to Jack London’s novella The Scarlet Plague, published in 1912. Both place their protagonist – an educated, self-reliant and traditionally heroic male – in a landscape of extreme future-shock, forced to live in a world that has changed beyond recognition, forced to exist on hope and the memories of hope, both protagonists having the desire to pass on knowledge and humanity in a place where neither are valued. However there are points of disparity between London and McCarthy and the message of their respective stories that mark the authors as men of their own times, that show the tectonic-shifts in human consciousness that occurred in the century between the publication of the two books and which cause the reader to react in very different ways. The Scarlet Plague is narrated by James Howard Smith to his three grandsons as they sit eating shellfish on a beach in the San Francisco bay area around the year 2063. They are dressed in animal skins, armed with the hunting weapons of the Paleo-Indian and obsessed with finding enough to eat. Smith is the oldest man in their scattered society, perhaps the oldest man still alive anywhere in the world and the only man who remembers the coming of the monstrous pandemic known as The Scarlet Plague which brought an end to the human dominion of the earth in 2013. London’s plague kills swiftly and implacably and seems to be a product of the overcrowded megatropolises that cover the world. As it spreads across the world Smith describes to his grandsons how the lights went out one by one, how news from other places ceased, how in the panic and chaos caused by the collapse of society virtues and values were discarded and selfish, lawless thuggery reigned. How even the family unit disintegrated in the face of the plague, causing parents to abandon children, husbands to abandon wives. In scenes perhaps echoing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 London narrates a world of huge city-wide fires in which armed gangs of drunken looters destroy and carouse until death, inevitably, takes them. However London sees the eradication of humanity from the face of the earth not as the final and irrevocable end but as a temporary, albeit cataclysmic, set back in the onward march of progress. Freed from the yoke of Man London’s earth is slowly reverting to a wild, pre-Edenic state of abundant fecundity tempered by the natural laws of prey and preyer. The forests are reclaiming the fields, the salmon are running the rivers and wild horses are driven down to the coast by the increasing presence of mountain lions. Life for London’s survivors may be harsh and full of challenges but it is still possible, still tenable for those with sufficient knowledge and the will to use it. For London the human race has been doomed to sink down into a pre-barbaric state but it will, though it may take eons to achieve, one day begin its climb upward to civilization. There is optimism in London’s narrative; Smith has saved and stashed some books, he hopes to preserve some learning and his community, albeit it primitive and lacking in the finer social graces, is sustainable. London never lived long enough to see the twentieth century wax into it’s noontide of horror and degradation. He would not see the industrialized, bureaucratic death machines employed by totalitarianisms of various complexions or see survivors walking through the ashes and rubble of Hiroshima. He would not see the endless cycles of famine inflicted on whole continental regions, the cancer at the heart of the modern man who has so much that he feels only self-pity or the destruction and poisoning of the forests, seas and air. As such when the end of the world arrives in The Scarlet Plague it comes in a medieval fury of blood, fire and death but when the smoke clears the survivors find themselves alone in a savage pristine paradise. For McCarthy the smoke does not clear. We are not told how the end comes. Like his characters, places and times it is anonymous and universal. The Man simply hears the massive percussive crump of some vast, unknowable event and fills the bath to conserve as much water as possible. What has happened has happened, no explanation or justification is offered. Neither do we know how long has passed since the cataclysm, we can speculate that the Boy – born into a world after the end – is now old enough to undertake the journey but young enough so that his protection and nurturing is a constant source of stress and anxiety for his father but time as it was understood prior to the end is forgotten and is now measured in the passing of days without food and fire. Even the sun and moon are no longer visible, abandoning the earth beneath a pall of smoke and ash. Across this landscape of fimbulwinter and eternal twilight the Man and Boy make their way, a slow heartbreaking exodus through a devastated wilderness, aiming always for the coast, seeking warmth, seeking food where there is only the blowing of ashes, the drifts of litter and refuse, the empty and desolate echoes of a time that has passed. Their rejoicing when they happen across a bunker of stored food is real and terrible, it is an oasis, water from the rock of Horeb. It has saved their lives and with it their hope. In London’s story the narrator, wandering lonely and mute in the empty wilderness of the Sierras is overcome at the sight of people and craves their society but for McCarthy it is other people who threaten the existence of the family unit that is everything. London saw his survivors banding together in communities, founding tribes and clans. He foresaw the problem that survivors would not all be men of good character, that the foolish and small-minded may stand as much chance as the brave and the good but he did not foresee a future in which community meant nothing, in which captives were chained to walls as their limbs were harvested, in which men armed with lengths of pipe raped and ate those weaker than themselves. How can there be hope in such a place? Is it hopeless and nihilistic to abandon a life that is truly without hope? Is it cowardly and vain to prefer the painlessness of oblivion to an existence of brutal slavery and cannibalism? Is it not better, as the Mans wife said, to go now before the horror finds you? McCarthy’s vision is bleak and pessimistic, at times the living really do envy the dead, but it is not utterly without hope. The Man is driven only by a hope that in searching he will find a future for himself and his son. Perhaps the Man no longer hopes that he and his son will meet with the good guys, perhaps he never did but he can not abandon the life that he has created, not walk away from the duties and obligations that his act of creation has bestowed upon him. That both London and McCarthy choose to view their new worlds through the eyes of children tells us much. The boys in London’s story are feral and cruel, wearing strings of human teeth knocked from the skulls of plague victims, delighting in the pain and humiliation their childish pranks inflict on their frail, senile grandfather and spurning the learning and wisdom that he tries to impart. The boys are not noble savages but ignoble and stupid brutes, reveling in their ignorance, wearing their lack of knowledge as a badge of honour. When Smith tries to explain the meaning of the word scarlet he is mocked and howled down, two of his grandsons state that there is no such thing as scarlet, only red. If the Inuit have many different words for snow it is because they are aware of the subtle differences and qualities that the phenomena we call snow can possess. This knowledge is won through many generations of experience and passed on because it allows the possessor of that knowledge to know something valuable about the world in which they live; In allowing that there is only red and not scarlet the boys aid the contraction of the world, abet the loss of that knowledge and awareness that was the legacy of human progress. But the Man in The Road can hardly bear to impart knowledge to his son because of the pain that would be caused by the realization of its loss for a boy to whom even the words and meanings of a language from before are meaningless and empty. Information is pared down and simplified because there is nothing one can say to a child about a world that has gone except the need to move, the need to stay warm and to eat, the message that we are the good guys and that we are carrying the fire for the other good guys. For London there is no place for God in either the destruction of the old order or the rebuilding of the new. In The Scarlet Plague London predicts a stratified society in which the government of the USA, indeed the world, is carved up into hereditary fiefdoms by impossibly wealthy industrial magnates. A society in which technocrats do the bidding of plutocrats, built on a foundation of oppression and servitude. When the plague has ebbed away it leaves behind only scattered individuals who come together to start afresh in brutish innocence. If Jack London’s evocation of the future is not as bleak and existentially desolate as McCarthy’s how can we blame him for not knowing that God would be put on trial in the courtroom of a death-camp bunkhouse or believing that survivors would wade through the ash and rubble of their cities. McCarthy’s apocalypse is very much more modern and simultaneously ancient, very much more eschatonic – God’s name is called down not in anger or grief but simply as a manifestation of beauty and presence. Through the course of the narrative the Boy is deified, he becomes the God of New Life that the Man swears to serve, to carry across the Jordan. It is through the Boy that the Man finds redemption from his own misanthropy and cruelty, albeit cruelty that only seeks to protect and prolong the life and thus the hope that they both carry. When the Man and Boy happen upon Ely in the road it is the Boy who prevails upon his father to help the old man as it is the boy who begs his father to return the clothes and boots to the thief who stole all their belongings. It is the Boy who forgives those who trespass against him and it is the boy who reminds the Man what it is to be human and why they continue to carry the fire. Man and Boy, the Father and the Son. An old and a new testament and each a reflection of the others entire world. Can we find any redemption or return to grace at the conclusion of these texts? Smith and his grandchildren simply strike camp and herd their goats back towards their tribe, resigned to the millennia-long struggle ahead of them. The Boy finds others who we hope are the good guys, like him we have to take a shot on it but we know that what has gone will never return. I was never scared until I became a father. I was reckless and I was fey in the true meaning of that word – contemptuous of death and all its unknown faces. But when I became a father I also came to know what fear was. I became fearful for the future, I became fearful for the world that my daughters would have to live in. I began to calculate risk and measure dangers. I became intolerant of those things that would impose upon and threaten the sanctity of my family. In making life we become aware of those unknown faces of death and most of all that face which reflects our own mortality. The conscious act of will to create life is also a conscious investment in the future and in return for that investment we receive a violent, atavistic impulse to protect it from those who would squander it or take it from us. We become the Creator-Destroyer but we are also given hope. It is our children who Harrow this Hell for us, who light our way. We are no longer the tip of the spearhead, the fire has been placed in the hands of a small child. Jack London’s novel The Scarlet Death was published in 1912 and is available online at www.gutenberg.net.au The Road is published in the UK by Picador at £7.99 www.picador.com

Unearthly Trance + Ramesses + SkinnyCock: Trillians, Newcastle 16th April 2009

It’s rare for me that I stay with a band from demo to big label and my interest in Unearthly Trance is one of the few exceptions to the whine about the old stuff being better. I traded a copy of the Hadit demo from the band around 2001 and the monstrous crust of Winter/Celtic Frost riffs mixed with barked blackened vokills of the highest order had me gagging at the mouth. Since then the band have found a label on US indie-metal giant Relapse and if the sound has become more polished and accessible it has also continued to display the same fierce intent and ugly ecstasy that gripped me in ’01. Displaying a fine work ethic of getting on stage with minimal fuss and fan-fair Unearthly Trance commenced to knocked the shit out of their tracks, creeping doomed riffs rubbing shoulders with vicious blasts of HC nihilism. Watching bands like Unearthly Trance play songs like Penta[grams], Firebrand and God Is A Beast in a small club is what keeps me interested in going to gigs. This is where the real heavy music is in 2009. Ramesses, possessors of the largest cymbal known to man, are doomed to be the eternal nearly-men of the UK doom scene. The third time I’ve seen them and the third time their set has been ruined by poor sound, it’s only when the band stop midway through and ask that the guitars are turned up that the sound rises from the mire and with more bite and edge the riffs can finally be heard. Everybody’s got a noise project these days but not everyone’s got a SkinnyCock. If the set had gone on much longer I’d have started dancing!