December 6th 1813: Byron writes in his diary:

"This journal is a relief. When I am tired - as I generally am - out comes this, and down goes everything..... I have just thrown a poem into the fire (which has re-lighted to my great comfort), and I have smoked out of my head the plan for another. I wish I could as easily get rid of thinking."

For many years I have been an indefatigable note taker. The extent of it causes my head to spin, and as the years role by it gets worse, not better. In this emptiest of empty worlds, paradoxically my curiosity constantly expands - though I do draw the line at Formula One. And even then I am curious as to why people continue to follow it, forever on the look out for the moment of breakthrough when spectators crash the barriers, not the cars.

Despite having a pocket computer, I still have several notebooks on the go and which I try to keep separate. A keyboard cannot match the spontaneity of a pen, and when, for example, looking through a microscope at a hatching butterfly egg, a note book and a Biro is undoubtedly the more flexible and appropriate tool. And when depressed, to scribble pain on a page is about all one can manage to do.

Notwithstanding my best efforts to keep topics apart, one subject constantly threatens to spill over into another. Whenever I do this I make a mental note of the fact - and then forget where I have buried it, only for it to take me by surprise later, and when I least expect it. This note taking is a whirlpool of impressions, facts and opinions that constantly threatens to drag me under. But how to order this material? Should I even try to do so? Shouldn’t I just let it roll and roll and accept that all attempts to impose a discrete ordering undermines the spirit of this note taking and is not really me in any case? Anything less fails to show how I arrive at my ideas and diminishes me as a person. Moreover, I firmly believe those who can narrow things down, are able to do so only because they lead a narrower life. So why not push things to extremes and see what comes up, for capitalism, more than ever before, is now a total culture requiring a total response? And I did let rip - only to find I was drowning in the flow. The following is like some compressed file put together around what I initially wrote, constructed from the building blocks of the far-flung note taking – and which still needs opening.....

Nature diaries ------ and

We were only eight years old when we first started to keep nature diaries (c/f “Mabey Baby” also on the RAP web). We had moved from a small railway halt in Co Durham on the fringes of a vast industrial estate that during the Second World War had produced armaments. To disguise it from the air, the armaments factories had been covered in spoil and clinker taken from local pit heaps and blast furnaces. As very young children this was to be our playground, farmers’ fields and country lanes unable to offer anything like the same enticements. And so was born in us the combined love of nature and industrial wasteland which has never left us and that we still regard as home. From a very early age we knew we were more likely to find skylarks, flocks of lapwings and gold finches on the heaped-over factories than in the surrounding countryside. Still in primary school, our hearts and minds were flung open to an “industrial pantheism”, experiencing in places that were then, and still are, regarded as eyesores, a profound, unforgettable sensation of connectedness. On these wastes intermingled with tarred railway sleepers, rusting rails, forgotten boilers and half demolished brick huts, nature teemed effortlessly. And we knew which industrial workers to trust and who would come down to our level, remembering, perhaps, that sites like these had also once been their playground. Looking back these men, who were sometimes setting snares, also helped increase our powers of observations.

This expansiveness diminished somewhat amid the soot and grime of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Sad to say only one diary survives from that time. But leafing through it, whether in the shape of disused quarries, railway sidings or mill yards, the presence of industry is always there as a backdrop. I was particularly struck by the evocative power of one entry that reads: “Sat 15th Jan 1954. At half past nine it started snowing. It was a very silent day, not a tree stirred”. Otherwise the diary is memorable for its documenting of butterflies not known to be then present in industrial West Yorkshire, like the common blue and meadow brown. Brought to the attention of Yorkshire naturalists only in the last ten years, these observations dating from the early 1950s indirectly led to the discovery of a remarkable colony of grayling in Healey Mills MarshallingYards in lower Calderdale during 2003.

Though sporadically at first, sometime in the late eighties and after a lapse of three decades, I began to keep a nature diary once more. Whenever I wish to refer back to then, invariably I cannot immediately put my finger on what I am looking for, having first to wade through a mass of other material. I therefore resolved to keep a notebook specifically devoted to observations in the field. So every time I go out, mainly in pursuit of butterflies, I record the exact date and quickly note down other details. Stacked on a shelf are fourteen volumes of notes that have been thrown down in massive haste in case I forget a detail that may eventually turn out to be of some significance. To say the least these tatty volumes make for disjointed reading. However their lack of premeditation is a welcome release from the bane of considered writing.

To these notebooks another has been added entitled “anatomical details”, although the varying degrees of magnification provided by the microscope allows me to observe and photograph everything from living butterfly eggs to a single scale from a butterfly’s wing. The number of prior entries extend from August 2006 to August 2007, the last entry detailing a magnificent derive we took through Grimsby docks. There is the same rapid fire, staccato delivery as in my nature diaries: “a sunken boat, its funnel projecting from the water - a shop with a sign on which is painted “ice and ocean”- in the window a chandelier and a pair of rubber gloves - a rowing boat on a mound of earth with starlings resting on the rim, on closer inspection only half a boat as if sawn in two – on the prow of this part boat someone had recently sprayed ‘Gemma’ - the Jubilee Café - a black wooden hut - behind it a small stove with a tall chimney some 8ft high - plastic chairs and a mean table. In fact there were chairs to be found all over the docks left just as quayside workers had left them. No one ever tidied them away. The strangeness and emptiness of it – opposite the Jubilee Café a failed installation made from a disused dockside crane - to one side a broken down planter covered in Canadian fleabane from which soil was spilling out onto the road- on the top a discarded brief case - magnificent, cryptic concrete structures now abandoned - huge frame-less windows rising above the docks like empty cinema screens peering onto nothing and with no audience - a couple of turnstones hopping about – their quick, jerky gait was markedly more hurried than the flock on the tiered breakwater on the approach to Cleethorpes- the sudden transition from freshwater to saline plants - mugwort then sea purslane and spurrey – and as for the insect life - could it be almost as good as England’s rainforest… and more likely to survive because the place will be saved from the scorched earth of gentrification unlike the Thames Estuary? After all N. E. Lincs is a fragment cut off from any real post modern development; a land that neo liberal time forgot.

Over the years the details have tended to uncouple and become less focussed on butterflies and habitat as the world forced its blanket attention upon us. I wonder too if the hopes we had invested in a resolution of the class struggle had not now been transferred onto nature and that the struggle for nature is obliged to take on anti capitalist perspective, the issue of an anti-statist autonomy mattering as much as it did to a lapsed workers' movement. The treatment meted out to us over the fate of the Dingy Skipper on the spoil heaps of South and West Yorkshire was also a requiem to the defeat of the miners' strike and which, by the same token, also sealed the fate hereabouts of this endangered butterfly. To the eternal shame of conservationist bodies, especially Butterfly Conservation and other Dingy Skipper deniers, this holocaust of the species has passed off with never a mention. Thus two linked communities were cleaned off the face of the earth, their memory lingering on in photographs and shaky film footage.

Whenever we took photographs, and latterly film, in the field we endeavoured to capture the small as well as the large, minute detail as well as background. In 2008 the binding polarities were taken to their furthest extremes, when, in a gale on the top of the Langdale Pikes, I succeeded in filming a microscopic close up of the eye and antennae of a mountain ringlet, its “eyelashes” whipped by the wind shaking the butterfly and minutes later a panoramic view from Sergeant Mann, the Langdales’ topmost pinnacle, my tripod tethered down by rocks. All this was hastily scribbled down latter that day, the unearthly fluorescence of the hair moss and lichen tachiste rocks noted and how when gasping for breath, having just ascended Dungeon Gyhll, the mountain landscape appeared to heave as if breathing. This scrawl that passes for writing is not just badly written; it is frequently undecipherable!

Above, top left: Stickle Tarn and Harrison Stickle. Above, top right: Pike of Bliscoe.
Middle, bottom left: Mountain Ringlet sheltering in howling gale, 2008. Middle, bottom right: Eye of the same butterfly.
Bottom, left: Dungeon Ghyll from valley bottom. Bottom, right: Mountain Ringlet on the Langdale summit.

The photographs that we have taken in the field mostly lie unscrutinised, shut away in wallets. Space permitting, they could profit from a greater exposure because over time one begins to notice things, their continual presence becoming less habit forming as if time is required to enable them to release their secret. Propped up on a work surface is a photograph of a oleander hawk moth taken with Notting Hill’s cloud clipping edifice of Trellick Tower in the background. I had imagined to myself how wonderful it must be to encounter the moth resting on vegetation or walls in dusty urban settlements at the base of the Atlas Mountains. And it remained like that until by chance a woman, in recovery from breast cancer, remarked on it and I took down a copy of Skinner’s “Moths of the British Isles” and showed her a plate of hawk moths. We both immediately noted the museum specimen lacked “depth”, that the moth’s top wings appeared much flatter than they did in my photo. Here the wings gave the illusion of an alternating concave and convex undulating surface with a plant like stem running through the top wing, the effect greatly increased by the moths natural resting position than in the splayed out museum specimen. The overall effect was intensely three dimensional and resembled more the skeletal remains of an animals skull that has lain on the ground for some length of time and is already turning mouldy. That or overlaying foliage in which light and dark varies, an effect that has evolved to trick likely predators. I looked at the top wings of other hawk moths and wondered if photographs taken in the field would tell the same story, particularly in the case of the silver striped hawk, striped hawk, spurge hawk and bedstraw hawk, all from warmer climes where a greater adaptation to the starker effects of light and shade would be called for. I then went on to note that the under wings showed less variation throughout the Sphingidae than did the top wings, and that the colours were toward the warm end of the spectrum – red, pink, orange, yellow and more saturated, though broken by two dark bands that followed the outlines of the wing margins and with just the hint of a third more or less parallel to the abdomen. Did these colours and bands have any evolutionary significance, or were they just junk adornment that just happened to gratify our aesthetic sensibilities? In any case it was a rare delight that this one photo glanced at a thousand times but never once really looked at, had triggered such a train of reflection. But could repeated exposure to the same moving images ever do the same, creating insight rather than overwhelming it? Or would one forever remain trapped in the same endless, ground hog, loop screaming for release from a medium becoming ever more invasive and threatening to take over one’s entire personality?

- and the new nature writing -

For some time now there has been talk of a new nature writing which we were contemptuous of from the start. The very idea one should define oneself as a writer has long been bankrupt, despite the many blood transfusions and repeated bailouts that grow ever more desperate, the whole gamut of art being capitalisms' final redoubt. Writing henceforth must remain a mere adjunct to expression, a prelude to action rather than yet more words, words, words. The “new nature writing” aspires to an engagement with reality, but because ecological critique is not wedded to a rigorous critique of capitalism, stays put at a sentimentalising, even deeply conservative, notion of the humanising of nature and its interconnectedness with us. Instead of developing the “Thesis on Feurbach“ by Marx, this drift has led to the reclaiming of Feurbach for ultimately reactionary purposes. In “Crow Country”, Mark Cocker describes the way rooks followed the spread of European farming from the cutting down of the primeval forest to the present day. Though appalled by today’s agi-business, ultimately Coker's tone is resigned and rooks become a symbol of our heritage, and so indirectly the key to our salvation: rookeries were recorded in the Doomsday Book and subsequently regarded as a sign of baronial entitlement.

This engaged approach to nature lived on as a romantic sub culture composed largely of working people to whom the mere passive recording of the facts was an in built anathema, knowing that their chances of a better life depended on practical change. Concurrent with this there was a modernising literary fashion stemming from the Cambridge professor F. R. Leavis linking the practise of poetry to the practise of rural crafts like that of the wheelwright, the whole edifice being predicated on a rejection of industry, the industrial working class and the class struggle that went with it. Though we are spared the embarrassment of the new nature writing breaking into song, some of this attitude still remains though brought up to date by the avant-garde aware Richard Mabey, particularly in his fulsome praise of the wretched eco artist Andy Goldsworthy. More or less intuitively the new nature writers know they must not revive the corpse of romanticism down to the last detail otherwise they will become a laughing stock. The undeniable power of “Crow Country” partly comes from its unconscious assimilation of the revolutionary avant-garde of the first decades of the 20th century, for what we have here is not poetry but the actual poetry of facts. The same goes for Richard Deakins ”Waterlog” and “Wildwood” which though interspersed with quotes from Clare, Ruskin etc, seeks to practise Keats not imitate him. To get to know about pond and river life Deakins would swim in them, “taking part” even more than Keats, it has to be said,“ in the experience of things”. In “Crow Country” the landscape is viewed, at least partially, through non-human eyes.

Yet another example of this budding genre is Phillip Hoare's “Leviathan-or the Whale”. Like so many other works written by natural historians and biologists, we are repeatedly reminded of Kant, as though his imprimatur would, unawares, stamp everything produced after him. What could evoke the Kantian sublime more than when swimming beside a Sperm Whale, Hoare experiences “a sensation of beauty, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded, an almost religious feeling”, and though made to feel small, he cannot rid himself of his (rational?) ego: “I felt insignificant” he says “but not quite”. Hoare is not a natural historian, marine biologist or cetologist by training, having studied English Literature at university.

The two novels that had most impressed him were also ours, both written within four years of each other: Emily Bronte's “Wuthering Heights” and Herman Melville's “Moby Dick”. Though both were written at the height of the novel as the literary genre both anticipated the complete collapse of the novel. In fairness, we would add two others that still excite with possibility: “Tristram Shandy" by Lawrence Sterne at the moment the novel was kicking off in the 18th century and inevitably “Ulysses” and its aftermath in “Finnegan's Wake” by James Joyce in the first few decades of the 20th century both of which finally laid waste to anything promised by the artificial novelistic conceit. (Ever after, the novel has meant absolutely nothing no matter that as a dead form it is more ubiquitous than ever marking a cocooned, reified, dead or dying existence).

Though Hoare refers to “Wuthering Heights” as a novel he never describes “Moby Dick” as one but simply as a book, an omission that is not thought through because not entirely conscious. Hoare perceptively notes the book “stands outside itself from the very start”, weighted with exo-literary minutiae: alongside typical taxonomical details are also weird ones, rather in the same manner Pliny would include descriptions of fabled monsters in his natural histories. Millennia later, natural historians would disdainfully dismiss these apparitions, though logic requires that we begin to accept that the human capacity to imagine is also part of natural history. Now necessitating a radical reappraisal, its meaning has remained unexamined, superseded by the exigencies of scientific method and the need for accurate recording .The book’s legendary beginning “Call me Ishmael” is like the sound of a wave breaking and Ishmael himself is a walking conceit of discordant suggestions, continually “sidestepping his own narrative” and interrupting the reader with “diversions and digressions, pulling him aside with hell fire sermons or musical interludes, with anatomical allegories or sensual dissertations on spermaceti oil”.

Hoare dips in and out of “Moby Dick” becoming “engrossed only for my attention to wander”. We can also pick up “Wutherings Heights” and more or less open it at random in a way one cannot do with the historical novels of a Tolstoy or Balzac, for here time frames reign supreme. In these two books the form of the novel, though only two centuries old, is – as previously pointed out - already breaking down, their extraordinary power residing in this formal dissolution. Though there is a narrative structure, it is also one we help create and personal to each of us, time coming to something of a standstill in these two seminal contraries of the novel. Hoare half grasps he is the beyond of “Moby Dick” but never quite. Human beings are absent from his evocation of a pre-lapsarian world as is also a critique of art: “it was as if human kind never happened, as if the ocean had reverted to another Eden”. The worry is that in bringing to light an endangered world in which, as oceans warm and the food supply of whales dwindle, there is no space for man. We are hardly at the beginning of this development that could eventually turn into the horror of horrors.

Moby Dick” especially began slowly to obsess the growing revolution of modern art in the first few decades of the 20th century though nothing like to the extent of what was to succeed it - the modern art of revolution – which still remains to be realised. And wasn't it so because the book deals with so much in a wide ranging, even disconnected, passionate totality which constantly leaps out of the pages and sentences in a call for imaginative activity and action? Inevitably it gave rise to Charles Olsen's perceptive theorising about Melville which complimented the American beat lifestyle and action painting of the 1950s though rather more coherently than the recuperative, often tired, artistic limitations these movements entailed. Nearly four decades later and Loren Goldner was to add further extensive reflections to this wide ranging critique instigated by the quest that was Melville's life and the expression of that complex, wild experience. In fact Goldner in his “Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne & the Antemosaic Cosmic Man” was able to to formulate an original and sensitive critique of the present failure of social revolution in the continent of North America. The essence of Melville particularly as expressed through “Moby Dick” means such cavalier interpretation is wholly in keeping with the spirit of the original and doesn't feel one iota out of place. (Needless to say the academic pantheon around Melville memorabilia will have none of this and Loren Goldner was forced to publish his contribution through his own auspices - something we are entirely familiar with and the 'new' nature writers are not!) The fact that “Moby Dick” is now being placed high up in the pre-history of eco critique may bode well though if the raw urgency of imaginative action which is the very heart of “Moby Dick” isn't emphasised it may also prove to be nothing more than another dead end. For let's face it: most action proposed by even the better part of the ecos falls well short of the basic trajectory needed, hidebound by statist perspectives and professional status meaning infinite reforms of the present system of capitalist accumulation encountering moral duty is the only game in town. But first a few asides......

It is time to get down, dirty and very personal. Overtime, the records I have kept of butterfly jaunts, though always dashed down with an eye to other details, also include accounts of brief encounters in the field. These have, we believe, a tendency to turn more impassioned than at any other time since the mid 1600s, an upside down world producing a nature turned upside down. This development is so momentous it’s best not to dwell on it too much since it can tip a person into insanity. Suffice to say that birders are more conscious of it than lepidopterists because of the mass decline of summer migrants. The annual migration of five billion birds between Africa and Europe is on the scale of the Gulf Stream or Indian monsoon. As regular as clockwork they arrive and depart – or rather once did. All “new nature writing” is aware of impending eco collapse. What is substantially less obvious in this writing is the extent of capitalist induced social collapse that destroys not just the complex irreproducibility of the planetary ecosystem, but personal relationships as well.

Apart from a meticulously kept nature diary and sporadic entries arising out of the building scene, there are countless pages of tortured stuff recording the messy details of breakdowns following failed relationships with the opposite sex, the kind of thing one doesn’t want others to read, is embarrassing to re-read but also contains moments of insight so naked, intensely private and self revelatory that only the heart of darkness can unlock. Am I forever to be denied a companion prepared to put up with the rigours of fieldwork? Both Mabey and Cocker have endured quite severe depressives episodes but theirs is not an expression of the all-round hopelessness the approaching end of human time is bound to produce. In Cocker's case we feel in the background the comforting presence of domestic orthodoxy and it is difficult to escape the conclusion his unfailing crows are a continuation of time-honoured ritual, both human and animal: “Crow Country” is as motionless as socio-biology gets. How different my life has been, how ripped apart in comparison because more open to experiment and a yearning for total change. I wonder too if my fondness for the wild life havens of industrial dereliction over countryside canons, means my experiences and outlook are indelibly marked by relationships forged in the melting pot of the inner cities and which I genuinely believe, though fragmentary and courting the non-existent, are superior, when all is said and done, to ones based on more traditional premises. If the human race is to have a future, this is the way forward, not least because it breaks the reproductive spell of a planet now threatening a holocaust of children so dreadful as to end forever the desire for reproductive success.

Building work notebooks and the

displacing of writing, music and

nature

Two years ago in 2007 I remember sitting in a garden with others and all of us at the end of our tether because we were unable to plastically realise the building dream of the woman who owned this darned house. It was an old 19th century house with all ceilings and walls on the piss, the mortar between the bricks being little more than dust. We had made a large kitchen out of three rooms each with different ceiling levels and walls that did not read through and so had to be evened out. We had just about made a silk purse out of a sows ear, as we, in desperate need of reassurance, told ourselves over and over again, and given the subsidence, a better job was not possible. Yet it did not meet with approval because the by now passé, energy wasteful, halogen head lights were literally millimetres out in some places. We were made to feel incompetent chancers and we were on the verge of jacking the job when my eye was drawn to a piece on John Coltrane written by the Guardian’s music critic John Fordham in which this musicologist for the first and last time excelled himself:

“Coltrane's huge yearning tone, sermonising intensity and revolutionary technique allowed him to sound like several saxophonists rolled into one, but for all that he always sounded as if striving for what still lay out of reach. It wasn't just the search for more music, or a different music, It sounded like the search for another world or another life” (13.7.07).

Jack Kerouac had also written brilliantly on Lester Young but this was different because it hinted at the transcendence of music. But would the great ‘Trane have ended on a building site like we had, dreaming of a far, far better world whilst being hounded by a pernickety client whose ideal of building were the bleak interiors of Canary Wharf and who went off to work looking like a prostitute in a see through dress, the better to sell properties to rich overseas buyers? Pushed to these extremes, temperatures rise and analysis grows razor sharp, each sally, in this mounting crescendo of insight, prompting an even smarter response, a carpenters pencil and scrap of paper torn from an open bag of plaster, all there is to note down some of the choicest turns of phrase, and then only very infrequently, the inspired bon mots mangled, because written down much later when the writing hand is free. Forget bad writing - like a latter day cuneiform, it hardly qualifies as writing at all. Nor is it apparently good building work either, and we would leave work resembling more a wart-covered toad than a human being. I was reminded of a passage from Lautreamont that could have been written especially for us, with the days events in mind:

“I cast a long look of satisfaction upon the duality that composes me ----I find myself beautiful! Beautiful as the congenital malformation of man’s sexual organs – or - as the fleshy wattle, conical in shape, furrowed by quite deep transversal wrinkles, which arises from the base of the turkey upper beak”;

or rather as the following truth:

“The system of scales, modes, and their harmonic series does not rest upon invariable natural laws but is, on the contrary, the result of aesthetic principles which have varied with the progressive development of mankind, and will vary again”;

and “above all like an iron clad turreted corvette”. The reference to music could have been lifted word for word from a then current textbook, though hardly a standard one. Again it is a vivid demonstration of Lautreamont's magpie-like clashing together of unrelated material whose bizarre possibilities for good and evil also reflect a cock-eyed totality out there, one in the process even than of becoming misshapen, phantasmagoric and very ominous.

I greatly regret that I did not keep a more thorough diary of the building sites we have known over the past 35 years. For working at the coal face of the property boom was, looking back, an extraordinarily rich experience and had this personal record been more complete, had I thrown down literally everything that came into my head, for every piece of fiction appearing in estate agents descriptions, in government statistics, in economic analyses or in trade union records I could have substituted a real story. So I often have to rely on memory to fill in the gaps, like the bricklayer who saw rise up in front of him on Dartmoor, a brick wall of vast proportions reaching to the cloud base. Or another brickie who was back living in his parents’ council accommodation, his own house seized by his aspirational, estranged wife who had married him for his building skills and taken out an injunction against him, prohibiting him from seeing his kid. To cope with his depression he would stare for hours into his parents’ aquarium and try for all he was worth to think himself a fish with a memory span of less than two seconds. That way he could forget his wife and child. We were often struck by the way builders, particularly those with general building skills, commanded a premium in the marriage market, complimenting that of an endlessly rising property market. They were in fact Gasoline Alley’s new rock stars and could marry up, if they chose to, but only on condition they became aggressively more entrepreneurial

Many years ago we worked with a couple of ex-Catholic Irish lads from Belfast who had been laid off with some reasonable redundancy from the Harland and Wolfe shipyards. They had no wish to ever become sub contractors and were dating a pair of lasses from the all girl pop group Bananarama, then just breaking into the charts. Naïve colleens though the girls were, it was inevitable they would be swallowed whole by the music industry and would in turn spit out their Irish chippies. Years later we saw one of them, now a broken man, on his own and talking to himself. He had become a subcontractor, addicted, like a moth to a flame, to frequenting the rock musicians’ hangout, the Horley Arms, in Camden Lock. With property on its ass, building merchants are suffering as never before, B&Q advertising its wares to the accompaniment of a thirty year old former hit single by – Bananarama! Hardly back to where they started from, though, more's the pity.

Sometimes a record of events related as much to nature as to building. During the total eclipse of the 1990s we were working on a boat moored in the Thames. As the midday sky began to darken we stopped working, noting how under Battersea Bridge the mallards began to roost, some tucking their heads beneath their wings. Out in midstream on an empty Thames barge, a dozen herons became as eerily motionless as their ornamental tin counterparts. As the moment of totality approached, corks popped, and the inevitable rockets launched, the crowd gathered on the embankment breaking into applause. During the last eclipse in the 1920s, in the little Pennine town of Giggleswick then directly in the path of the eclipse, people had fallen on their knees. Which was worse, we wondered, religious dread or natures' grandest spectacles become a performance to be cheered and clapped at?

- Nature as merely another media circus -

The immense contemporary problem for us and the essential one we have to deal with is the passive consumption of nature; nature as something to be viewed, as simple entertainment; a nature X Factor to be switched on and off as we surf with boredom; an hour long TV spectacular between soaps, football results and late night pornography, and all relating to the omnipotence of money. It is nature as spectator sport celebrating an absent life, something which isn't practised let alone something we immerse ourselves in or consciously live with. We delight in the discovery of a miniature, multi-coloured parrot in an undiscovered rain forest while killing the dull little black beetle scurrying across our sterile carpets bought with a 30% discount from Dunelm or Allied Carpets. Keats exhortation in the early 19th century to seek out "negative capability" which by now should have flowered on a mass scale with the concept deepened magnificently - meaning a large amount of us would now have some idea what it is like to be a bat or a beetle - has virtually disappeared without trace.

It as though some horrible, benighted recognition that should never have seen the light of day has been born within us like a Maldorean monster which says nature is dying, if not already dead and so fucking what for at least we have the compensation of celebrity culture. Or, if not that, at the very least celebrities will save the planet as they engage in saving everything else. It's a realisation intimating that the final extinction has already taken place and from now on a dying nature can only be catalogued and filed away tucked into an eternal one thousand gigabyte yellow folder drifting endlessly in cyberspace as we hasten ever faster to our final encounter with stardust.

Everything is circumscribed by an all powerful fatalism blithely masquerading as its exact opposite heralding the era of the living museum; of a pickled in aspic nature inseparable from a living sculpture intertwined with each other forever! It is the era of a spurious radical nature as permanent gallery exhibit writ large; a space to be charged for by every visiting, cloned consumer replete with officious aesthete police touting a disposition of silent, supine worship.

We are still at the early stages of the financialization of nature. That eco artists are without a doubt the emissaries of this process was clearly evident from the recent “Radical Nature” exhibition in the Barbican Centre in London during the summer of 2009. The exhibition's mast head was a field of wheat planted and harvested in Battery Park at the tip of Lower Manhattan in 1982. Called simply “Wheatfield - a Confrontation” it is now famous, but it would be in a far better world if it was now regarded as infamous - with the essential proviso 'infamous' for the right reasons. The fact that the wheatfield was planted on land worth $4.5 billion neatly disguised another totally ignored fact that it has to be the most value-added wheat field in history. The harvested grain travelled to 25 cities around the world in an exhibition called the “International art show for the end of world hunger” organised by the Museum of Minnesota. Superficially a protest against the crudest, most blatant, form of commerce, it raised the prospect of an art farming in which crops can be valorised according to whether they are labelled art or not. The artist, Agnes Denes, has been able to live off it ever since and was indeed “recreating the work on a scrap of forgotten land in industrial East London" as an associate editor of the New Scientist put it (15th August 2009), insensible to the way the recreation was being used to greenwash the Olympiad site and increase real estate values. What other farmer in history has lived off the proceeds of a two acre wheat field for well over a quarter of a century? The artistically modified seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the world and, given time, Guggenheim Seed PLC may come to rival Montsanto. However we can be certain of one thing: AM seeds will be a lot more expensive than GM seeds – and far harder to combat.

Truth about nature must also be denied like never before in a kind of strange oscillation between depressing fact and a euphoric make believe about the future as nature is aestheticised from all quarters. It has been said recently by the media in general in the slightly better, climate-wise spring and summer of 2009 in the UK that we have had a glorious year for insect activity. A brief respite, a slight rally, has been hyped beyond all cognisances of even minimal truths. On the simplest of levels, any nondescript, casual observer will tell you in comparison to the buddleia bushes of even ten years ago the florets are empty of the pollinators which, in their turn, were empty in comparison to the late 1980s and so on as we travel backwards in time. One example will suffice: a few photographs, well courted by the media, portray a pretty picture of eight or so Heath Fritillary butterflies resting on a frond of bracken in East Blean Woods near Canterbury thus merely sharpening the appalling con we are forced to swallow. Yet none of the official, 'important' lepidopterists and other experts will say anything leading about this for fear of courting pariah status as they eternally look over their shoulders frightened of their shadows and forever hedging their bets.

Above left: The offending super-abundance in East Blean Woods. Above right: The offending butterfly dome.

Indicative of such grovelling toadying, every individual belonging to this crew is singing the praises of that monster of monstrosities; the huge geodesic structure now being built to house the lucky (?) representatives of enough of the world's dying invertebrates near St Albans in Hertfordshire. Nobody even dares murmur that this artificial palace of hospitalised beauty is a sure sign the battle has been lost before the forces have even engaged in resolute skirmishing. Yet this monument to death is clapped, clapped and clapped again. Oh the noise of that joyful din! Yet more than ever this artificial twisting of paradise signifies that the rest of the real environment, even in the vicinity of St Albans – e.g. the vicious widening of the M1 – can go hang.

In a similar vein the London Pestival exhibition on the Southbank artsy/fartsy scene gets bigger and more sophisticated by the year as the combination between artist and insect is gradually made more rounded or rather conical like some aesthetes giant wasp's nest. Aren't we the lucky ones because wasn't it ourselves in Icteric in Newcastle in the mid 1960s who first set the Pilkington father and now latterly son on this path as the figure of Mark Pilkington certainly figures large in this display? Cynics and buffoons will certainly say we blow our own trumpet, yet it is no more than truth still hidden from history! There is little point here going into all the ins and outs suffice to google Pestival to provide yourself with a host of irrelevant details giving some idea what the project is about, though obviously the central, salient facts are missing. In 2009, computer aided design & build took centre stage via a giant mock-up of a termites nest suggesting such a form of construction is the way out for architecture at a dead end rather like some updated repeat of the mid 1960s Archigram project but this time around replete with an eco veneer and just like aeons ago, helps keeps the idiotic role of architect alive and kicking. Needless to say, we were reminded of the Icteric beetle (see “A Malicious Dunciad in Newcastle” elsewhere on the RAP web) as natural architecture which we unceremoniously threw into the sea at Tynemouth sometime in 1966-7 as already our critique of architecture way back then was becoming more sharpened. No need here to go into psychogeography and all it implied though perhaps it's worth pointing our fulsome praise of the free-for-all relationship between human beings and nature conceived as living space, in a probably ex-colliery allotment in Maltby, South Yorks which we have referred to as the Maltby favela in one of our present films on the demise of the northern Dingy Skipper butterflies to get some idea of a more fruitful way out of the impasse of modern and post modern architecture. More than ever this curious favela – for want of a better description - is a space put together over the years without the aid of the scurrilous profession of architecture!

Yet this art/nature/architecture syndrome pulls all the “the little learning is a dangerous thing” nitwits in everywhere and their numbers are mushrooming and among them sometimes those with the beginning of an idea who could really go somewhere but tend to be derailed by one obfuscation after another. Among these serried ranks can be placed an organisation like “Buglife” which starting out with combative spirit in the road protests of the 1990s directing spot on telling criticisms of English Nature (now Natural England) over the demise of the Desmoulin's whorl snail etc on a Newbury by-pass translocation, (a process whereby threatened species are moved to a new location where they invariably die) relinquished their early promise as more and more they courted official media and were equally more and more patronised by middle-of-the-road eco organisations. The outcome is also today part of the backbone of Pestival. Unable to go down the searching, difficult path of a new total, revolutionary, autonomous critique they have been placated by half measures and “Buglife” is an awe of environmental art!

Alas, we fear something of the same fate, though coming from different angles, may befall “Workers' for Climate Action” who've played such an inspiring part in fomenting the employee occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight in 2009. We note more and more – like “Buglife” before them – they resort to interesting letter writing to newspapers like the Guardian whom it seems never refuse them. (The Guardian has always refused ours when we've been stupid enough to put pen to paper addressed to that crock of shit!) We note naiveté too though this time through a touching faith in trade union structures as means towards eco/social emancipation without even cautioning about the need for open assemblies outside of any bureaucratic interference. And for sure, their critique of art will probably be non-existent and they could so easily fall for “Pestival” display events. But we shall see....

The occupation of the wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight laid bare the limitations of the eco movement even in its most progressive aspect, namely the Workers for Climate Action group. An initial enthusiasm was rapidly tempered when it became apparent how much they were still in hock to traditional trade union ideology, the ideology of nationalization and ultimately a workers' state, though this time a 'green' workers' state. However it did mark something of a break and may possibly have occasioned a bit of a rethink in the ranks of the green movement, forcing greens to disinter the real, unofficial, history of the workers' movement that for over a quarter of a century has been declared dead and buried, along with, it is essential to add, the official workers' movement. To say the least there is much catching up to be done and so little time in which to do it. And meanwhile we are still left talking to ourselves and brick walls.

Amid the hubbub caused by the occupation which briefly caught the headlines – Bob Crow the Gen. Sec. of RMT (Rail/Maritime/Transport union) ably summed occupations up as “immediate, focussed and high profile and can force a dispute into the headlines at short notice” – it was soon forgotten that the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight was a non unionised plant. However this was not true of the Visteon occupation earlier in the year. Visteon was a spin off from Ford and when Ford's decided to close the plant, the staff received just six minutes notice to clear their lockers and get the fuck out. The redundancy terms were far inferior to what they had been promised and after an initial plan to ram the main gates; a back way into the building was found. Local people, some with no connection with the plant, joined in with the struggle and saw it as their own – just as was to happen on the Isle of Wight. A placard appeared “don't need politicians, don't need bosses, workers take control”. A classic statement of its kind and which, if it were to become fact, Leninists, Trotskyites etc would be the first to oppose, workers control of a Ford plant, no matter how radical in terms of rejecting politicians and bosses, simply does not make sense today when it is essential all production is fundamentally altered and redirected according to whether it is sustainable or not. Reimagined is how ecologists like to put it, which gives a hint of the creative flair that is vital to success but not that actual workers need to be mobilised from the ground up in order to carry it out. To save the planet and teach the majority of ecologists a lesson, workers of the world have still to unite.

The slogans that issued from the Vestas occupation, though not as abstractly radical, somehow struck deeper by recognising it was humanity's future that was at stake. The occupying Vestas workers called for the nationalisation of their enterprise unlike the Visteon workers who did not (perhaps realising that this option really was a dead duck), adding, “its about the history of humanity”. However at this point the occupation was open to be taken by the ideology of a “green new deal” which has been much aired since the financial crises hit but not acted upon primarily because it does focus on manufacture and goes against the grain of a country still sold on financial capitalism and the need to protect the hegemony of the City of London whose present sway, as regards these islands, is historically unprecedented. It is an acutely disabling power and the number of people who can no longer open a pot of paint or use a screwdriver is astonishing. It is as if a fatwah has been issued against all practical capacities and the “British genius” for invention put permanently on the dole. To even mention the international division of labour is nigh on forbidden and that the growth in consumption and the spendthrift profligacy that goes with it has been made possible by the off shoring of production and by the willingness of countries, mainly in the east, with a huge trade surplus to fund the deficit. However the demise of the dollar and the decision by China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading could mark the end of an Indian summer of a hoped for, and speedy return, to an economy built on financial speculation. Purchasing treasury bonds denominated in a currency likely to go into free fall is not an attractive proposition. Yet again finance capital is as vulnerable as ever to self-slaughter.

Like it or not the greens are very much a part of this disabling tendency and harbour a dislike of blue collar workers. And so it should come as no surprise that come Climate Camp in the late summer of 2009, newspaper coverage had dropped any mention of the Vestas occupation. Given the anti-worker hostility that is endemic in this country, one felt this was not mere oversight but policy and one the greens are more than happy to go along with. On August 31st a letter from Workers for Climate Action appeared in the Guardian claiming that the newspaper’s reports had not mentioned the presence of the Vestas workers who “are still fighting for the nationalisation of the plant” and who are “taking part because they understand that workers organisations and the fight against climate change are inseparable” The letter concludes “trade unionists should join the debate”.
Workers for Climate Action had obviously got wind the turbine factory was due to close long before it was officially announced. Some weeks prior to that they had set up camp outside the main gates and spent long hours talking to the workers who were employed inside. According to the Guardian of July 25th 2009,, "Initially they were met with sceptism but gradually small numbers of workers began to be persuaded that action could make a difference”. The group, to their great credit, obviously played a major part in getting the workers to occupy the plant. The ease with which they were able to talk to the workers must have been greatly facilitated by the fact there were no official trade union representatives present to put them off their stride. Like as not, the latter would have regarded the camp as undermining the negotiations with Vestas management to keep the plant open and would have advised their members to steer clear of the trouble makers, even saboteurs, parked outside. So how come Workers for Climate Action were now directing their appeal at bona fide trade unionists, as if to say people who are not in trade unions can play no part in the struggle? This is a leftist prejudice of the first order and one that throughout history has been disproved time and again initially in some of the writings of Bakunin and William Morris and, a little later, eloquently spelt out by Rosa Luxembourg in her agitational, book length, pamphlet “The Mass Strike” through to the late 1960s and 1970s where this disposition was more prominent than ever e.g. a huge swathe of the May ’68 revolt in France was comprised of the non-unionised etc. Then suddenly a vast dumbing down took place and a direct outcome of the grotesque neoliberal experiment. This theoretical humbug must in part be put down to the catapulting of Workers for Climate Action briefly into the limelight and the fact that Bob Crow of the RMT was prepared to sign a joint letter with them, which the Guardian published without further ado. But even without Crow's imprimatur, letters from the group were published in the newspaper. However if the letters had born witness to the hobbling role of trade unions and political parties in revolutionary moments, and how it will be no different come a genuine green revolution, then, for certain, not one letter would have been published.

So many of these people who make up this half way house critique, though not perhaps Workers' for Climate Action, are precisely the ones who will see in the Guardian's recently created 10:10 campaign (the pledge to cut your personal emissions by 10% within the year) a means of future freedom via fluffy eco get-togethers; the stirring counterpart to the inevitable bureaucratic sclerosis of the Copenhagen climate summit. For isn't the social basis of 10:10 those individuals who've spent their lives climbing somewhat the career ladder oriented around 'concerned' occupations or businesses spewing out high ideological good intent who've flocked to the Guardian's cause? For sure they'll cut somewhat their carbon emissions and tamper with their lifestyles a little but, for certain most will refuse to go down that very difficult, extra mile abandoning their bullshit professions, their buying and selling, or even their augmented purchasing power and/or their love affair with celebrity – minor or major. Like journalist Mad' Bunting they will be adept at a pernickety reeling off of carbon statistics they've improved upon, though essentially they'll never move beyond a holier than thou, deeply hypocritical, essentially moral response to commodified superabundance (for some) making sure their status in this wretched society remains an eternal given.

So it is left to us; those who've been cast aside and thrown away; those without official status either, culturally, politically or scientifically to say the obvious: Down with this huge sideshow – and slideshow – of utter bullshit .There are more of them than us, more, much more. Most of us don't have the means to buy big - or even medium expenditure - carbon polluting items. Most do not own a house, live the suburban existence, or even had/have a car and literally have no empathy with Mad Bunting’s hand wringing over a deluxe, very polluting, Aga cooker. Most too have always travelled by public transport and, as we know, George Monbiot finds buses depressing. So what about us who've never ever found this to be true?

Sadly we also know that most at the real sharp end have little awareness of the impending eco catastrophe and lack any sophistication in reeling off variation upon variation of green thoughts in green shades. However, the constant media bumph spewing out tales of an eco woe not accurately presented means that a minority of sharpenders are beginning to read through the phased alternate lines and are coming to the conclusion, whilst still hanging on somewhat to their fluffy teddy bears, that their carbon front print is very small indeed, so what are they exactly supposed to feel guilty about? It is not a climate change denial alibi neither because it inevitably seems to bring with it heightened, general eco awareness that big storms are on the way headed by an uprising of the dispossessed.

This patchy though growing awareness emanating from the ecos of no property and slight consumer pulling power can only really get somewhere by relying on themselves alone, minus the false friends of eco consumption and the have your cake and eat it alternative. This isn't denial rather its opposite as there is nothing today in dominant society which is creative or worth having. For sure interesting facts, interpretations, tendencies or what have you can for instance be taken from the 'new' nature writing providing all hesitations, half-measures and double dealings of these litterateurs are redefined by a down home energy and a previous wealth of hard, practical experience. It means if necessary we must court arrest through intelligent intervention aimed at getting across – through the publicity of an anti publicity - a sharpened eco awareness as an essential part of renewed, total revolutionary critique. The future points to extreme divergence: The spectacle is marginalising like never before all real thought, contribution and achievement, because in the era of a state supported free market buttressing the rich and super-rich we can only rely on our own genuine internet 2 samizdat, our own blogs, or more permanent ebooks as the facebookers, youtubers, twitterers forever dallying with the society of entertainment are cast aside. As for the rest, a dying, official, all pervasive media wants no truck with us in any case and more importantly, we no longer need to have any truck with them.....

Stuart & David Wise: Autumn 2009

Section 1

(Comments on Woolley Colliery/ Maybey’s “Beechcombing”/ The great storm of 1987 viewed as free form art

Essential childhood differences regarding play and their enduring effects)

Of all the new nature writers Richard Maybey is without a doubt the most art conscious in the “progressive” sense and the one with by far the biggest profile. I intend to confine my comments to his most recent book “Beechcombings” (2007) which came out in 2007, though with luck we intend to finish a short film on the Yorkshire sculpture park shot in 2006 when the park hosted an exhibition of Andy Goldsworthy’s nature nonsense which Maybey praised to the skies. The site could not have been more apt or the contradictions more telling. For just across the MI lay the old pit spoil heap of Woolley colliery now the scene of the utmost destruction upon which a new housing estate, with regal pretensions, was in the process of being constructed. Bearing the portentous title of Woolley Grange, the pit had once employed Arthur Scargill as well as hosted West Yorkshire’s largest Dingy Skipper colony. As far as we know this is the only estate that has actually been constructed on the slopes of the giant spoil heaps that bulk up through West and South Yorkshire, the latter in particular. The others have all been built on the flat surrounding them, so, with a bit of luck, soil creep and inadequate drainage just might result in a well-deserved po-mo Aberfan, the stepped piles of lego-brick, neo-Georgian terraces eventually slithering down the spoil to end up on the muddy flats alongside a pair of rare Little Ringed Plovers. Not only was the estate a triumphalist snub to the former mining community, it was also an act of malevolence against an endangered butterfly whose fate mattered as little to the developers (and ultimately their conservationist legitimators) as did that of the miners.

Above; Woolley Colliery's magnificently disturbed hills just across the M1 from the bland 18th century landscaping of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at Bretton Hall....

The sub title to “Beechcombings” is “the narratives of trees” implying there are a number from which we can take our pick. It also has post-modernist overtones suggesting each is a fiction in its own way and none really true. And like all post modernist writing it is taboo to ever once mention capitalism, that especially being a fiction we construct - or deconstruct - according to how the mood takes us, any one perspective as valid as that of any other. However the last thing Mabey can be accused of is relativist nihilism - merely that he backs off from ever hitting hard, though the mild mannered, erudite and it has to be said, gentlemanly text is constantly on the edge of tipping into real anger and critique. In the unlikely event of Mabey exploding with fury, he would unfortunately find that he would lose all of his false friends, partner and publishers overnight and that they would not be replaced by a better class of person, which by rights is what ought to happen. Such is the subtlety and brutishness of today’s blanket totalitarianism he would find himself marginalized to a degree he would not have thought possible, disrespected and denigrated at every turn. On the upside he would, at long last, find out who his real friends were.

Yet throughout the book Mabey’s real sympathies obviously lies with the commoners, as if they alone came closest to understanding and appreciating the essence of trees and the variable essence of woodland renewal and regeneration. Though hardly a let be approach, their “narrative” comes closest to that of the trees themselves had they been gifted with the capacity to speak. These and artists belonging to the 19th century Barbizon school and -----would you adam 'n' eve it ----- today's installation artists! Though he does not specifically mention Andy Goldsworthy in his book, Mabey does reproduce his nature sculpture “Beech Leaves at Scaur water” dated 1992 and his “Continuous Grass Stalks - Climbing a Tree Pinned with Thorns” dated 1983 from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and “Wall Sheaves” from 1993, a beech sculpture by David Nash, in fact mere planks of wood, which, though beautiful in themselves, are made ugly by being claimed as art by some tit of an artist. When compared to a fabulous photo of pollarded beech trees taken in1962, the former artworks pale into nothingness beside this twisting, crippled, arthritic flare-up of a tree. Away from the stink of art, this unpretentious photo lets nature speak for herself.

Mabey does however quote Antony “Gormless” Gormley approvingly whose studio was wrecked by the Great Storm of 1987 and whom he claims was one of the few with the discernment to enter into the storm’s critical spirit. He told a Times journalist “I regard the whole thing being in a sense nature pruning the works of man. There are times when I feel it was strangely appropriate…. One whole aspect of my work has been to reposition man within a kind of elemental context”. Banking context more like, for all installation art is a for-runner and celebration of gentrification, of money destroying what’s left of the exceptional and hope for a better future. Imposing the most dreadful conformity to commodification there has ever been, it is the death knell of let be, revolt and spontaneity whether in nature or man.

Two days after the Great Storm, Mabey toured the Kent /Sussex border to inspect the damage. Two days after the storm we were laying floors for a solicitor who had made something of a reputation defending the Angry Brigade. His pretend radicalism had long gone and amassing money had become the sole purpose of his wretched existence. Not content with the fees he was earning defending rich villains, he too treated the storm as an opportunity – an opportunity to make money by hiring lorries to pick up the felled trees he then intended to mill and sell. Unable to conceal our disgust, a day later we were laid off for taking the piss. Mabey says of the storms aftermath “the elegant landscape parks of the Garden of England were comprehensively rearranged”. We were delighted that Seven Oaks had lost all but one of its oaks and that especially the Royal Parks were a scene of utter devastation. Try as he might, Mabey couldn’t quite stifle his enthusiasm either, describing the Petworth estate in Sussex as “turned into a free form jungle” and that “he saw children having the time of their lives crawling about these vast natural climbing frames”.

Uprooted trees in Kensington Park, London following the great storm of October, 1997. One of the great storms of history, its real threat was not to trees - most elderly trees withstood the hurricane force winds - but to public order, dramatically changing this most royal - and boring - park for the good. But, of course, the trees were not allowed to thrive horizontally, and even in less doctored environments, it is rare to find a flourishing tree just as it fell in this most salutary of storms. Left unmolested in Kensington Park, and just two years on from the defeat of the British miners' strike, these levelling trees could easily have been read as foretelling the fall of the Windsors. Dendrologists learnt much from the roof plates of the blown-over trees and it became apparent that the trees most affected were young trees that had reached full size but had not the girth or developed root system to resist the gale. But, as always. real conservation had to be sacrificed to the ruling ideology of conservation, the clean-up and indiscriminate replanting inflicting at least as much ecological damage as the storm itself. The colossal sums of money spent on "restoring the nation's ravaged woods and parks" would only be exceeded (in fact greatly exceeded) by the amount lavished on spoil heap makeovers come the turn of the millenia. However, the latter was a vengeful act taking every conservationist body with it, whereas it is becoming increasingly respectable to condemn the wholesale rush to hew and sell-off the stricken trees following the hurricane of 1997.

The two contrasting perspectives are the measure of the differences separating us from Mabey. As a young lad growing up in the Chilterns he had given names to old (beech) trees, all of which are still standing. We did the same, except the location could not be more different. The landscapes of our childhood in the Co Durham and West Yorkshire have been all but obliterated for they were semi industrial though nature rich. Though not the only ones, railway stations, goods yards, sidings were our playgrounds of choice now all gone excepting the ‘heritage line’ that runs from Darlington to Bishop Auckland. Today a shadow of its former self, the line once continued on to Tow law and Wearhead right into the heart of the England largest expanse of common land totalling over 90,000 acres! Some years ago fondly looking at a photo of a field outside of a mean row of five station houses at Heighington in Co Durham where once we were privileged to live, it suddenly came to me the now grassed over, undulating strips were the remains of common land tillage. But the other lines that once were our familiars, like the one that ran from Wakefield to Bradford, are now nearly untraceable beneath unforgiving, ‘executive’ housing estates and roads including the MI which cuts right through it. I can never cross the refurbished railway bridge, the olive green wrought iron panels now replaced with breeze block, on Station Road in Ossett without recalling with a pang what once lay beneath it as recently as 1970. A magnificent railway station built on a curve, for example, the formally innovative utilitarianism – coach houses were traditional in comparison – involuntarily, and only briefly, redolent of a new way of living, malling having now totally destroyed the promise that once existed in railway stations.

The above photos are of a Heighington station, Co Durham and its environs that no longer exists marking the exact place where George Stevenson's Locomotion No 1 was first placed on the railway in 1825. The bottom right photo is of nearby Codlings Bridge where corncrakes could regularly be heard and where the dark green fritillary and var hospita albino form of the wood tiger moth were relatively abundant. Indeed in one of the trees near the bridge we once espied a large tortoiseshell butterfly....

Dead moths in their hundreds would accumulate at the bottom of the glass bowls protecting the gas mantles and if we were there when the mantles were replaced on Ossett station we would take the moths away with us. An entry in a joint nature diary from August 13th 1954 records how we witnessed a swallow chase a moth and "eat it up" that had been disturbed by a railway worker passing under the eves of a shed in the goods yard. Another entry records how on May 10th in the same year and in the same yard "a short tailed field vole" measuring "about 2 inches" and that “I nearly went over it one (sic) my bike”. These once fairly commonplace occurrences now truly are a thing of the past.

Above photos taken in the mid 20th century of the beautiful structure that was once Ossett station and its surrounds in West Yorkshire. it was an environment where industry and wild-ish nature happily intermingled though on the cusp of the devastating invasion of an increasingly highly capitalised horticulture. In this peripheral wilderness of weeds, large elephant hawk, poplar hawk and peppered moth caterpillars - the latter mainly of the industrial melanic form - thrived in late summer/early autumn The bottom left photo shows the remnants of a burnt out signal cabin which simply exploded one night at the bottom of our garden....

The young Mabey would take adults on a tour around his called-into-being trees in the Chilterns. We gave names to the local topography of dereliction, particularly the long barrow like mounds that had been pushed up overnight during the Second World War to disguise the nearby armaments factory. “Indian Hill” was our favourite and it may well have concealed a number of natural hills for on its summits there were the splintered, hollow carcasses of what, thinking back, may well have once been elm trees. The entire man-made creation was covered in gorse that attracted flocks of Goldfinch and, to our delight, the occasional Waxwing in autumn. To facilitate access we thought nothing of cutting a maze of ‘secret’ passages through the gorse and such was the absence of constraint on this industrial common that we went about it entirely unmolested, except for once being stopped by the police who wanted to know what we doing carrying makeshift bowie knives.

Above: Random pages from a childhood Nature Diary. (See longer discussion on "Fuck the New Nature Writing"

Maybey’s relationship to the landscapes of his youth was passive in comparison to ours and hedged with restrictions, this common metaphor a graphic illustration of how hostility to enclosure has entered the unconscious of the English language. Other than in farmers’ fields, we knew no hedges and we made free play with the industrial detritus left lying about. And so decades later when we ventured once more on to industrial wastes in search of butterflies, the unreflected anarchism of our childhood and early youth surged within us once more as ours by right and we exploded with incomprehension whenever we were stopped by authority, for right of access was in our blood much as the right to pasture animals once was for commoners. And so we collided head on with conservation bodies whose first priority, we mused bitterly, was to give butterflies lessons in Lockeian civics which would teach them not to trespass and to respect other people’s property.

Mabey grew up at a time when the countryman and woman and traditional country crafts were rapidly disappearing from the rural scene to be replaced by the ignorant, vulgar, experiment phobic, 4 wheel drive, home owning circus of nothingness we are all so heartily fed up with. Peopled with slaves to the market in consumer goods, the countryside becomes a mere image on a postcard and the last refuge of the petrol head, nature a selling point in the estate agents description. Between the latter and the industrial agronomists there is a growing army of professional ecologists whom are not exactly buzzing with life, that don’t swear, get drunk and beside themselves with rage and who never savagely kick back. In the last analysis, Mabey is very much part of this refined coterie of buttoned-up professionals, far more likely to move on and become therapists than ever frankly admit the only solution is revolution.

And Mabey does mention in passing just such a case - and that of Arthur Tansley the renowned botanist who, for a short while, gave up botany to study with Freud. Quitting his post in Cambridge in 1923, Tansley returned to academia in 1927 when he was appointed Sheridan Professor of Botany at Oxford, before stooping lower still to become a knight. However Tansley’s abrupt move sideways is not to be dismissed so easily because it is a cotyledon of something that threatens to grow like Jack’s beanstalk, combining childhood, nature, the psyche and revolt. Though it has never found its proper voice, throughout the country’s history of the last eight centuries we continue to hear the strongest of echoes – like when Wordsworth wrote “the child is father of the man”.

Researching the history of industrial activity, particularly mining and quarrying, on the common lands of the South Pennies and whose residue of earth works and shales have greatly aided the recent, astonishing spread of the Green Hairstreak butterfly, I became aware of how these upland rural areas once teemed with characters whose lives at some point must have touched on the insurrection taking place in the rapidly industrialising valleys below. Take ‘Old Three Laps’, for example, who appeared to have modelled himself on Heathcliff: indulging his unrequited love, he took to his bed for forty years. (Well, it beats working, the late Victorian writer reprimanding him for his indigence whilst having to admit ‘Old Three Laps’ certainly added variety to the upland scene!) Except for the odd rambler, today, the countryside is an impoverished wasteland of dull conformity where nature fascinates more than people, when, particularly in the days of Defoe and John Ray, a happier equilibrium once existed.

Returning to my childhood I recall how we would go ratting with Mr Goldsborough, a railway worker who also owned the field on which the marks of communal strip cultivation were still visible. Close to a brick tunnel through which ran Demon’s Beck and over which ran the legendary Stockton and Darlington railway, there was an old oak tree, the “old oak tree” as we called it. Over the years it had become top heavy, its root system dangerously exposed by the scouring action of the beck. It needed pruning and so a terrific guy of ‘a retard’ employed by the railway was given the task of sawing off some of the trees biggest limbs. We children were the only ones present and watched him climb the mighty oak, ease himself along a branch and begin to saw, with him seated on the outer reach of the branch. Sure enough, when it did crash to the ground he was on it. “Lighting Dennis” was another shining ‘retard’, remembered and respected for backing almost an entire goods train into the waters of Whitby’s inner harbour, right opposite the still working boatyard where Captain Cooke’s “Endeavour” was built, where this singular wreck of a goods train could have made the most memorable ever artificial reef. And then there were the railway men who, from the safety of the goods yard running alongside the mouth of the river Esk, would stretch night lines across the harbour with little fear of the water bailiffs ever catching them.

The railway sidings at Whitby in the early 1860s set alongside the river Esk right next to the tidal mud flats where the golden plover regularly nested. A later typical development of the inner harbour for liesure time yaghting meant the bird was exterminated. The photo left is of the railway line along Upgang to Sandsend and the coastal route to Middlesborough and though closed well before the Beeching cuts of the early 1960s, it signified the triumph - and ultimately eco disaster - of car transport....

I mention these incidents since Mabey is unable to reminisce like this. What has this to do with the battle for nature? Well in truth as little and as much as Thomas Bewick’s many vignettes depicting the human–all-too-human foibles of Northumberland’s rural poor and who had just as much right to be there as did a Woodcock and Mistle Thrush. For people and nature formed more of a continuum then and which must be recovered in ways we can scarcely, as yet, guess at. Looking back I have a fund of very precious memories which directly challenge the insidious stereotyping of the industrial working class as straight laced, uniformly dull, nature comatose men and women lacking in imagination and a desire to change life. And when the “revolution of everyday life” finally did hit this country in the late 1960s, it not only instantly tied so many separate strands together but caused me to reconnect with my teen and preteen years. The many incidents I had witnessed came to be imbued with a radical hue through which a new life was visibly searching to be born. Continuing to worry out yet more memories, my opinion has not changed in over forty years.

Take my grandfather’s signal box situated on Battersby Junction station midway between Middlesboro and Whitby. This signal cabin looked on to the North York Moors and there is a photograph of my grandfather in it. Someone with half an eye must have come across the photograph because a few years ago it was on sale in Whitby, alongside Sutcliffe’s pioneering photos of the harbour taken in the closing years of the 19th century. In this photograph my grandfather, contentedly puffing his pipe, is sitting in an easy chair. It was an obligatory fixture in all signal cabins, the turned wooden legs invariably charred by the burning cinders which fell out of the coal fires that superheated these unlike greenhouses mounted on preposterously exaggerated brick foundations, and that made signal cabins such welcoming places in winter. A canopy of plants obscures the ceiling, some of whose tendrils appear to be entwined around the less frequently used signal levers (and which were always that bit harder to pull). He has made the place his own. To describe it as home from home is to misinterpret what the cabin signified to my grandfather. It was an escape from home - and my grandmother would have to send her children down to the station to implore him to come home, otherwise, once his shift was over, he could have well stayed in his cabin all night long. The communal nature of allotments has habitually functioned as a safety valve, venting pressures building up within the nuclear family. At their best they prefigure a new world and, it has to be said, miners’ allotments excelled in this respect. These allotment were never just about saving on household bills: they were also a declaration of intent, a right to build as one thought fit – free -form extemporisation as opposed to the dragging tidiness of home life, four walls and the linear terrace, scrounged material as opposed to the shop bought commodity. However, in my grandfather’s case it was a very controlled environment - and had to be given it was a functioning signal box. Though at the bottom of the cabin steps there was a poke that housed a pig, a chicken run and several beehives (he swore he could tell which were his honey bees whenever he went on the moors), within the limits of the permissible, my grandfather had conjured a spell binding palace of glass, leaves, electromagnetism, pulleys, levers, gear wheels and flowers out of a no frills, industrial man-coop.

Grandah Wise in his signal box surrounded by a jungle of hanging potted plants. Above right, a present day Battersby Junction station now overgrown with a delightful display of weeds....

Back at the family home, one of about thirty houses divided into two red brick terraces more typical of a Lancashire mill town than the farms and villages built of stone that dot the sylvan foothills of the North Yorks Moors, the one and only picture that hung on the wall was of a local farm set in a fold on a moor land hillside. It was simply called “Midnight Farm” because the sun never shone on it. I always wanted to be taken to this anti farm, this negation of sunshine, chlorophyll and everything that a farm stood for, its mysterious allure obviously capturing the imagination of our grandparents as well as my brother and I. What did this dark, forbidding place, this Wuthering Heights of non-conforming agriculture, really say about my grandparents? Why did they prefer it to a far happier reproduction of, say, the “Hay Wain”, or a Gainsborough or Hobbema? They must have felt a seed’s kinship with this darkness. Was it, perhaps, calling time on a sunny tradition of landscape painting, as if only out of a midnight nursery like this could a new world come?

At the local village school in Ingelby, the children of railway workers repeatedly outshone children from agricultural backgrounds, including farmers’ children. When I pause to reflect what this humble signalman, with virtually no schooling, had picked up in terms of rearing animals, keeping bees, growing vegetables in addition to mastering morse, basic mechanics and developing an interest in mathematics for its own sake, I am led, at the very least, to conclude here were the rudiments of a more developed totality. Given habitual experiences like this, is it to be wondered that from our earliest years we never found nature and industry to be that antithetical.

Section 2

(Ecology and corporatism/the industrial commons and freedom /Shelley & industry/Children’s nature book especially Kenneth Grahame/On dens & anti architecture)

Ecologists, particularly in this country, tend to spontaneously bundle workers and management together in the same, detestable, corporatist package. No matter how the pack is shuffled, they are inclined to find this combination of nature and industry, rather than nature v industry, an abhorrent one and are wilfully deaf to its historical resonance in this country. It would be surprising if, parallel with demands for greater job security and an end to wage cutting subcontracting, wildcatting, engineering construction workers in the energy sector were not beginning to openly argue the case for a green energy plan. (The inspirational occupation of the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight points to this) In terms of an equitable exchange between nature and industry, it is now or never. And the energy sector is at the heart of this exchange. However there is not a chance it can be accomplished within a capitalist framework. The question therefore can never, never, never be solely a technical one and though technical innovations, like carbon capture and sequestration can buy much needed time, mankind will not be free so long as ecological technocrats, bureaucrats, politicians and capitalists are free to roam the earth.

Growing up in the years following the Second World War, I have, on reflection, become aware of other formative aspects. In a curious way the ancient liberties of the commons merged with the ideology of nationalisation, the coal and steel industry but particularly the railways, forming an ever present background to our play and fledgling interest in nature. Ideologies are never empty chimeras and the ideology of public ownership positively contributed to the surprising absence of restrictions we experienced as mere striplings. In comparison with today’s youth, it was a “self-determined” childhood. The comparative freedom from constraint afforded by this unique, greened over industrial playground moreover bred in us a psychological expansiveness, the absence of hedges a preparation for the tearing down of barriers of a different order that would later arise. And so when we did eventually come to read the romantics, the ready acceptance of horizonless disparities on a collision course – adventure - immersion in dreams, landscape, engine sheds, chimneys, industrial cowls - love of butterflies and moths - biology- depth psychology – love - popular struggle came about because it was the fruit of an experience that, in considerable part, went back to the unfettered play we enjoyed on these “unbounded” industrial commons.

Though not an entirely apt one, a line from Shelley springs to mind: “I love all waste and solitary places where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.” Writing when he did, his love of Waste is insufficiently nuanced, Shelley’s conception of industry then the opposite of a Waste. In his early 20s, and though impoverished, he had enthusiastically raised money for a reclamation scheme in Cardigan Bay which involved the building of a giant embankment, or Cobb, across the mouth of Traeth Mawr. The expansion of the port of Holyhead in North Wales sealed the fate of the projected port at Porthdinallen in Cardigan Bay, though the Cobb, somewhat ironically, now carries that talisman of functioning industrial antiquarianism, the Ffestiniog Railway. Knowledge of Shelley the friend of industry has been buried beneath that of the nature poet, and we need to be reminded of the fact. That said, the straitjacketed categorisation of the latter won’t do either. Evident in practically everything that Shelley wrote is the search for art’s transcendence in unrestrained nature. The Skylark’s song is perfect fulfilment and cannot be surpassed whilst art remains “a thing wherein we feel some hidden want”.

Actually the Cobb, and the related reclamation scheme upon which the new town of Tremadoc was built, required an act of Parliament, presumably because it was Common Land. Surprisingly, census figures from 1956 show that the area of common land in Cardigan had expanded slightly since the last census in 1873, doubtless due to a post war increase in the number of nature reserves and SSS1s. In industrial Glamorgan there had only been a marginal decrease. Again this is surprising, given that during the interval there had been a massive increase in the number of pits sunk in the steep sided Glamorgan valleys. The Commission on Common Land held during the mid 1950s were forced to conclude “if the land is common land, it would seem that many of the mining operations – construction of railway sidings, works, site of dumps etc – by the National Coal Board is ultra vires. Furthermore, much of the land concerned is eminently suitable for afforestation, but who has the right to plant?” This absence of an unambiguous legal framework meant that even prior to nationalisation, much industrial infrastructure was treated by workers – and not just workers – with an impatient, expropriating disregard because ,come the crunch, trespass laws were fundamentally unenforceable. Closer to the present day, Thorne Waste, a raised peat land of great age and scarcity, was saved from almost certain destruction by a gang of cutlass brandishing, dynamite hurling desperados that went by the name of “Bunting’s Beavers”. Composed of miners from Thorne Colliery, engineers, (and anyone else who cared to join in and could keep schtumm) they would leave calling cards that read “sue us you buggers if you dare”, their exhaustive knowledge of common law rendering them virtually untouchable, though some spent time in jail. (We hope to put together the story of the Beavers from a former member we met on Thorne Wastes who like the Ancient Mariner had us spellbound, unable to move off the largest raised wetlands in Western Europe even though night was falling).

Above left: Large Heath butterfly on Thorne Wastes on the day we met Bunting's Beavers on July 17th 1997. The opposite photograph is of the general terrain but with the extremely tall winding gear of Thorne pit in the background. The pit was mothballed during the 1993 pit closure programme but has since been pulled down....

A long held, very fierce grudge against the privatisation of common land morphed to include the private industry erected on it, the abolition of private property signifying to many an industrial worker (and from our experience, usually the most experimental and alive to new ideas) a retracing of lost steps to a scrap heap reinvention of life in the wild. Was it just our identification with Native Americans that caused us to name the long barrow of an artificial hill we haunted “Indian Hill” and along whose side there ran “Street One”, a concrete road as unforgiving and Euclidean as only industrial roads can be. Or were more local ancient spirits already speaking the language of subversion to us? Sometimes we carried staves and one railway worker in particular would always ask us if we were going “lancing”, an expression which even then struck me as unusual and could not possibly mean joisting. Perhaps it harked back to the black acts or even earlier and referred to the illegal spearing of wild animals on enclosed manorial estates. The word den grew its meaning on common land for Denns in the 8th century were originally outlying, felled woodland pastures. The overtone of remoteness, of a secret place safe from prying eyes and adulthood was taken up by children, we in particular becoming the ingénue architects of a hundred dens, some of the most imaginative the least noticeable and as cryptic as a barely detectable Buff Tip moth at rest on a budding twig . There but at the same time not there, they were the ones we would most dream about when tucked up in bed at night. Almost invisible to the naked eye they were, for that reason, as indestructible as childhood itself, and I don’t doubt that the ideas we were to develop much later on of a pushed- to- the -wall, negation of building, have their origins here. Though once thought sheer lunacy not that long ago, a growth architecture that postures as not-architecture is rapidly becoming part of the mainstream. However, what really counts here is the media bio feed nurturing architects’ reputation. We on the contrary sought nothing less than imaginative self build on a global scale, a vision that automatically lead to the destruction of the role of architect on a global scale.

A den was also home to a fox – at least in Co Durham and North Yorks though elsewhere lair may have been the more common term. A badger had its sett, the rabbit its burrow and warren, the squirrel its drey but the wily fox had its den. Once in a hen run, the fox was merciless, yet our hearts went out to it. There was something about its fugitive, hunted existence that appealed to the railway workers I knew as a child. I recall how my mother once opened the back door to a fox that had been pursued across the railway lines by the Quorn hunt, then rushing quickly to open the front door so the fox could escape the hounds. More than a wish to protect the fox that had recently slain all our hens, this was a protest against the two Co Durham’s, that of its aristocratic landowners in West Durham and that of its spat-upon industrial workers, particularly miners, in East Durham, my mother having come from a mining background. High upon the list of my grandfather’s (the signalman mentioned previously) favourite books was “Reynard the Fox”, a book that also delighted us as children. He too must have felt a strong identification with foxes, despite their periodic raids on his hens. The saying “as sly as a fox” may have been construed by him as an ability to remain poker faced when confronted with authority – in my grandfather’s case the hated railway bosses, for this was the era prior to rail nationalisation. Though it is easy to dismiss the humanization of animals as mere folk psychology and more typical of pre-industrial eras, here are instances of it informing industrial struggle. In America’s Deep South the boll weevil, which destroyed cotton crops and therefore the livelihood of slave owners, became another symbol of resistance.

Another favourite country writer of both my grandfathers (one a signalman, the other a miner) was G Branwell Evans, the Methodist minister turned poseur gipsy and going by the name of “Romany”. Though Evans gave repertory names to the birds and mammals he observed in company with Tim, a farmer’s son, his chapters on “Droll and Darkie the Rooks”, “Brock the Badger” etc were full of naturalistic observation. And though the ‘stories’ would unfold over several seasons, they were not anthropoid narratives in the manner of Kenneth Grahame, author of “Wind in the Willows”, or Beatrix Potter and would never make it onto the West End Stage. In fact they were more akin to Favre’s beguiling, and much superior, narratives of insect life from which the human persona is even more absent. Mulling over these facts and a few phone calls later it occurred to me I knew next to nothing about Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton tail, Swallows and Amazons Puck of Pooks Hill, Peter Pan and the entire arcania of children's stories written in the closing years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. Would I have done so if they had been on my parents and grandparents bookshelves? And why weren’t they there? Did they perhaps find something repellent in them as I did - and still do? However “Sajo and her Beaver People” and the characterines of “Big Small” and “Little Small“, the two beavers, were a different matter, the antipodal naming delighting me as much as the fact that waterproof canoes could be made from birch bark, no other tree thereafter having quite the same appeal to me as the birch. A portent of spring, the birch became a symbol of rebirth in more ways than one, for it was the first tree to appear on industrial spoil and in railway sidings. Today I see it as a harbinger of a nature sensitive, industrial renewal, a liberatory tree for a liberatory technology, just as the beavers’ names suggested the possibility of a countermanding renewal of language.

But as for “Wind in the Willows”, I do recall doing a jigsaw puzzle at the age of six or seven of Toad of Toad Hall pursued by a gang of wildcatting weasels in a train. Our sympathies even then were with the weasels, not least because they were actually leaning out of a steam engine with a perspiring Squire Toad fleeing before them, in fear for his life. Now Co Durham, where we were then living, was the birthplace of the railways, and odd though this sounds, it was popularly perceived as a “proletarian” achievement, an idea, though it had reactionary implications (the apostle of self help Samuel Smiles wrote a book entitled “The Great Engineers”) not as daft as it might first appear. Many of the great early railway engineers received little schooling: not only was the great George Stephenson, the inventor of the “Rocket” (the first antigravity machine, steam pressure replacing gravitational pull), actually illiterate but he liked nothing better than to challenge someone to a bout of bare knuckle boxing to relieve the tedium of a “board meeting”. Real kids stuff and we loved nothing better than as children to be taken on a Saturday morning by our uncle to a small industrial workshop in Shildon where engineers would casually gather to shoot the breeze but also discuss technical stuff. The workshop was situated on the road to Brusselton, the great incline having featured in a panoramic illustration from the 1820s that not only depicted the stationary engines and cables that hauled coal trucks up the incline, but also, on the level ground, Stephenson’s locomotives that were as “busy as ants”.

Shildon, Co Durham many moons ago. The photo left is of the oldest engine shed in the world in a state of derilection. Thirty years later and the shed became a museum.Standing opposite (photo left) was the home of Timothy Hackworth, the railway engineer who invented the spoke wheel. Like everyone else we called the place "tintacs". A similiar fate was to befall that dwelling too and you wonder which is worse: a gutted landscape or gentrification?

The metaphor whispers in another way for my uncle was both a skilled carpenter and foreman at a small wagon works owned by British Rail. Much of the timber that came into the yards for the repair of damaged rolling stock came from abroad and he would feed our imaginations - and his - with real tales of wood boring larvae, some so fearsome they could slice through a carpenter’s pencil with the ease of an executioner’s axe. A likely story, but the truth of falsehood with a good conscience turned trumps and we became fascinated with native wood boring moths like the evil smelling Goat Moth, the beauteous Leopard Moth and the many different, harmless, Clearwing moths that mimicked stinging wasps such as the Hornet Clearwing, the latter the only Clearwing we have so far seen. We, in turn, wove our own slightly less exaggerated history around them, others also, including adults, becoming fascinated by them. To be sure, we did embroider nature but I can’t say our expectations were dashed and we became progressively disenchanted as we learnt more about these extraordinary insects. It was easily more nature friendly any day than, after reading “Wind in the Willows”, fancifully expecting to see frock coated animals buttoned up against the cold amongst knotted tree roots. From an early age the bleached carcases of tree stumps became a source of inspiration to us, their form and content of great appeal to us. Lying on their sides like a tipped over L, the shattered trunk and branches became a skeletal torso of arms, elbows, hands and preternatural head that crumbled into rotting chips revealing beetles and hopefully the moth larvae we were intent on finding. We had no need of further animation because these ghost trees were already alive. Today, “Buglife” rightly argues for the retention of fallen trees but many years earlier we and others had intuitively arrived at the same conclusion, though not necessarily by the same route. A tree left where it fell indicated a relaxing of property rights and, like a disused factory or siding, that monster field was now safe to enter. When visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2006 to jeer at everything we saw but especially Andy Goldsworthy the only escape we found from artistic oppression was in the sheep droppings and the occasional dead tree, but even these lost their allure latter took on some of the characteristics of it surroundings and became art losing its dead treeness.

None of the books I mentioned above we ever read in the sink schools we attended as children and teenagers. This must say something fundamental about them. Added almost en passant as if he does not wish to draw too much attention to it Mabey does admit that in “Wind in the Willows” class war was waged against the weasels. He also acknowledges the tamed suburban nature grown up on the ruins of a buried city which badger, ratty and mole inhabit is not that of the wildwood but through a persistent misreading has become so. In a characteristic inverting of the truth, it is the denizens of the wildwood that are stand offish, peculiar and “not like us”, the animals grouped around badger never anything other than affable and approachable in an offbeat kind of way. Inevitably it is the suspicious, easily offended, unpredictable lumpen weasels that start the trouble, with badger and the other animals, like true, decent Brits, forced into retaliation, secure in the knowledge they did not cast the first stone. Like most of the other seminal children’s stories previously cited, “Wind in the Willows” was written against a background of growing social unrest and though it pleads for a return to nature, it is, above all, a moderate, reformist plea for a bourgeoisified nature. In Grahame’s eyes, the unyielding, machined austerities of Victorianism and equally motorized morality had finally let loose the primeval beast of “the great unrest” that formerly had rampaged on the great “wastes” safely beyond the ken of civilisation.

Though no one at the time was able to make the connection, the old mole of revolution had grubbed away in a double sense. To Kenneth Grahame, Secretary to the Bank of England, the real wildwood and unbidden, more than consciously autonomous, industrial action had come to mean much the same thing It is not just the fact these children’s books were an exact hominid ledger of class society that made them somewhat mystifyingly distasteful to us. This got-up fantasy of middle English speaking animals also amounted to a kind of betrayal, even to our child minds, of the imagination, natures inherent riches not needing to be dressed up in nursery costumes. Free to roam from a very early age, our childhood was lived outside the “nursery”- whatever that was. We befriended animals; we even had an animal graveyard for out pets, every so often digging up the tortoise to see “how it was getting on”. Our eyes transfixed on an infinitely varied surface, we did not need to metamorphose them into something they were not. In the school playground a ditty made its round: “There are fairies in the bottom of my garden/ There are fairies in the bottom of my well/Are there fairies in the bottom of your garden? –Are there hell!” Yet this down to earth, crushing realism was far from lacking in vision. Its anti mythological concreteness and practical engagement with the world was, I sincerely believe, more an anticipation of classless society and the polar opposite of Graham’s ethological anthropomorphism and deification of suburbia.

One wonders what Mervyn King, the present Governor of the Bank of England, might now come up with were he to open his laptop after first getting ripped on smoke. A guileless, free-market “Animal Farm” or “Animal Pharma” would be too obviously political and seen as satirical in intent, thus defeating its purpose. The watchword has to be obedience to the laughing hyenas of the banking fraternity who want us scurrying about like scared rabbits rather than behaving like rats in a trap, or worse, massing like locusts on the Thames embankment prior to descending on the City of London .

Manipulative children’s fantasies cast their most binding spell when they appear not to have a political axe to grind. Moreover dead tree format has had its day, so a more interactive format would need to be found, a Wii game, perhaps, in which the bot flies of the of the Financial Services Authority take on us plodding shire horses stabled on dealing floors? However, in order that the FSA or dealing floors remain an immovable fixture in our lives, it is absolutely essential they first be interred deep underground and their controlling presence made to appear a nigh on absent one, just like the urban foundations of Graham’s pseudo wildwood. How very, very English!

Above is a photo of a dead oak tree on Ashstead Common, Surrey, together with a photo of a Purple purple emperor on a youngish oak sapling in July 1997. Many of the often 500 years old oaks around Ashstead are now virtually dead specimens ending their days as gnarled oddities easily giving off the appearance of goulish witch-like monsters that take up their roots and walk when darknessfalls. No wonder they were the inspiration for all those Arthur Rackham's illustrations that scared many a child witless....

Section 3

(The conceit ridden character of English/Milton & Keats/Mabey’s beeches and Marx’s commodity fetishism/the commons as realisation of the critiques of rights/Mabey’s dislike of social and ecological revolution/ The near uselessness of conservation bodies)

No other language is more conceit ridden than English and to probe the reasons why is a major investigative task in itself. The cataclysmic events that rocked Britain, though in particular England, from the peasants revolt onwards resulted in a layering of the language that was so dense as to almost obscure the actual revolutionary convulsions that lay beneath it, language through its own autonomous development appearing to become convulsed instead. The siren voices of revolution are everywhere in Shakespeare, though probably despite himself. Then comes Milton and “Paradise Lost”, this epic poem the end of the line for all epic poetry and also rooted in a civil war in which the spectre of communism is more than just an apparition and so altogether different from the Peloponnesian Wars of the Iliad or that of Rome v Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid. Try going back and all you will get instead are the bore wars of Middle Earth and digitised sublimity for the kiddies. Then compare Miltonic literalness with the “dromedary camel” of the metaphysical poets, the beginnings of modern industry and communal seekings, part of the “new philosophy that puts all in doubt” in which “meanings press and screw”. Then finally there are the Romantics after which the English language very abruptly – at least in England - settles into a suspicious, insular slumber from which it cannot be awakened, its once inexhaustible formal inventiveness traduced into the idiom of industry, of iron, steel, steam, pipes, girders, batteries, cylinders, pumps----------- requiring a revolutionary proletariat for their proper articulation, without which this industrial disequilibria will remain mere doggerel. “Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme” proclaims Shelley in his remarkable “Letter to Maria Gisborne”. But otherwise this historical shift went unnoticed. As for the English language------well that becomes French, literary symbolism demonstrating once and for all that once society becomes indecipherable then the poetry must follow suit, until finally the only way out is to permanently swap the pen for the hammer.

Meanwhile in science Cartesianism is the name of the game throughout, matter existing independently of mind, each of which can be studied without reference to the other. Mabey is right to want to unambiguously put the ghost back into the machine in a “literary”, if not a metaphysical sense, because a non-metaphorical beech tree is a dead one, dead to history, dead to us, and above all dead to itself, the scientific realization of “literature” enabling the tree to live for the first time in natural history and social history, it too acquiring an omega all of its own at the “end of pre history”. And Mabey does put it most eloquently “Beech trees are persistently cast as victims, they’re repeatedly looted, excoriated as bad influences and wastes of land, granted reprieves, turned into scapegoats and hostages – this is the story of the beeches with an eye for the trees experience of what happened”. But let us at least grant that in large part these metaphors are rooted in social relationships, more specifically in a class divided society and that they also are the real expressions of a class divided society and not mere artifice. These metaphors reflect the social character of trees not just as a raw material but also as political facts and a source of enjoyment (or otherwise) itself mediated by changing tastes driven in the last analysis by changes in the modes of production. Like the commodity they become a personification of social relationships but whereas the universal medium of exchange, money, - its genus if you like –, takes on many different popular names (chicken feed, rhino, dosh, readies, bread, loot, smackers, spondulies etc) the genus tree never undergoes a comparable name changing. Only in the genera’s individual ramification as separate species does it do so and then only at the moment of gravest crises for Keats’s “the grand democracy of forest trees”. Coming very late in the day, this is, at best, only a halfhearted admission that natural facts are also social facts and that natural history is also a people’s history, dinosaurs included, which is not the same thing as saying we walked alongside them.

Mark Cocker in his recent book “Crow Country” reckoned he had just about read everything there was to read in English on crows. One cannot help wondering did Mabey sit himself down to read every item that came up when he googled “beech” on his computer? There is something too literary about his beech conceits that overwhelm the subject and that tend to turn the beech into a work of art and nature into a gallery. However Mabey as a proto gallerista of the wild, a trend that is becoming ever more important, spurred on by the reaction to the financial crises has to be left for another web that specifically deals with this issue. Yet this whole drift into fantasy projections, at the same time both imaginary and real, caused neurons to fire in my brain and I was drawn once more to open Marx’s “Capital” and read Chapter 4, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret”. And what material does Marx select to demonstrate how a raw material becomes a commodity? Why, wood of course! And what does our carpenter make of the wood? Why a table, in all probability a table made of beech wood from a tree cut down in the Chiltern Hills where the legs were also initially turned by the bodgers that peep into Mabey’s tale of beech trees, as most tables in London at the time were made from Chiltern beeches. These justly famous legs not only sit four square on the ground but dance as well, their capers as a commodity performing more wonders to behold than the table turning of mediums. The entire chapter is an essay in religious demystification; man not only creating god but the commodity form as well, which then assume the “fantastic” form of a relation between things. Mabey has scanned the far horizons for references to beech trees, even citing passages from Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”. How come that he missed this reference, then? Though not exactly explicit, it is also rather more than just bordering on the credible. And what a can of worms Chapter 4 opens up. And how necessary it is for all ecologists to read it and take on board what is there revealed and to henceforth treat it as a base line. For without it, we, and vast swathes of nature, are doomed.

Marx began his life’s work with a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. “What has this to do with the price of eggs” ecologists might well ask, or at least the pitiful few prepared to take the above approach seriously. Well, it is also a critique of the state and Hegel’s statolatry, mind and nature coming to rest in the state in Hegel's system. Though natural scientists since the mid 19th century have split their sides laughing at Hegel’s “preposterous” philosophy of nature (a presumptuous judgement in any case which is now being questioned, particularly in America), the deification of the state by today’s ecologists, climate scientists etc is equally preposterous and just as metaphysical. By entrusting the future of nature and the human race to the state, this closet Hegelianism works behind their backs, barely one natural scientist even remotely suspecting they are the victims of what is rapidly turning out to be history’s biggest ruse.

As for Mabey, literary imagery becomes actual imagery - tree stumps and the hobgoblins of pollarded trees. Unbeknown to himself he has metamorphosed the truth of literary imagery and the literary past and made into a tree and at the same time rescuing it for science by letting it live. However he then goes too far in the range of literary and painterly references meaning the tree itself becomes a work of art an exhibit a natural gallerification. Mabey – as previously pointed out - really is a gallerista of the wild, a collector of nature’s artefacts, a Guggenheimer of greenery.

Mabey shies away from ever mentioning his radical past when articles written by him in the mid 1960s appeared in the often excellent, New York based “Rebel Worker” via being copied and pasted from the often insipid London based “Peace News”. (In truth, quite superficial appraisals of the 60s growing youth revolt as personified in the Mersey Sound). I can understand why Maybey might not wish to be reminded of the former but not “Peace News”. I also have a very early book of his entitled “Class in Britain” which I got in the hope I just might find an enlightened coming together of class struggle and the battle for nature. Not a whisper and I did actually wonder if there might be another Richard Mabey. In “Beechcombings” he describes in some detail the past history of the repeated attempts to enclose Berkhamstead Common. Matters came to a head in 1865 and fences were torn down in a night raid - just as they had been in 1640 when a local man had led a “disciplined” band of 100 men in an earlier foray, cheered on by 1000s of locals. The adjective is hardly neutral, given the date, and the precision of this military style enterprise reads more like an anticipation of the New Model Army to come. Significantly Maybey’s two direct references to the English Civil War are a shade negative, one regretting the looting of the forests that took place, (much the same happening during the French Revolution,) the other that Epping Forest, after the Civil War, become a place of refuge for former soldiers turned deer hunters - a sort of back to front remake of the Hollywood blockbuster if you like. How would he deal with the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, one is compelled to ask? Would it be any different to that of W.G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, joint authors of the New Naturalist” “Common Lands of England and Wales” (1961) and who had been part of the royal commission on Common Land (1955-8)? (This commission marked the moment the matter of the Commons became part of a wider landscape amenity aesthetic and conservation “ethic”, culminating, at the end of the decade, in Nan Fairbrother`s “New Lives, New Landscapes” which positioned this altered perspective in an industrial change-over promising automation and consumer abundance. We can only regret the visionary, revolutionary upheavals of the late sixties were not powerful enough to stamp on the book, for it has a lot to answer for – the chapter “The Disturbed Landscape of Industry” suggesting that it is not merely an eyesore but also akin to a psychological abnormality).

Hoskins was an historian and Dudley Stamp a geographer, neither really kicking against the limits of the academic division of learning. However it was geography that was about to take the most surprising leap forward, and though to Dudley Stamp psychogeography (then taking its first, and best steps) would have been beneath derision, it is implicit in his catching descriptions of the terraced houses of the Welsh valleys “climbing gradually up the hillsides in congestion and disorder to present a specialized industrial landscapes which has become famous or infamous the world over”. To the historian Hoskins, the Commons had throughout their chequered history not only been threatened with “longing commercial eyes” but were confronted with “another attack ---- from an entirely different angle This was the revolutionary movement of the Diggers (who) advocated particularly the ploughing up of the commons and waste land throughout England regardless of the rights of the lord of the manor. He concludes, “This dangerous revolutionary movement was quickly crushed “.

We think it more than likely that Mabey would box clever on this issue and keep his counsel, knowing that to lend his name to such a crass denunciation could be his undoing. However it has to be said we get a better feel of what the Commons were actually like from Hoskins, in particular the fact that the monetary economy was a late arrival on the scene, “money for the majority of English and Welsh people playing only a marginal part in their economy until the early parts of the 19th century". As we are living "in a complete money economy" today, this is hard to grasp given the constant temptation to remake the past in the image of the present, the heritage industry being the final triumph of this unhistorical tendency. One gets the impression reading Mabey’s drawn-out account of Berkhamstead Common that a monetary economy had thrived on the Commons since time immemorial and so had beech wood commodity speculators. Nowhere does he explicitly say that throughout the entire existence of the commons money played only a marginal role in the reproduction of the society of commoners.

Though Hoskins and Dudley Stamp only twice mention Berkhamstead and the battles to retain it as a Common not once, their discussion of rights has an odd Marxist ring to it, as though they were no strangers to the examination of the matter by Marx in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme” taking it upon themselves to develop the critique still further. Where there was an ample supply of land, and especially on the wastes, it was not possible to speak of “common rights” for they had “no need of definition, and therefore could hardly be said to exist”. This absence of definition defines the Commons, though more especially the Wastes, as a place of freedom from constraint upon which everything is permitted and a fool can dethrone a king. When Hoskins declares “where there is no limitation, there can be no rights” an extreme libidinal craving breaks through despite himself, and what is clearly meant to be a colourless statement of the obvious becomes marvellously shadowed with suggestion. It is rather ironic to be reminded that Mabey had written a long article in The Guardian (14/3/09) deeply critical of the lack of engagement he felt in the New Naturalist series of interesting books that dominated nature writing in the decades following the Second World War. Is he not guilty of a greater charge, a more metaphorical approach to nature that yearns to be the thing itself, much as Keats described the infilling of “negative capability” and that paradoxically says more on the plane of objective truth than the commonsense of science, ultimately falling down because of a total absence of a critique of political economy, hints of which we find in the authors of “The Common Lands of England and Wales”?

The ancient commons of Grassington in the North Yorkshire Pennines. The photo on the left is of the limestone pavement on the top of the largely ash tree array of Grass Woood where the only indigenous plant of the lady's slipper orchid remains. On the right is a photo of a wall overgrown with thick moss in Grass Wood proper. Sixty years ago a peculiar, indistinct, sooty-coloured variety of the rare Scotch Argus butterfly - an Arctic species - flew here....

This intense dislike of revolutionary upheaval also shapes Mabey’s attitude to avant-garde art. Going no further than installation art, will he forever be able to keep the hatches battened down on the territory that lies beyond it and which he knows full well is there and just hopes no one will out him over? It is a logical step to take but few are prepared to go that extra mile because everything about their life will change. Never able to fully purge the memory of the past, Mabey dreads radicalism because it embodies his more real self, the one he has been running from for decades. When Mabey trespasses accidentally into a lime wood he describes it as an “intervention”, as though the word has wantonly slipped through the snare in his throat, despite his continuing efforts to tighten the noose on it. Called La Tillaie, it was a reserve biologique in the Fontainebleau Forest, though dedicated to the unmanaged growth of beech rather than lime trees. Would Mabey have done so had he seen the notice beforehand pointing out that La Tillaie was a strict non-intervention zone? What we, and the rest of the English speaking world, now understand by the word is etymologically rooted in French usage. So to make an “intervention” is not mere motion in space and time that thrusts others aside just for the hell of it, but a deliberate, thought out challenge to authority, a provocative act that encourages the common people to take heart and take over. As an invitation to an uprising rather than an opening at a gallery, it clashes head on with the property relations typical of capitalist society. So when Mabey says of this minor act of transgression in Fontainebleau that “I had become an intervention myself, as I had much more aggressively in Hardings Wood” he forgets to add he is the titular owner of Hardings Wood and therefore free to do more or less as he pleases. In Mabey’s hands the vital word becomes emptied of meaning. This was not what was meant by the realisation of art and the setting free of nature that the powerless early 19th century, East Anglian poet John Clare could only yearn for, the enclosing fences torn down in his mind’s eye only.

Now had we, in desperation, taken a chain saw to the encroaching carr woodlands in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards, West Yorks to save the Grayling butterfly, that would have been an “intervention”. Though it would have led to our arrest and a swingeing fine, the situation had potential and might have ended up acutely embarrassing the owners of the yards (now Deutsche Bahn and presumably less thick skinned than the former owners, EWS) but more especially conservation bodies who allegedly are there to protect wild life but fail massively when it comes to brownfield sites. We say “had the potential” to cause profound embarrassment but this is by no means a foregone conclusion. Such a drastic intervention may not have received any publicity at all because the growing rapprochement between conservation groups and the media only serves to stifle all independent criticism and silence dissident voices (like ourselves), despite the latter being numerically easily the largest, and potentially most proactive, constituency. It is the latter, among others, to whom we address our theories and our experiences in practical action.

Above: a burnt out carriage in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards and photo right, a grayling butterfly

Mabey as the titular owner of Hardings Wood sensibly has allowed the place to become the property of a village trust. I’m unable to own a piece of nature because I simply don’t have the money. But in the highly unlikely event of ever being left any money and with no dependants, perhaps I too would want to purchase an uncoppiced wood, a piece of a spoil heap or quarry and see what I could do with it in terms of creating a variety of habitats and attracting wild life. Meanwhile I am very much a member of that unsung band that goes around giving nature a hand and is constantly knocked back. Virtually all my guerrilla seeding and planting has come to nothing: whether mown down or pulled up or whatever, it has all been destroyed in one way or another. More than disheartening, it flattens a person. It occurs with such devastating regularity it is beginning to seem like it is fated to happen. It is as if all our efforts are being monitored on CCTV, a panel of invigilators then sending out a swat team dedicated to ensuring that nothing is allowed to regenerate of its own accord but must be covered with evergreen aliens and then mulched to stop native weeds from appearing. Every bit of trefoil that we have planted around Shipley station on the outskirts of Bradford to extend the threatened Common Blue population has literally been ground into the dirt it thrives on, if left alone. However, for a couple of years our efforts did meet with success and for the first time ever we succeeded in drawing the Blue across the Bradford beck, “t` mucky beck” as it is known locally. With no one to lend a helping hand, it is a lone, thankless task though if something drastic is not done in the immediate future, the butterfly is doomed to die out at the station.

Conservationist bodies do not like individuals taking matters into their own hands. That way they lose control, their unwritten motto being “everything within the party nothing outside it”. I had intended to write “organisation” rather than “party” but what came out instead is very telling. For we find members of conservationist parties have something of the apparatchik about them. This control fetish is also a property fetish and the fact that all our planting involved trespassing means it is therefore illegal and to be doubly condemned. Conservationism profoundly mirrors the society we live in and is riven by an us and them of believers and sceptics, of representatives and the betrayed represented whose “stakeholding” is much weaker and therefore far more open to the idea that we must be rid of the reservation mentality and all that implies. We go to look at a reservation or SSSI in a frame of mind akin to that of visiting a museum or gallery or any staged performance. We must begin to envelop ourselves in nature, approach it with hands, feet, spades, hammers, saws, as well as eyes, prepared, this time, to work with nature rather than against it. We must cease to seat ourselves before it as we would a TV, treat it as easy viewing in the confident expectation it will perform as requested and at the time of our choosing. Looking at nature has made us blind to it.

To take the theatre out of nature so we might better grasp it comes at the end of a long development that has its origins in classical German philosophy. Appearing in 1849, the explorer Von Humboldt’s “Ansichten der Natur” was the apogee of one particular strand arising out of this tangled skein in which art and nature are intertwined and which essentially sets the scene for today’s pretty pretty, natural history aesthetic. For these “pictures of nature” were aesthetic presentations of research into natural science and geography that Von Humboldt honed up into a dazzling series of lectures and which won him a worldwide following. These polished performances also suggested a new approach to travel as opposed to the fearsome privations of the voyage, the comfort of the planned tour, the travelogue and leisure cruiser taking the place of the “floating coffins” which were the sailors names for Darwin’s “The Beagle” sister ships.

Hegel would have undoubtedly objected to Von Humboldt’s “pictures” because surface appearances were only part of the story. Much in the same way, Faust longed for a philosophy and praxis that transcended the dead objectivity of the solely contemplative and the disunity between knowledge of nature and human nature. His first step in Faust Part One was to explicitly reject the notion of drama as simply denoting a play, bending it to mean something far wider. I merely cite the latter not in order to show off, but so that conservationists may begin to take us more seriously. And so to conclude this lengthy digression on Mabey, suffice to say this has never been his problem but it is ours, just as our praxis of conservation is profoundly different and basically at loggerheads with his and the entire conservation Cominterm.

So is it possible to neatly sum this guy up? Richard Mabey as a young man with flair liked the razzmatazz of the mid 1960s - what blues shouter George Melly referred to as revolt into style – a relatively mild-mannered non conformity that also occasionally nurtured an often astounding radical expression quickly following on its heels; one which demanded the world be turned upside down. It was a vision of total social revolution. And pronto! We guess that Mabey was flummoxed by much of this. Nay more; he probably hated it and he probably hated all the people like us who tried to practise a situationist critique. Mabey’s turn to nature throughout the 1970s was also a retreat from the uproar as he couldn’t even countenance social ecology a la Murray Bookchin never mind a critique of art and the state and nearly everything else beside. Suffering from periodic nervous collapse – an inevitable by-product of intensifying alienation – Mabey sought in nature quiet, contemplative ponderings and solitude, looking for a wholesome fulfilment that forever escaped his grasp; a deflected eros that we have more than a little sympathy for, as it also soothes our furrowed brows. Ineluctably though the great themes of revolt slunk through the cool, dark woods and crept through the back door of his country cottage. Maybey had to confront them or rather, he made it his business not to confront them, deflecting them into cul-de-sacs of fine sounding phraseology and prose which on the surface look so profound but end up meaning little. The guy cannot be crude, he cannot forthrightly hate the system, and as for the very word capitalism, why it is an ugly expressive description to be avoided at all cost. Above all, Mabey has no faith in a liberatory uprising of ‘the people’. The bald truth is that elusive but utterly essential revolution of the green, red and black combined is not for the likes of an English gentleman naturalist who sees in such an uprising something of Edmund Burke’s “swineish multitude” nowadays given added value by an hysterical media that views all of us at the sharp end as part and parcel of a psychotically maimed collective. Mabey baby you should first pronounce on the real psychotics who administer and promote this end game suicide capitalism?

Stuart Wise with help from bro’: Late Summer, 2009

The above is also prelude to the critique of Maybey’s erstwhile friend, eco artist Andy Goldsworthy who despite all his self-serving images to the contrary, is the person most responsible for an even greater invasion of value and monetarisation of nature, especially through the paid for up front concept of an aestheticised nature walk and counterpart to an eco tourism more expensive than any banal, humdrum, cheap and nasty, swimming pool vacation in Lanzarotti.

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20/20 vision in William Hazlitt's Maidstone and a short addendum

........The discovery of a fold made of beech trees.........

Quite by accident we discovered this fold made from beech trees on a piece of waste ground known locally as 20/20 in Maidstone, Kent. The land now belongs to Wimpey's and planning permission had been granted for yet another suburban atrocity when like a deus ex machina, the credit crunch struck and so the brownfield site was, at least temporarily, saved from predation.

Chancing on the site was a transforming experience and made our day. We had passed what we took to be a beech coppice several times without paying it that much attention, except to unconsciously note for a large beech it did look rather squat lacking the height, if not the breadth, of a mature beech. Stooping beneath the low-slung branches that concealed the trunk from view, we were surprised to find ourselves confronted with a palisade of beeches. We immediately thought the beeches had once formed the boundary of an ancient path but shimmying between the close set trunks we were even more amazed to find we had entered a dark, rectangular enclosure bounded on all sides by beech trees. Except where the light was able to break through the canopy in the centre of the fold, there was no other woodland vegetation apart from decaying beech leaf litter and therefore not that untypical of beech woods generally. This geometric, malfunctioning naturalness had taken on a life of its own and instantly caught our imaginations, for we had never seen anything remotely like it before. A fold constructed entirely of beech trees must be virtually unique, surely? Why beech, why not fast growing hawthorn (“quickthorn”), for there was plenty of hawthorn on the 20/20 site?

We instantly began to notice other irregularities. In the gloom there appeared to be a glowing crystal of considerable size. A bag of white cement perhaps that had been left outside in the rain? On closer inspection it turned out to be a shattered ball of gypsum, strewn fragments scintillating from beneath the decaying vegetation. Where had the quartz come from? Perhaps the cement works located some distance outside of Maidstone? Strangest of all, though, were a large number of buried plant pots, their terracotta rims just to say visible and which we would have overlooked had not the strangeness of the place quickened our perception. An illicit marijuana plot? Hardly, for very little could grow in these sunlight-starved shadows. There was also an abandoned plough and an old wrought iron gate which a blacksmith must have fashioned in the late 19th century. It was now laying on the ground where it once had stood upright in the only gap in the four-sided figure of beech trees. Rough cyclists had practised in the clearing, a series of earthen ramps having been thrown up and which are now becoming rapidly grassed over. The cyclists have now moved on to a patch of sandy ground outside of the pill box.. Someone has sprayed “local” on it as if this was an alternative, criminal Tesco's owing to the numbers of shopping trolleys that had been dumped around it. By the side of the pill box there are a couple of cherry trees with branches that have been rived off, this delinquent 'pollarding' contrasting with the traces of 'legitimate' pollarding in the rows of beeches back in the hidden fold. However the fold could not have been much more than 150 years old and by then pollarding was going out of fashion as coal replaced wood as the commoners' household fuel, and iron began to take the place of wood in buildings for industrial use, the construction of machine frames and in ships and barges etc. Henceforth, in addition to becoming objects of scientific study as more was learnt about trees in one decade than in the entire previous history of dendrology, trees would increasingly be aestheticized and revered for their intrinsic beauty as art aspired to break through representation and be life itself. As absorbers of CO2, rather than just providers of oxygen, only latterly have trees proved to be more functional and necessary to mankind than ever, a necessity however that, up to a point, proscribes their centuries old utilisation: rightful tree worship has finally rid itself of pagan crankiness, found its corresponding science and come of age.

The fold (on reflection intended for pigs rather than sheep, goats, cattle or horses) may actually have been a beech coppice that was traditionally foraged by pigs and this had been chopped down piece-meal over time. The commoners' rights of pannage for swine in Kent - the Andredsweald - reached back to the 8th century. Any beech mast that had taken root may well have been grubbed out and then planted in straight rows. If wood anemones and dogs mercury, both specifically woodland plants, appear in spring, then almost certainly we are dealing with a ghost wood that has been made-over and aligned into a pig pen. We looked for signs of other trees between the individual beeches but found none, so presumably a temporary fence cut from the nearby hawthorn had once protected the newly planted hedge. Once the beech trees had gained in girth, the hedge would have withstood any amount of rough treatment by pasture animals.

(Though, in the scale of pasture animal values, the pig ranked below that of the milk cow, it was above that of the goose and it was the fate of the goose more than any other “farm yard animal”- the notion of the farmyard was a consequence of enclosure- that sparked revolt. It was not the pig but the goose that prompted the inspired, anonymous, couplet that has resounded down the centuries and just too acute and stinking of muck for any self styled poet: “they hang the man and woman that steals the goose from off the common /but lets the greater villain loose that steals the common from the goose”. We have lost sight of the fact the goose once was a life and death issue for the poorer commoners summed up in the lapsed popular saying someone’s “goose is cooked” meaning they’d completely had it. The dreams of the poorest burst with excess and the commoners desire for untold riches and freedom from toil was centred on the “goose that lays the golden eggs” and a good layer that nurtured her goslings eventually evolved into the Mother Goose of Xmas pantomimes, theatre but a poor substitute for the lost dramatic significance of domesticated wild fowl)

The oddity of the Maidstone denaturalised wood (see the addendum to MABEY BABY) somewhat helped compensate for a desolating absence of song birds and insects on this waste ground that could well have once have been common land. Three sun filled days in mid September, 2009 with sound carrying for miles on the motionless air, and all we saw were several Common Sympetrums, one female Common Aeshna, one Comma, one Small Copper and at most three Speckled Woods. We remarked on the absence of wasps, bees, hover flies but especially crane flies, unable to spot even one daddy long legs, though in truth we opted not to look too closely, preferring to remain blind. In nearby suburban gardens the diadem or garden spiders appeared to be doing well, but one couldn’t help feel that this was an aberration and that it did not indicate a recovering eco system. But this is the position that has been adopted by Buglife and the British Arachnological Society, duplicating the dangerous hyperbole of the billion Painted Ladies that purportedly would, in a spectacular reverse migration, be winging their way to warmer climes in late summer.

No other explanation was ever offered for the seeming large number of arachnids. Helped by the decline in insectivorous birds, spider eating wasps, frogs and even flies, could it be that the chain of predation has broken down, allowing more spiders to reach maturity than is customarily the case? The larder appeared to be all but bare when we came to examine garden spider webs in the second week of October, these intact, tensile and empty orbs showing only a barren assortment of leaves, down, dust particles and the odd winged aphid. Though this may seem far fetched, a comparable scenario is infolding in drought-ridden East Africa. Big cats are also doing well there because stricken herbivores are very easy prey. Of course we would know nothing of this if all we had to go on was David Attenborough's shameful "life" (first screened on Oct 12th 2009) which began in Kenya and showed an example of cooperative behaviour, three leopards joining forces to bring down an ostrich. The series was three years in the making so there can be no excuse in pleading ignorance regarding a drought that has ravaged East Africa for five years with Kenya, and neighbouring countries, the first to be almost totally burnt to a frazzle by climate change. With this in mind “Life” (though “Death” would be a better title) did not come across as a scientific record but rather as invitation to a wild life safari and was therefore advertising at its most deceitful.

Attenborough is a master of the black arts of pseudo conservation and honorary president of Butterfly Conservation [BC], chosen on account of his celebrity status and unrivalled capacities as a salesman of nature. This year BC and the Independent newspaper got together and came up with the hard sell of “Butterfly Summer”. In fact this partnership was an ecological bogoff - join BC and the Independent was yours for free for one year.

On July 25th the Independent's environmental editor Michael McCarthy foamed that we were in the “middle of one of Britain’s most extraordinary butterfly summers – with a billion butterflies of one species about to take wing----presenting people with a chance to spot butterflies in greater numbers than have been seen in Britain for years”. What pernicious nonsense! One butterfly, no matter how many there are of one species (in this instance, the Painted Lady) hardly makes a “butterfly summer”. Nearly six weeks later the same sentiments were echoed in the Guardian (4/9/09) with a journalist claiming he “had been amazed by the swarms of butterflies that I believed only existed in the hyperbolic imagination of Victorian lepidopterists” adding “the summer of 2009 has witnessed one of the greatest Painted Lady migrations in living memory”. Both journalists appear to have been suffering from the same hallucination brought on by the editorial enforcing of wishful thinking, because, in our view, there have not been that many Painted Ladies on the wing either in the north or south, certainly not in comparison to the great invasion of over a decade ago when it was possible to pick Painted Lady larvae off thistles growing up through cracks in the pavement of inner London and Silverdale Moss in Morecambe Bay was one mass of writhing larvae. Come October 2009, even the BBC's “Autumnwatch” began to have their doubts: where were all the expected millions - even billion - second generation Painted Ladies? No one dared say it was not much more than hype from the very start. And so this perplexing ecological mystery needed to be solved and perhaps we the viewers had the answer! And there had to be an answer – if not some knowing wiseacre might begin to compare this piece of inflationary nature hype with the fictive bubbles generated by a stagnating capitalism founded on the advertising of brands (or butterflies) and the spinning of wilder and wilder fantasies.

As the Independent’s environmental Editor Michael McCarthy, of all people, should have exercised restraint. In an article for the Independent on April 21st 2008 he wrote of the alarming decline of birds migrating between Africa and Europe, this profound motion having long been “recognised as one of the worlds most magnificent natural phenomena on the scale of the Gulf Stream and the Indian monsoon. On the 22nd of March, 2009 reviewing a book titled “Say goodbye to the Cuckoo” by John Murray he wrote of his unease, of something troubling he could not put his finger on, of spring as we know it coming to an end, of something so momentous “that perhaps it is better not to think it through”. Fortunately for the Independent's environmental editor “Butterfly Summer” saved him from having to do that and bland conservationism is once more the order of the day. The majority of conservation yap is today filtered through the media with cash strapped editors and program directors pressuring journalists into writing up-beat assessments against their better judgement, just as if they were preparing a company report prior to a shareholders meeting.

In this media transect they clutch at numbers (numbers in organisations, numbers of individual species, numbers of consumers of nature - everywhere the hunt is on to increase the number -) never once stopping to ask what do the numbers actually mean, for their jobs would be on the line if they did so. And wild life conservation charities ever anxious not to alienate the middle ground, in the last analysis unequivocally support this bad practise - despite the occasional quibble of a conscious stricken member who is then silenced by being ignored, (or maybe judged a bit touched), rather than asked to leave.

Even more insidiously than their advertising counterparts (for it is expected of them) the bio-numerati have, almost without exception, fallen into the trap of hyping the one swallow that makes a summer in ad land but certainly not in nature. So number begins to substitute for genuine biodiversity and becomes bioperversity, the main aim of the language of advertising being to inflate expectations and the myth of possession, the ceaseless wanting rather than the actual holding. Selling dreams as reality, the consumer imaging of nature as abundance rather than dearth, works just so long just so long as we remain separated from nature, either as viewers or tourists to earth centres and pricey nature hospices like the St Albans butterfly house, made all the more agonizing because not one voice has been raised in protest against it, in fact very much the opposite. Only if we resist the controlling images of nature will we begin to get anywhere.

A language inevitably accompanies the financialization of nature that comes straight from theatre, film, gallery or music reviews. Briefly viewing the BBC's “Autumnwatch” before I could stand it no longer and had to switch off, I was forcibly struck by hack literary expressions like “natural theatre”, “incredible drama” and then show biz head liners like “Battle of the Titans”, “King of the Green” etc. to describe the red deer rut. At one point a nature presenter (Chris - Crisp Packet - Packham) accused another (Simon King) of “trying to out-orchestrate” him. Continually assaulted with jargon like “nature's harvest”, “autumn's incredible riches”, autumn was being constrained to live up to its stereotype, as though Keats' “Ode to Autumn” had been especially composed for the show. Rather than seeking to express the alarming reality of today’s out of kilter autumn in which birds are nesting and fields of poppies blooming for the second time, language was here deployed as a tool to style a conventional autumn, the one sanctified by tradition, the cosy autumn of fireside chats and church harvest festivals.

Of course, these presenters know a lot about nature and their facts and experiences are often very interesting but there again so are ours and all others immersed in nature that have no profile or position in society. For the last two centuries at least, there’s been tension between the specialists (often writers) and the field naturalists (quaintly referred to as "professionals and amateurs") though neither could get by without the other; a living testimony if you like to that vibrant democracy nature forces on us – intimated perhaps again in Keats’ “grand democracy of forest trees” – a concept ever beckoning towards greater enrichment. Have we now reached the moment when there may be a greater coming together involving the questioning of the very existence of money, the state, the suburbanisation of life and a omniscient trivial consumption bringing about the end of all the eco-systems which so much life depends on? In short, a coming together to combat the era of suicide capitalism.

The creation of an artificial language that shapes rather than reflects reality, is greatly aided by the fact that nature is increasingly experienced as a media representation, one we are guided through by professional presenters and ‘unworldly’ falsifiers like David Attenborough as if they alone know the path to nature's holy grail, a nature unspoiled by the devastation wrought by capitalism. Sir David has now acquired the status of a national treasure. Revered to the point of worship even by the likes of Johnny Rotten, to be even mildly critical of this nature royal is to be guilty of the crime of lese-majesté. As the nature illusionist, he has rightly incurred the censure of George Monbiot but who then typically retracts and praises the man - however in a way that totally damns Sir David, once the connotation of his remark are properly understood and whose true meaning obviously escapes Monbiot. Godlike in that St David can do no wrong “in the eyes of all who worship him” he is godlike in another sense in that “he has created a world which did not exist before”.

A comment like this could have rolled off the pen of a Schelling or even the far harder-headed Hegel. Dialectical idealism aside, also present in this categorical statement is the romantic dream of ultimate artistry, the desire to create life and replace “god”. Translated into today’s environment it amounts to saying that without Sir David nature does not exist and, what's more, can only do so in the presence of celebrity, for this is now its conditio sine qua non. Forget cameramen and women, production teams, production editors, operations managers and what not, (actually all irrelevant save the former), this is more than just the appropriation of other peoples efforts typical of captains of industry or those erstwhile “masters of the universe”, the financiers. No longer just a knight of the realm, Sir David has now become a demiurge that creates the universe we are in! Every bubble is more an outrage against common sense, more of an anti-gravity event than the last, so now is the time to float the possibility of a nature bubble, a Planet Earth become an ark of re-engineered nature.

In order to retain their credibility, nature celebrities like Attenborough have begun to pepper their broadcasts with calls for action as though they were saying something shockingly radical, the incantatory effect of this word sweeping all before it like magic. But really it is a call for more talks at the political level, for talks about talks until the incendiary word has been robbed of all meaning by talktalk. Action as envisaged by Sir David is inaction, a motionless form of motion, an impotent declamation on the stage of world politics such as the December 2009 Copenhagen Conference on climate change will undoubtedly turn out to be and which more perceptive, though hardly radical, commentators already acknowledge to be the case (see, for instance Guardian 29/9/09 “The last chance to save the world: long, contradictory and impenetrable”) The last thing Sir David wants is for people to take matters into their own hands and act for themselves. This is the only way to save nature and is also rapidly bound to reconnect with a past which has been smothered in forgetfulness and drowned in calumny when people did take to the streets and could make a difference.

In the interim, as never before, celebrity became a displaced praxis, an alienated form of empowerment based on the renunciation of self and a symptom of increased dispossession such that nothing is achievable without the presence of celebrity. So omnipresent is the infatuation with celebrity that not so long ago Butterfly Conservation organised butterfly walks along the south coast of England with each step of the way guided by a different celebrity! By virtue of being a celebrity they knew everything about butterflies and gave life to them. So much for the little things that run the earth. Without a parasitic superstructure it seems they can’t! Today there is nothing a celebrity can’t fix from curing world poverty, negotiating with the Taliban, sorting out the Middle East to finding a cure for cancer. Their collective, gargantuan, though self-serving aims, reminds one of the hopes that formerly were invested, for much sounder reasons, in the workers and non-workers’ movement. And ultimately it all boils down to money, the need to justify it, even appearing to give it away (“we owe it to humanity”) in order to double up on income later, once the media publicity has done its work by keeping a celebrities name in circulation. And that is why Sir David Rottenborough has to predate the word “action” and render it extinct through over kill. His unspoilt, not of this world, vision of nature he seeks to project is ultimately directed to preserving the status quo, to conserving the money economy and a dreamlike nature rather than a down and dirty nature for an anonymous majority that has temporarily lost sight of itself, the worship of celebrity a major part of this self-denying ordinance. And only in so far as the eco-constituency is prepared to transgress, and not do as it's told, will it begin to understand this and act upon it.

*********

Not only is the eco movement in desperate need of a relevant critique of capitalism, it is also totally wanting in a critique of the state. Because of this, actions that have the potential to cut loose from the state and capitalism can fast get bogged down in the quick sands of the state that will ensure they come to nothing, though admittedly it is far from easy to keep the two apart as the state will always shadow a threatening social movement and seek to do everything it can to integrate it if it cannot destroy it directly. No one in their right minds can expect Sir David to initiate a discussion of the role of the state because, like all big name ecos', he is incapable of even beginning to see that the state is a huge problem and that a nature liberated from capitalism is also a nature liberated from the state. He couldn’t even contribute intelligently to a discussion on how the conservationist state arises out of voluntary initiatives beginning more or less in the 1920s which are then promoted by radio and national newspapers in particular, the conservation of nature eventually forming part of a broader national plan of strict town and country planning laws, welfare agencies and the nationalisation of basic industries, all designed to preserve capitalism and make it function 'properly' by correcting, once and for all, free market anarchy. Though Sir David is aware that if we get out of kilter with the natural world “the associated emotional, spiritual and physical loss is the road to madness” he does not see that the nature tradition in this country is infused with a hidden radicalism of great subterranean power and that the extraordinary pre-eminence of natural history in these islands kicks off when its founding father, John Ray, refuses around 1660 to swear an oath of allegiance to the state in matters of conscience. Thus from the very start, modern natural history in England is stamped with liberty and a resistance to state tyranny, though as time passes it tends to increasingly become an underground current. Though a very broad one, it is reluctant to show its teeth and is inclined, like all underground movements, to whisper rather than bark, fearful of making its presence known and only roaring out of earshot.

The Attenborough files, with nature a distinct second, are now to be made available on line in the BBC web archive. It has been hailed as “a massive online experiment” with fresh clips, between two and eight minutes long, uploaded everyday. The streaming of film on the internet is increasing by leaps and bounds so why call it “a massive on line experiment”? How will success be measured? By the number of hits a hit counter registers? Or will success be measured to the degree the consumption of digitised images replaces actual nature? If digitised viewing becomes an end in itself then there is no need to conserve nature, for the proxy more than improves on the tedium of the original that fails to bite when we want it to or hides beneath a leaf or won't come out of its cave. Rather than the key to appreciating the diversity of life, this aesthetic Darwinism selects only the best shots. And why stop here? Why not eventually offer the opportunity to remix nature as we think fit and make up our own cryptozoology as we go? Interactive media is still in its early stages but dreams of becoming digital biology. So what better way to compensate for the disappearance of nature than by inventing our own? This we can ‘print’ out in a backyard biofactory and then set free to maraud like a vengeful chimera straight out of the pages of Lautreamont's “Songs of Maldoror? Though still only a distant possibility there is many a true word spoken in jest. Attenborough is on record as saying “urbanization (means) people are increasingly out of touch with the natural world” but that the great remedy is TV that has “an obligation to keep people informed of what is going on”! Search far and wide and it is difficult to find anything that remotely can compare with this Delphic banality and that has to be a candidate for the most stupid utterance ever.

From fairly modest beginnings, the BBC’s Natural History Film Unit has become enormously influential over the past 25 years, commanding a worldwide audience - and franchise. The standard format is tailored to the demands of television and never lasts longer than an hour and typically makes maximum use of a more or less lone presenter, David Atttenborough becoming the first nature celebrity to achieve international renown. Though the world hegemony of the made–for-TV Natural History Unit is not at risk, it is now facing a challenge from the “big screen”. Disney is back again, this time selling more of a space/time experience than the earlier fare of appealing bed time stories that were the despair of serious naturalists and the butt of satirists. The new company is called “DisneyNature” and was formed after the screening – a few years back - of Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” in the States, Disney responding to the series success by setting up its specialist nature division. The company’s first release in the US was simply called “Earth” – a full length version of “Planet Earth”, meaning it was a once-and-for-all viewing experience with no subsequent episodes to be screened over the following weeks. Over the next five years “DisneyNature” intends releasing a film a year, the first , “Crimson Wing” a “lyrical study of flamingos living on Lake Natron in Tanzania”, the second , the sub aquatic “Adventure Ocean” (why not promote it as “experience total immersion”?) and the third, “Naked Beauty” about the job pollinators do but which wont mention that in 2007 there was a 31% loss of bee colonies in California and so will intentionally fall far short of the Naked Truth.

The other factor behind the founding of the company was the runaway success of the French film “March of the Penguins” which when released in the States in 2005 grossed a staggering $77m. As the British director of “Crimson Wing”, Matthew Eberhard said, the French film “made things possible because other people saw they could make money out of it”. Though the emphasis of “DisneyNature” is upon an immersive experience – Eberhard said of “Crimson Wing” “we wanted it to be a project that people can’t experience on television (by helping) give one the feeling that they could be there” - he also added that “we’re trying to tell more of a story line than a standard wildlife film”. Are we back to the old Disney ways or will the narratives strive to be more faithful to nature and seek to reflect its truth? Some hope of that, matey! Eberhard has confessed to finding himself “getting quite bored with television wildlife programmes” a view we would readily agree but which he then immediately negates by declaring they lack artistry “big screen productions giving one a little more artistic leeway” i.e. code for artistic license and all the crap that goes with it. Frankly to find Attenbrough’s approach preachy, and proselytising because it “tells people what to do” is to be deaf, dumb and blind to the low key box of artistic tricks from out of which the series is constructed and the equally insidious “do nothing” message that goes with it. Other than chucking the TV out and going back to dial-up, we cannot, all that easily, disconnect ourselves from this increasingly universal form of smothering, academic, nature entertainment that is now so predictable, repetitious and formulaic that we take about as much notice of it as the air we breathe it is so omnipresent. In fact it is only a superior form of Disney, a staging post for Hollywood, a bloc buster in abeyance. The cunning of artifice resides in its capacity to slam the door shut on the absolute need to make that imaginative leap that leaves the editing of nature behind and goes to its actual defence on the field of the battle for nature. The spectacle of the fullness of nature is part of this sinister stratagem: why save when nature’s credit is unlimited?

In tandem with the financialization of nature, the BBC’s Natural History Unit has become increasingly capitalised. The days are long gone when a naturalist husband and wife team would live out their days in a tiny caravan parked on Spurn Point in the Humber estuary sparingly using the film they could ill afford to buy, so pitiful was their income from the BBC. We also yearn for the vérité of George Cansdale and “Animal Magic” when animals bit keepers and went berserk in the studio. On the spot where once stood an outhouse to nowhere there is now a career ladder. And nowhere has this been made more explicit than in the Unit’s dealings with everyone’s favourite animal of the moment, the Meerkat.

Twenty years ago Attenborough produced “Meerkats United” which subsequently was voted the most popular nature documentary of all time. It was made by James Honeybourne who had just joined the BBC’s Natural History Film Unit. He has since gone on to ‘better’ things and is now the director and “brains” behind “Meerkats-the Movie” which is backed by the Weinstein Bros and narrated by the deceased Paul Newman. In the New Disney the presenter has become a voice, though not just any old voice for only an instantly recognisable one will do. The voice we hear on the American version of “March of the Penguins” is that of Morgan Freeman and Whoopi Goldberg narrates on “Meerkat Manor”, the film that will go head to head with “Meerkat - the Movie”.

The original “Meerkat Manor”, (narrated by Bill Nighy of the abysmal “Love Actually”), was an animal soap and the first of its kind and became a hit both sides of the Atlantic. Produced by Oxford Scientific Films with support from the BBC, TV ratings showed it had as many viewers as “Eastenders” and “Coronation Street”. It was originally the brainchild of Tim Clutton-Brock, an animal behaviourist and head of evolutionary biology in the University of Cambridge, who had been carrying out an extensive study into the lives of Meerkats for more than ten years. Using a LAN system of miniature cameras linked to computers to aid the team’s investigation, at some point or other the penny dropped the footage could be turned into a new kind of serial movie and franchises used to fund further research. “Nature” selected for, processed and digitally remastered into a “somewhat art” is here used as a form of pop art futures trading and economic prop to underwrite science. (Note how the funding of science has become increasingly dependent on the amount of exposure it receives in the media and whether research can be digitally imaged. The Independent of the 6th October 2009 carried, on its front page, a striking photo of a human embryo to focus attention on the fact that all research on the creation of animal-human “hybrid” embryos had been refused funding).

In the feature length movie of “Meerkat Manor”, reconstructions and special effects have been employed - and the drama upped. As the Independent (15th October 2009) put it “Honeybourne’s film draws one animal’s life in to a tear jerking coming of age drama”. The anthropomorphic views of Konrad Lorenz have been aired once more to explain our attraction to Meerkats, Lorenz arguing that humans react positively to animals that resemble babies because we are hard wired to do so. However, in later life, Lorenz became a victim of what he had initially struggled so hard against and his malignant brand of sociobiology led to a facile projection of human responses onto the animal kingdom, and vice versa, Lorenz crudely justifying fascism as “animal” in origin because, through the study of animals, we “discover facts which strengthen the basis for the care of our holiest, racial, volkish and human heredity”! How very cudddlesome! In his book “The Year of the Greylag Goose” (1979) Lorenz spoke of one bird’s “scorned mistress”, another’s “unfaithful mate” and a goose’s “dumbstruck grief” at the loss of his beloved. Reviewing the book in “Natural History” magazine, a zoologist wondered, “How did this soap opera get into a book on geese?”(For further comments see “The Encyclopaedia of Evolution” by Richard Milner). Other than the maintenance of the status quo the sociobiological art we are discussing has no political agenda beyond that of keeping us fixated on the media, dumbed down, with the freedom to choose and enjoy more channels than ever before and that has now become the essence /definition of the good life.

Having mentioned one of the “big three” ethologists or behavioural naturalists (Lorenz, Von Frisch and Tinbergen), I am reminded of another exhaustive study of animal behaviour. Under the guidance of Niko Tinbergen, beginning in 1952, Kittiwakes on the Farne Islands were put under the spotlight for several years by another husband and wife team, Esther and Michael Cullen. Then the phrase “under the spotlight” was merely a rhetorical flourish, whereas nowadays it would mean the Kittiwakes had been singled out for the Meerkat treatment. Rinsed by media exposure, their identity, as Kittiwakes, would be subtly erased, softening them up so they could be remade by the marketing men. We would, for instance, give the birds names, like they were a troupe of actors, to prepare them for their debut on the world stage. In “Meerkat Manor” there were several clans, or mobs - the Whiskers, the Lazuli, the Commandos, the Starskys, the Zappas, staffed with soldiers like Frank (geddit?), Hannibal, Zaphod, Mitch, Houdini, Punk, Mozart, Carlos, Nikita, Wilson, Shane etc. So from this to Count Orlov of “compare the market/meerkat.com” is only a short step for mediaman – but one giant step for Meerkats. Though the ad that has been heaped with industry awards and remixed in virals that has Count Orlov watching porn, the Meerkats grooming essentially begins with Attenborough - and ends with regular updates on Count Orlov`s twitter feed and flick album. It’s that simples.

Back on the Farnes off the coast of Northumberland, Michael Cullen sought to capture the Kittiwakes display on film whilst Esther carried out her tireless observations from a windbreak erected perilously close to the cliff edge. Today there would be a network of leads, digital observation replacing actual observation. The hair raising risks that once were part of fieldwork and gave it that special, electrifying umph has been largely superseded by computer fed armchair observation, which, though it can be just as canny, do not force upon a person that life-enhancing spirit of adventure and carelessness of personal safety that animated the old naturalists.

I have seen snatches of the film shot by Michael Cullen, and which though absorbing, has not struck me to anything like the same extent as the regular appearance on Tyne Tees Television of Kittiwakes nesting on the Tyne Bridge. Would prolonged observation reveal subtle differences in behaviour when compared with the behaviour of Kittiwakes on the cliffs of the Farnes? The regularity of a machined environment does affect animal behaviour and it takes some adjusting too, like the garden bird Julian Huxley observed that persisted in trying to build a nest on each rung of a ladder despite the fact the nest fell to the ground every time. In nature there are no such regularities, the bird tricked into thinking the ladder was a tree, and the rungs, branches. Similarly I feel particularly miffed that I have not been able to follow up my observations on the Grayling in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards in West Yorkshire and examine further the butterfly’s relationship to rusting railway lines and points levers, the peeling cream paint of the latter giving them a flaking, blotched appearance not unlike that of the bark of a silver birch which Graylings traditionally like to rest on- and rather warmer, moreover, because of the heat retentive properties of metal. But no, dumb fuck authority decided the yard looked better with the old, buckling, railway lines and rotting sleepers pulled up and carted off. I did notice in 2009 that their has been a reversion to type and that the Grayling is returning once more to hug the birches that fringe what used to be the colony’s centre. A marvellous opportunity has been irretrievably lost without one conservation body giving a damn.

The urban Kittiwakes are the only thing that would persuade me to visit Newcastle’s quayside. However, once there, I would wander down to take a look at the Eye Bridge and then sadly reflect does anyone know the real origin of this metaphorical, body-part, construction which goes back to 1968/69 and Raf Fulcher`s brilliant reconstruction of Tatlin’s Ornithopter in dingy basement premises in Newcastle. We did not know it then but this talisman was the herald of a fundamental change about to take place in Newcastle and that, far fetched as it does sound, eventually would have a colossal impact on the regions industrial base, easily as big, and certainly more consequential, than Parsons Turbinia on show in Exhibition Park. This construction was just a part, and a recuperative part at that, of a tide of advanced revolutionary thinking then sweeping Newcastle that sought to transform everyday life in its entirety. Unable to remotely achieve its goal, this profound, encepahlous movement that was almost immediately brutally stamped on, would eventually reap the ironic harvest of aestheticisation the city is now noted for. Everywhere we go in present day Newcastle we see the inverted image of what we were about all those years ago. For the moment its more avant-garde, conceptual conservatism has been overlain by an even greater orthodoxy, that of traditional theatre and the musical epitomized by the runaway success of Lee Hall’s “Billy Elephant” and “The Pitman Painters” in the West End and on Broadway. When Melvyn Bragg, that consummate philistine of encyclopaedic scope, interviewed Hall on TV there was no mention of the most knowing painting ever produced by the Ashington miners, which was of a public urinal in Wallsend. Containing a hidden reference to Duchamp’s Urinal, potentially it could have opened a can of worms and pointed the archaic debate more in our direction. (Again in this respect take a look at “A Malicious Dunciad in Newcastle” elsewhere on this web).

And so once more to the brownfield Kittiwakes of the Tyne Bridge. Urban yes, but they are not yet urbane. And to become that they require the services of an artist. But it doesn’t have to be that of a film crew, editor and producer taking instructions from an increasingly art conscious animal behaviourist. It can be like what happened in Folkestone on the south coast just as the noughties economic crash was getting under way. The Folkestone Triennial, curated by Andrea Schlieker, is a three yearly “time and space” exhibition, the first taking place in the summer of 2008. All the usual names were to be found with their noses in the trough - Emin, Deller, Wallinger…..and Marc Dion an LA artist who had constructed(or rather had made- which actually is an important qualification, for today’s conceptual artists typically cannot bang a nail in) a Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit in the shape of a giant seagull. This staffed unit was a clearing house for information about the “evolution, ethology, natural history environmental status and folklore of these remarkable birds”, Dion announcing in a masterly statement of the obvious that “Gulls are the most conspicuous non-human denizens of Folkestone”. Conceptual artists valorise just by looking and eco artist are no exception, the observation of nature now coming with a price tag attached.

Andrea Schlieker had been called in by the Town Council to head an arts led re/degeneration of Folkestone though in fact all the Council did was rubber stamp the Creative Foundation set up by Roger De Haan, a resident of Folkestone and chair of its most successful business, Saga (or Gaga) that deals in tourism for the elderly. A multi millionaire, De Haan owns masses of run down property in central Folkestone and through the Triennial clearly hopes to set the gentrification ball rolling. An Observer newspaper reporter described Folkestone “as once the most glorious holiday destination in all England”, Edward VIII his mistress and an entourage of aristocrats staying in the Metropole and Grand hotels high on the leas overlooking the Channel. Now that the port has been run down in the wake of the opening of the Channel Tunnel and the former hotels converted into apartments for the retired, the town has become “a ghostly place” in search of a new identity. However at the head of Schlieker’s roll call of notables is none other than Marcel Duchamp, who reputedly crossed the Channel to play a game of chess in the town. It is he who has stamped his seal of authority on the Triennial’s “tales of space and time” and there is enough that is ambiguous in Duchamp that leads one to suspect he might nimbly have side stepped the issue of for or against but nonetheless gone along with this property led stab at regeneration - though covering his tracks with an enigmatic silence.

Schlieker is unquestionably streets ahead of Lee Hall “culturally” (though any meaningful dialogue with her is just as much out of the question) and checking out her curriculum vitae we see that, in addition to being a Turner prize judge, she jointly edited an exhibition back in 1992 in the (S)Turpentine Gallery with East London born Henry Bond whose “work is discussed in relationship to the derive as theorized by Guy Debord” (no apologies for not reproducing the blurb). One of Bond’s published Photo Books is called “La Vie Quotidienne”. Now that title rings a bell, even in English!

Schlieker has chosen the sites of the Triennial’s work and they stretch from the Martello Tower “up near the Warren”. Mention that name to any lepidopterist and it will start a ghost for it once teemed with butterflies and moths, though not any more. There are records of Berger’s Clouded Yellow and it formerly hosted a variable colony of Scarlet Tigers, a moth I have yearned to see since childhood, having only ever seen a squashed specimen on a road near the village of Stanton St John in Oxfordshire. In E.B. Fords “Moths” (1955), the Warren is one of just four plates illustrating habitat and I am reminded that, as a youth of twelve or thirteen, I would stare at the black and white photo in my bedroom in temperate Co Durham and dearly wish I could be instantly transported to this alluring, tropical, undercliff. When an artist like Dion, who describes his work as “incorporating aspects of archaeology and ecology”, moves in on a place it invariably means that place is fucked ecologically and historically in terms of grasping its real, rather than local history, and that we had better look elsewhere for a nature that still just about manages to run free and a history that escapes ideology. The contrast is at its most stark between the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (which the Triennial cites as an example of ecologically minded, open space public art) and the nearby Woolley Colliery spoil heap. The latter is in every respect superior, from the Pit Fountains, to the Dingy Skippers, Little Ringed Plovers and rather rare Marsh St John’s Wort, to the submerged iron grids with their coral-like bloom of rust, lapped by the gentle waves that ripple across the pit ponds. The fall in numbers of species inversely parallels the growth in the number of eco artists. (For further elaboration read the first paragraphs of MABEY BABY and/or look at the video of the Dingy Skipper at Woolley colliery elsewhere on this web).

In 2009 the Triennial appears to have bombed, a victim of the crises. I couldn’t help but contrast the reality of a council estate barbecue I attended this summer in Folkestone and the PR put out by a West London agency promoting the Triennial. The art fest was never mentioned but the bats were, the residents of the estate taking a pride in their presence. We had been invited by Andria, a wholesome lass, and the difference between her and Tracy Emin is that between an absurdly rewarded nothing artist who provocatively plays on her sexuality (the only thing she has going for her), whilst pretending otherwise, and a worked to death, white collar secretary, in a road building firm who posts politically incorrect, off message texts of extreme obscenity. Emin was contracted by the Triennial to create an installation, which she duly did and that she entitled “Baby Things”, to call attention to the town`s high rate of teen pregnancy. Andria’s texts are full of cunts, cocks, saggy breasts and limp dicks that give the impression she’s anybody’s. Nothing could be more mistaken, but she is up front in a way Emin can never now be, Emin’s role, if she could ever get though to a person like Andria, to make her ashamed in front of herself, to confuse and disorientate her, give her two faces instead of one and destroy her working class reality. For the Triennial is about buggering-up the perceptions of the ordinary people of Folkestone, to make them other than what they are, to substitute alterity for alienation and to get them to act as the bottom-up drivers of new phase of capitalist reconstruction from which the majority will be excluded, concept art and the valorisation of nature playing an increasingly central role in the makeover and rebranding of traditional townscapes and their hinterlands.

Meandering dirt roads lead eventfully today to the superhighway and so we are back to where we started out: futurology and techno-romanticism. Though the allegedly larger than life and more real than for real, “DisneyNature” films have yet to hit the big screen, an “innovative” example of another type of bankrupt genre has: “Avatar”. This too strives to manufacture a visceral immersive film experience and to turn cinema into “the ultimate immersive experience” as the director James Cameron puts it. Director also of “Terminator 2” and “Titanic”, Cameron sought to create in “Avatar” an unprecedented “illusion of depth” formed from a novel “fusion digital 3D camera system” and the use of motion capture suits, studded with sensors that feed back to a bank of computers. 70% of it is CGI (computer generated imaging), the actors now genuinely byte actors, half digital half human chimaeras on a performance capture stage six times bigger than anything used in Hollywood before. With each day that passes, the film studio becomes more like a wished-for future biolab or protean operating theatre that puts its imaginary nurslings through their first steps.

Though the revived 3D format still requires audiences to wear polarised glasses, Hollywood execs are now talking of moth balling their conventional 2D illusions. And TV has responded with the first 3D sets promised shortly with laser TV somewhat further down the line, and that has the potential to be yet more immersive and like interactive theatre. Billed as the ultimate sitting room entertainment, it is merely the initial stage of a yet more distant possibility that seeks too make entertainment self and advertising also, and that we end as digitised man having become our own software and image producing factory. How will nature film makers respond to these challenges, for they are already half way down the road, digital renditions of microscopic processes now the norm? But this too is merely a beginning. And will Attenborough eventually be seen as a transitional impresario, part new, part old, a mere presenter, finally, but not a “creator”, a hesitant anticipation of the new digital magi to come, for he is, though unawares, most assuredly already pushing hard in that direction?

Attenborough of course would not see/recognise himself in this mirror held up to the future and would find it preposterous. Yet all his life he has gone in fear of saying anything leading and so we must now abruptly shift away from the gruesome birth pangs of techno-romanticism and go hard up against present day reality and scrutinize what Attenborough had to say on the July 2009 Vestas wind farm factory occupation on the Isle of Wight. This will take up no time at all because he had absolutely nothing to say about it-which is, after all, only being true to his Royal Sirness.

Stuart Wise: October/November 2009

Above: Moonrise by the Sea by Casper David Friedrich / GWF Hegel; re his profound theoretical critique of art

What we have here a series of notes written in an intentionally put-on academic style - though it is hoped with rather more edge - relating to English romanticism highlighted through a comparison with the different, more theoretical approach of German romanticism. It emphasises the sheer experimental revolt of poetic form inherent in the English experiment; an experiment that clearly pointed towards the transcendence of poetry. Although in Germany, Hegel provided a profound theoretical framework clearly pointing out abstractly that 'the arts were dying', in England that revolt was experienced in a more visceral, subjective way though no less profound. As a line of enquiry pointing to the final destruction and realisation of the historic endeavour alienated within art right up to the present day, these beginnings still remain an unwritten history cut short by the death of William Hazlitt in 1830 and lingering on somewhat in De Quincey only to be entirely extinguished in the Victorian era. This colossal reaction, though on the surface extensively modernised, is still powerfully present overwhelmed by the diktats of the Eng Lit pantheon with its vested interests in the immutability of form furiously dismissing any more accurate interpretation which would certainly point to something very different leading towards an entirely different world free of the ravages of capitalism. It is surprising that no aspiring young academic eager to challenge the petrified fossil of Eng Lit and maybe claiming a bit of notoriety in the process, hasn't risen to the occasion, even if the constraints of academia would require punches to be pulled. Nonetheless, like Writing Degree Zero fifty years ago in France, a kind of cat could be let out of the bag even if somewhat limping, as all this should have been said years ago in the immediate aftermath of the revolt of the late 1960s in these islands. It is still not too late to begin.

Recently (Jan/Feb 2006) there was a much praised TV series on romanticism put together by Peter Ackroyd, an academic who has written a few novels and at least one biography on a a major romantic figure in the shape of William Blake. Like his compatriot Richard Holmes who has studied the romantics more exclusively and who obviously has quite an influence on Ackroyd in emphasising the republican and social/political persuasion of the protagonists - hardly surprising seeing the TV survey often substituted the French revolution of 1789 with footage from May 1968 in France which both had experienced in their youth - Ackroyd fell well short of an all-rounded radical take on his subject. Instead of giving equal emphasis to the revolt of form at the heart of English romanticism he fell back finally on the usual Eng Lit homilies (yawn) about all the great poetry and art produced after initially pinpointing tantalising asides (e.g. how Coleridge and Wordsworth preferred their writings to remain anonymous at the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the significance of which he then could make no apposite comment on. Didn't such a gesture question the role of the artist deliberately disavowing any personality cult or special privilege and more than pointing to Lautreamont's later maxim: 'poetry must be made by all and not by one''

Nonetheless Ackroyd must be aware of such a drift as you couldn't fail but notice more than an echo of the English situationist group King Mob in the late 1960s. Some period piece re-enactment of Coleridge in a Quantocks' fishing village sees digitally imposed lines of romantic verse on the sea walls in the form of large, agitational slogans courtesy of some computer software programme. Hadn't King Mob originally done just this - though in raw spray paint - on the streets of Notting Hill in 1967/8? What King Mob had significantly failed to do or follow up with was a revolutionary critique of English romanticism emphasising the tendency towards formal dissolution at its very heart; a failure Ackroyd has merely compounded. It's hardly surprising that Ackroyd's conclusive comments at the end of his four part TV series were lame, even abysmal especially in seamlessly blending Byron's personality cult with the very lucrative media banalities of the modern day pop icon. In lightly skipping over the demonic impulse and outrage, which Byron let rip in his everyday life, the essential connection between such self-expression and the dissolution of artistic form is lost. It was a montaging or plagiarising which a few decades later was to find more coherent expression in Lautreamont's 'Songs of Maldoror'. Moreover, the plagiarism did not stop there as another Englishman had in the meantime made a further contribution in the shape of Charles Darwin. If you like Lautreamont blended the demonically hideous with the mutant transhuman having taken from Darwin not the origin of the species but where the species was horrifyingly going (see Fabre, Darwin, Dalton & 'DNA' Watson meet Lautreamont elsewhere on this website). It is an essential connection which all previous excellent comments and appraisals of Lautreamont from Andre Breton to Guy Debord have missed.

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In dredging up memories of the influence the French avant-garde of the 19th and early 20th century had on me (Lautremont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Duchamp, Picabia, Vache, the Dadaists and the Surrealists like Andre Breton, Peret, Bataille etc) - and then my enthusiasm for the Russian avant-garde - I also was forced even farther back....

Somehow at the back of my mind there lingered the influence of the romantic tradition in this country. Over the years its revolutionary implications had become lost and it was this I have been struggling to bring to light. I needed to have some external frame of reference from which to judge it. And the only country that was remotely comparable was Germany. France was undergoing revolutionary upheaval and no literature of any consequence survives from that era. It had been left behind temporarily and only the image making of David survives and his designs for public spectacles enthroning the rule of reason and as a homage to Robespierre. Germany was not comparable to England economically because Germany was then merely an idea, the reality a pre-capitalist entity of squalid dukedoms and principalities, ruled by petty tyrants. England was on the verge of the greatest change since the Neolithic revolution of settled agriculture and city states, possessing freedoms (though not revolutionary freedom) that were the envy of the rest of the world. As a consequence the subversive potential of the arts was much reduced in scope and the gap between art and revolution much narrowed, with art struggling to find an ever diminishing role in the service of a more fundamental revolution that affected all pre-existing forms of art. Their place was increasingly occupied by passion, spontaneity, the revolutionary moment, confession and critique (see 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; 'The Spirit of the Age'; parts of 'The Prelude'; 'In Defence of Poetry' in which poetry is viewed essentially as a progressive act and not merely the prerogative of metre and verse. Today we would say it is anything but the prerogative of metre and verse and unable to supersede art in its entirety has lapsed into meaningless acts or acting).

I can think of no more relevant words on Wordsworth than those of Hazlitt and which also applies to practically the whole of the English romantic movement from 1789 to the death of Shelley and Byron. He says in the 'Spirit of the Age' that Wordsworth's 'genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age ' it partakes of the revolutionary movement of the age: his muse is a levelling one, (he) tramples on the pride of art with greater pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and anti Strophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus, are still.' How different then is Schiller's historical approach and his efforts to categorize the forms of poetry by giving them a time and place within history, an approach that later on, Hegel was to greatly elaborate on. In 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. Schiller seeks, by historicising form, to establish the difference between ancient and modern poetry. Apart from anything else he sees it is man that has changed, losing over time a naturalness which henceforth it will be Schiller's appointed task to reclaim. (This historical categorisation of the arts, which Schiller initiates, may well have been prompted by the example of Linnaen systematics in the field of natural history. Rejecting this formalism, in which the part tends to separate from the whole, leads Goethe in the direction of evolution). Compared to Wordsworth's lack of sympathy for the arts, bordering on outright hostility, we cringe at Schiller's virtual deification of the Artist (see his poem 'Die Kunstlers') as would-be aesthetic supremo. And yet here is a much more concrete, fully worked out, critique of the growing division of labour than anything that can be found in Wordsworth or indeed the rest of the English romantics. Our lack of naturalness is solely due to that: 'They (the ancients) felt things naturally: we feel what is natural.(!) Our feeling for nature is like the longing of a sick man for health. (!) Nature makes the human race one with itself; art separates and divides.' However don't be deceived by this insightful bluster of radicalism: for Schiller it is only by being guided through the modern arts - nature 'as an idea and an object' - that man becomes whole again. In fact taken to its logical conclusion it does imply a certain transcendence and this possibility continually haunts, and runs away with Schiller, not least in his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man'. Though inspired by Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' that appeared in 1787, and which is the most exhaustive examination of the aesthetic faculties residing in man and up to that point without precedent in human history in terms of its concentration and scope, it was the world shaking event two years later that was to concentrate Schiller's mind.( The 'Critique' is not an art history: one had to wait for Hegel for that who criticises Kant for not including 'becoming' amongst his categories of mind: had he been able to do so history would have played a much greater role in Kant's system). Appalled by the Terror, Schiller needed to settle accounts with it. And this he found in his rejection of the cultivation, or cult - of reason to the exclusion of all other faculties. Immoderate reason is responsible for the division of labour, the sensuous in alliance with a chastened reason, on the contrary, overcomes it. And its chief ally in this battle of the faculties, which puts an end to the distressing consequences of the division of labour, is the cultivation of the arts. Though unwittingly, Schiller was anticipating a response which henceforward was to become commonplace, particularly in the latter half of the 20th Century, where ever capitalist society breaks down: either cheap narcotics or a blitz of the arts or a combination of both and which nowadays is fundamental to the restoration of a threatened division of labour and workaday world, and, as it is now 'lived' the none-workaday world. In fact Schiller willy nilly both though his dramatic productions and grudging fealty to the German aristocratic courts of his time was dragged into becoming an artistic impresario in which stage craft and the mounting of public spectacle became uppermost. 150 years before the age of television he wanted a world of perfect illusion, the better to stage the illusion of freedom. (By appearing to be the consummation of drama in terms of staged illusion, TV is the denouement of drama, destroying once and for all its claims to be an agent of change and real liberation). Finally by assiduously recruiting the arts to his protest against the division of labour, Schiller's cause turns against him: he can be seen as founding an ever more complex, intertwined and, to capital, ever more necessary division of artistic labour whose ramifications are now so immense the problem is knowing where to begin - and end. Capital is now at a permanent stage of 'Homage to the Arts', the title of a dramatic, processional production written and staged by Schiller in honour of a royal marriage in Weimar in 1804.Today this permanent homage-to-the-arts economy is increasingly global in scale and is an aspect of globalisation that is never subjected to critique or, worse, even recognised, its grip is so pervasive and all powerful. Beyond that of making a lot of money, the purpose of this aesthetic economy is to pacify, distract and alienate a person ever further from their real, natural self and potential. Schiller never fully squared up to this dilemma though he was aware of it. To do so would have meant abandoning art and finding another path to the nature that modern man yearned to recover and that lay beyond the division of labour.

How different things are with Wordsworth who is at once less precise but more consequential and finally total in his approach to nature.The appreciation of nature is not to be prefaced by a prolonged tuition in artistic appreciation. Rather nature perpetually remonstrates with the arts and scorns them, needing no further adornment. However Schiller's critique of the division of labour is far more anchored in reality and history than Wordsworth. At this point Wordsworth's apriori nature really does get in the way of a more developed, historical understanding of the division of labour.The relationship which he postulates between man and nature is primal and no social arrangement will ever make good in the life of the individual the sense of loss an individual feels in the presence of nature when compared to how he or she responded to nature as a child. However in the 'still, sad music of humanity' which as an adult he hears in nature, it is the betrayal of his revolutionary ideals he is bemoaning. His abhorrence of the Terror throws him into the arms of nature but not before he is detained for a time by the certainties of mathematics, a compensation for that 'revolutionary reason' that has laid him low. But scientific reason is not good enough finally, because it cannot apprehend the higher reason, the 'very heaven' of youth and revolution, that was expressed in his thwarted revolutionary hopes. And so it is in the Lake District of his childhood he finds this reason once more, shorn ultimately of revolutionary rapture. And so he gives the lie to his own nature mysticism as expressed in his 'Intimations of Immortality' which rather suggests our most intense experience of nature had to be in the womb!

Wordsworth is the first anti poet/poet. He is just one among many and claims no special privileges. There are others, 'silent poets', like his brother who was lost at sea. Poetry is woven into the landscape of the Lake District and its peoples. It has no name: it just is. It spills over into everything. It is in a heap of hewn stones rather than in the 'outrage' of architectural madness it is destined to become. It is in the bower made of withered fern in which to lie down during summer in the company of sheep and from there through the 'open door place' (a hitherto unimaginable architectural term by the way) to gaze and gaze until the vision of what is, no dream can ever equal. And as for stone monuments what better than Ralph Jones, a giant made of stone, constructed as a lark by three lads on Great Howe at the foot of Thirlmere. Wordsworth would gladly have participated in its making because of its lack of pretence and the playful spirit in which it was conceived. This conception of poetry is absorbed in the everyday: it neither needs or knows of poetry in the customary sense.

Matters do not rest here. It is only logical Wordsworth should find encouragement and resolve not in the lives of the poets but in the lives of those who daily trod the fells. He would rather choose a leech gatherer as a guide than Virgil. This is the antithesis of Schiller's approach where art is midwife to the birth of a greater nature and the artist is on a higher plane to that of the life of the common people. Call it humility, call it what you like but I see a link between Wordsworth's attitude and the utter failure of revolutionary vanguards in this country.

Yet it is legitimate to draw comparisons between Goethe and Schiller and Wordsworth and Coleridge. However there is in England an absence of that mighty philosophical dimension which stretches from Kant to Hegel with in between the lesser figures of Schelling, Fichte and Schlegel. Poets in Germany, particularly Schiller turn their hand to philosophy. Goethe did not regard himself as philosophically minded, evolving an intuitive dialectic that is the antithesis of Kantian dualism and hence that of his friend Schiller who was also, despite himself, not comfortable with Kant. This intuitive dialectic also bears striking similarities to Hegel and springs directly from his scientific endeavours, Abandoning painting (as Hazlitt was to do in this country) he also turns his back on verse temporarily to grapple with a larger problem, that of the need to redefine science by imbuing it with the unwritten of poetry. Through awakened eyes that over time have narrowed to a squint bordering on blindness, Goethe seeks to poeticise science by magnifying its visual reality. Observation, by inheriting the artistic tradition, reclaims its rights, replacing a withered observation that is now dead to beauty and the cognitive power of beauty - hardly a Kantian conception. (Apart from its epistemological wrongness it introduces history which, if not entirely alien to Kant, played a small part in his total system. In fact Goethe was to write one of the very first histories of science. See his remarkable preface to his anti Newtonian, 'Theory of Colours') Hazlitt in fact does not take this path. Rather, abandoning painting he next writes a thesis 'An essay on the principles of human action'. Time and again in English romanticism we confront the question now open now hidden of human praxis as if beyond the arts, which have had their time, as beyond there lay more productive, fulfilling occupations. Compared to the potentialities of the whole man the arts are just a hindrance and an embarrassment. The plough is mightier than the pen and without mentioning Burns and his poetic production Wordsworth opts to heap praise on the Burns who knew how to plough a furrow, as if regretting he lacked the skill himself and therefore excluded from the truth of his own versifying which never should have become verse in the first instance. The cult of science and Goethe's challenge to that cult by stressing a more inclusive, rounded science which concentrates all human endeavour by transcending all art and science in a new unity never takes off in this country. Rather it is subsumed by the question of praxis of which science is but a part.

There is no philosophical resonance in England to match that of Germany. However the theoretical stabs and searching's of the English romantics are much more sui generis and can be found wanting if subjected to the tedium of a more strictly logical mind which however continues to remain haunted by the truths they have dismissed after a more discursive examination. In particular, I am thinking of the preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1797, composed jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge but really Wordsworth's own. In this preface Wordsworth yearns to leave art behind and to find fulfilment in nature. Ever afterwards these views torment Coleridge and he must seek out an adequate rebuttal by rendering it more palatable and thus rescuing art. In his 'Biographia Literaria' composed many years later he goes to considerable pains to correct Wordsworth views which on more sober reflection are totally overstated and in need of correction. That he goes to these lengths does suggest the Preface was having an enormous influence, an influence not to Coleridge's liking who by this time wanted a commissariat of cultural continuity, a super-ministry entrusted with the safe guarding of the heritage of words (and the things created by words) of which he would be the soul presiding judge. To the Wordsworth of 'The Preface' the passionate language of common people is poetry though it must be understood this passion is linked to the unfolding of reason in its highest sense and illumined through and through by the imagination which is unleashed by sensuous apprehension at its most intense.

But had not Coleridge done the same and this time in a trance which dissolved the boundary between poetry and reverie, anticipating surrealism' 'Kubla Khan' renders his famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination as set down years later in his 'Biographia Literaria', null and void. It is the one poem of his entire oeuvre he could not reconcile himself to or believe possible. And its creation continually reminds Coleridge of the days when poetry, unrepressed spontaneity and reverie were as one.

For once upon a time this to Coleridge was the bridge between 'art' and 'science' (again there is the same need for italics as in Goethe's case) and the unspoken basis of his relationship with the chemist Humphrey Davy. For a time they were as one. Davy's discovery of the intoxicating properties of nitrous oxide not only narrows the gap between poetry, reverie, spontaneity and science (the discovery of the gas was patiently arrived at through rigorous experiment) it is also in its way a concrete example of the central quest of Germanic absolute idealism, the unity of art and science and hence subject and object by the action of mind and body whose own internal make up reflected that of the external world and vice versa.(The unease this conception gives rise to - we need only think of Lebens Philosophie and the drag it exerted on evolutionary theory even as it strove to recognize evolution within the boundaries of the fixity of the species - this paradox is evident in both Goethe's Ur phenomenon and Hegel's Philosophy of Identity - could only be resolved by dialectical materialism and its more grounded approach which views mind as a historical creation.) It is also given a characteristically English twist at odds with the sober rigidities of German absolute idealism, that of intoxication from substance abuse: nitrous oxide became known as 'laughing gas'. Davy himself writes down his experiences on the drug, his descriptions possessing an unfettered richness like they were from the hand of Coleridge. Even to this day they are regarded as unsurpassed descriptions of drug highs. Davy and Coleridge compare notes and one is reminded of the close collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller to the point where none of them could be completely sure as to who wrote what. The collaboration between Davy and Coleridge is a completely new domain in comparison to which the experiments by Schelling comprehensible only in terms of his desire to get beyond the antinomies of Kant with the 'science' of mesmerism really are laughable. It took some time for Germany to make good this absence of hard science in contrast to England poised as it was on the brink of the earth shattering industrial revolution in which science as objectified through capitalist industry would increasingly hold sway. All that Germany had to offer instead were the mythologies of absolute idealism and the deceptive, easily derided, 'subjectivism' of Goetherian science, which could have yielded fruit, but not in the way its progenitors thought.

Once this particular collaboration between Coleridge and Davy ceased the antinomies of art and science would assert themselves once more. Yet both would continually strive to understand the other, Coleridge forever seeking to give a more comprehensive account of Davy's discoveries fitting them into a larger philosophical whole. And Davy, in turn, was flattered by Coleridge's attention using it as an entre into polite society He learns what it is to be a cultural snob for Davy plays second fiddle to Coleridge deferring to his self-appointed role as superior pedagogue to the practical experimenter. Through his acquaintance with Coleridge, Davy gains social ease, acceptance, and class haughtiness including the rancour that goes with it, particularly when a member of the lower class comes within their orbit, and proves to be better than they are, as happened with Michael Faraday, the blacksmith's son. In fact this relationship was to be of enormous consequence to the history of science in this country, and which was still being played out over a century and a half later in the late 1960s and with the question of revolutionary overthrow still dominating events and to the exclusion of all else this time, for now there were no privileged areas immune from upheaval.

As is well known, Coleridge single handed brought German idealist philosophy to this country. Interest in Kant and particularly Schelling and Schlegel dates from Coleridge's visit to Germany. He brings back dialectic in his suitcase though significantly he appears never to have heard of or ever mentions Hegel. He was slow to fulfil his early promise and meanwhile looked on as friends from his youth rose to stardom like Schelling and Holderlin. He had felt stirring within him a much deeper more thoroughly historical way of perceiving everything that lay before him and which took time to realize.

Pushing Coleridge to onside for the moment I believe I detect a link between Hegel's dialectical idealism and the part played by nature in Wordsworth's scheme of things. It is still I believe operative to this day and could be of major consequence to the conservationist and eco movements though this time the reason unleashed by contact with nature would necessarily involve a critique of political economy, consumer society, the state and wage labour. Hegel the atheist was a believer to the extent that he held that god, in other words the dialectic of theory and practise, was realized in the unfolding of history. Hence there was no prime mover, only the ever deepening profundity of dialectical thought in which god becomes, rising from inert matter through the vegetable and then animal kingdom and finally to man all unfolding within the universal history of a dialectical pan logicism but which by far the most interesting part is that of human history. Of all of Hegel's work that of the 'Philosophy of Nature' is the least interesting despite going to infinite pains to master his subject. The same can not be said of his 'Philosophy of the Fine Arts' which is still richly rewarding and is in every respect remarkable and profoundly innovatory. The dialectic gains strength over time. Thus nature is weak - in fact Hegel speaks of 'the impotence of nature'. But for Wordsworth it is strong and like Hegel ultimately the fount of reason. However this reason can only come about as a result of a passionate feeling for nature and it is only through contact with nature that we can discover this reason. And to find it we must become immersed in it its outward forms unleashing the imagination and laying bare mere appearances allowing us to connect with that reason which had been so cruelly betrayed by the French Revolution. For Wordsworth comes to nature after the destruction of his hopes in the French Revolution, that is why he hears in it the 'still sad music of humanity'. Though still retaining his commitment to equality it is the right of the dandelion that is proclaimed before that of the rights of man. We on the contrary have no choice other than to reject this truncated reason and go directly from nature to man which means confronting the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. Without that all life down to even the merest microbe is in jeopardy and what could be more irrational than assenting to that.

The conservation of Nature today should lead to a profounder line of reasoning than was ever the case in the past. This is the next and greatest addition to the Wordsworthian spirit articulated by him but never fully developed It should also lead to a reappraisal of history, of modes of production and of forms of art because all in some way or other are present in Wordsworth. But unlike Wordsworth, conservationists today don't seek in conservation an antidote to revolution but rather should find there a stimulus to revolution. And all are in one way or another being propelled in this direction. Beginning with nature, dialectical reason seeks to reclaim its rights.

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Recently (Jan/Feb 2006) there was a much praised TV series on romanticism put together by Peter Ackroyd, an academic who has written a few novels and at least one biography on a a major romantic figure in the shape of William Blake. Like his compatriot Richard Holmes who has studied the romantics more exclusively and who obviously has quite an influence on Ackroyd in emphasising the republican and social/political persuasion of the protagonists - hardly surprising seeing the TV survey often substituted the French revolution of 1789 with footage from May 1968 in France which both had experienced in their youth - Ackroyd fell well short of an all-rounded radical take on his subject. Instead of giving equal emphasis to the revolt of form at the heart of English romanticism he fell back finally on the usual Eng Lit homilies (yawn) about all the great poetry and art produced after initially pinpointing tantalising asides (e.g. how Coleridge and Wordsworth preferred their writings to remain anonymous at the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the significance of which he then could make no apposite comment on. Didn't such a gesture question the role of the artist deliberately disavowing any personality cult or special privilege and more than pointing to Lautreamont's later maxim: 'poetry must be made by all and not by one''

Nonetheless Ackroyd must be aware of such a drift as you couldn't fail but notice more than an echo of the English situationist group King Mob in the late 1960s. Some period piece re-enactment of Coleridge in a Quantocks' fishing village sees digitally imposed lines of romantic verse on the sea walls in the form of large, agitational slogans courtesy of some computer software programme. Hadn't King Mob originally done just this - though in raw spray paint - on the streets of Notting Hill in 1967/8? What King Mob had significantly failed to do or follow up with was a revolutionary critique of English romanticism emphasising the tendency towards formal dissolution at its very heart; a failure Ackroyd has merely compounded. It's hardly surprising that Ackroyd's conclusive comments at the end of his four part TV series were lame, even abysmal especially in seamlessly blending Byron's personality cult with the very lucrative media banalities of the modern day pop icon. In lightly skipping over the demonic impulse and outrage, which Byron let rip in his everyday life, the essential connection between such self-expression and the dissolution of artistic form is lost. It was a montaging or plagiarising which a few decades later was to find more coherent expression in Lautreamont's 'Songs of Maldoror'. Moreover, the plagiarism did not stop there as another Englishman had in the meantime made a further contribution in the shape of Charles Darwin. If you like Lautreamont blended the demonically hideous with the mutant transhuman having taken from Darwin not the origin of the species but where the species was horrifyingly going (see Fabre, Darwin, Dalton & 'DNA' Watson meet Lautreamont elsewhere on this website). It is an essential connection which all previous excellent comments and appraisals of Lautreamont from Andre Breton to Guy Debord have missed.

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In dredging up memories of the influence the French avant-garde of the 19th and early 20th century had on me (Lautremont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Duchamp, Picabia, Vache, the Dadaists and the Surrealists like Andre Breton, Peret, Bataille etc) - and then my enthusiasm for the Russian avant-garde - I also was forced even farther back....

Somehow at the back of my mind there lingered the influence of the romantic tradition in this country. Over the years its revolutionary implications had become lost and it was this I have been struggling to bring to light. I needed to have some external frame of reference from which to judge it. And the only country that was remotely comparable was Germany. France was undergoing revolutionary upheaval and no literature of any consequence survives from that era. It had been left behind temporarily and only the image making of David survives and his designs for public spectacles enthroning the rule of reason and as a homage to Robespierre. Germany was not comparable to England economically because Germany was then merely an idea, the reality a pre-capitalist entity of squalid dukedoms and principalities, ruled by petty tyrants. England was on the verge of the greatest change since the Neolithic revolution of settled agriculture and city states, possessing freedoms (though not revolutionary freedom) that were the envy of the rest of the world. As a consequence the subversive potential of the arts was much reduced in scope and the gap between art and revolution much narrowed, with art struggling to find an ever diminishing role in the service of a more fundamental revolution that affected all pre-existing forms of art. Their place was increasingly occupied by passion, spontaneity, the revolutionary moment, confession and critique (see 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; 'The Spirit of the Age'; parts of 'The Prelude'; 'In Defence of Poetry' in which poetry is viewed essentially as a progressive act and not merely the prerogative of metre and verse. Today we would say it is anything but the prerogative of metre and verse and unable to supersede art in its entirety has lapsed into meaningless acts or acting).

I can think of no more relevant words on Wordsworth than those of Hazlitt and which also applies to practically the whole of the English romantic movement from 1789 to the death of Shelley and Byron. He says in the 'Spirit of the Age' that Wordsworth's 'genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age ' it partakes of the revolutionary movement of the age: his muse is a levelling one, (he) tramples on the pride of art with greater pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and anti Strophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus, are still.' How different then is Schiller's historical approach and his efforts to categorize the forms of poetry by giving them a time and place within history, an approach that later on, Hegel was to greatly elaborate on. In 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. Schiller seeks, by historicising form, to establish the difference between ancient and modern poetry. Apart from anything else he sees it is man that has changed, losing over time a naturalness which henceforth it will be Schiller's appointed task to reclaim. (This historical categorisation of the arts, which Schiller initiates, may well have been prompted by the example of Linnaen systematics in the field of natural history. Rejecting this formalism, in which the part tends to separate from the whole, leads Goethe in the direction of evolution). Compared to Wordsworth's lack of sympathy for the arts, bordering on outright hostility, we cringe at Schiller's virtual deification of the Artist (see his poem 'Die Kunstlers') as would-be aesthetic supremo. And yet here is a much more concrete, fully worked out, critique of the growing division of labour than anything that can be found in Wordsworth or indeed the rest of the English romantics. Our lack of naturalness is solely due to that: 'They (the ancients) felt things naturally: we feel what is natural.(!) Our feeling for nature is like the longing of a sick man for health. (!) Nature makes the human race one with itself; art separates and divides.' However don't be deceived by this insightful bluster of radicalism: for Schiller it is only by being guided through the modern arts - nature 'as an idea and an object' - that man becomes whole again. In fact taken to its logical conclusion it does imply a certain transcendence and this possibility continually haunts, and runs away with Schiller, not least in his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man'. Though inspired by Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' that appeared in 1787, and which is the most exhaustive examination of the aesthetic faculties residing in man and up to that point without precedent in human history in terms of its concentration and scope, it was the world shaking event two years later that was to concentrate Schiller's mind.( The 'Critique' is not an art history: one had to wait for Hegel for that who criticises Kant for not including 'becoming' amongst his categories of mind: had he been able to do so history would have played a much greater role in Kant's system). Appalled by the Terror, Schiller needed to settle accounts with it. And this he found in his rejection of the cultivation, or cult - of reason to the exclusion of all other faculties. Immoderate reason is responsible for the division of labour, the sensuous in alliance with a chastened reason, on the contrary, overcomes it. And its chief ally in this battle of the faculties, which puts an end to the distressing consequences of the division of labour, is the cultivation of the arts. Though unwittingly, Schiller was anticipating a response which henceforward was to become commonplace, particularly in the latter half of the 20th Century, where ever capitalist society breaks down: either cheap narcotics or a blitz of the arts or a combination of both and which nowadays is fundamental to the restoration of a threatened division of labour and workaday world, and, as it is now 'lived' the none-workaday world. In fact Schiller willy nilly both though his dramatic productions and grudging fealty to the German aristocratic courts of his time was dragged into becoming an artistic impresario in which stage craft and the mounting of public spectacle became uppermost. 150 years before the age of television he wanted a world of perfect illusion, the better to stage the illusion of freedom. (By appearing to be the consummation of drama in terms of staged illusion, TV is the denouement of drama, destroying once and for all its claims to be an agent of change and real liberation). Finally by assiduously recruiting the arts to his protest against the division of labour, Schiller's cause turns against him: he can be seen as founding an ever more complex, intertwined and, to capital, ever more necessary division of artistic labour whose ramifications are now so immense the problem is knowing where to begin - and end. Capital is now at a permanent stage of 'Homage to the Arts', the title of a dramatic, processional production written and staged by Schiller in honour of a royal marriage in Weimar in 1804.Today this permanent homage-to-the-arts economy is increasingly global in scale and is an aspect of globalisation that is never subjected to critique or, worse, even recognised, its grip is so pervasive and all powerful. Beyond that of making a lot of money, the purpose of this aesthetic economy is to pacify, distract and alienate a person ever further from their real, natural self and potential. Schiller never fully squared up to this dilemma though he was aware of it. To do so would have meant abandoning art and finding another path to the nature that modern man yearned to recover and that lay beyond the division of labour.

How different things are with Wordsworth who is at once less precise but more consequential and finally total in his approach to nature.The appreciation of nature is not to be prefaced by a prolonged tuition in artistic appreciation. Rather nature perpetually remonstrates with the arts and scorns them, needing no further adornment. However Schiller's critique of the division of labour is far more anchored in reality and history than Wordsworth. At this point Wordsworth's apriori nature really does get in the way of a more developed, historical understanding of the division of labour.The relationship which he postulates between man and nature is primal and no social arrangement will ever make good in the life of the individual the sense of loss an individual feels in the presence of nature when compared to how he or she responded to nature as a child. However in the 'still, sad music of humanity' which as an adult he hears in nature, it is the betrayal of his revolutionary ideals he is bemoaning. His abhorrence of the Terror throws him into the arms of nature but not before he is detained for a time by the certainties of mathematics, a compensation for that 'revolutionary reason' that has laid him low. But scientific reason is not good enough finally, because it cannot apprehend the higher reason, the 'very heaven' of youth and revolution, that was expressed in his thwarted revolutionary hopes. And so it is in the Lake District of his childhood he finds this reason once more, shorn ultimately of revolutionary rapture. And so he gives the lie to his own nature mysticism as expressed in his 'Intimations of Immortality' which rather suggests our most intense experience of nature had to be in the womb!

Wordsworth is the first anti poet/poet. He is just one among many and claims no special privileges. There are others, 'silent poets', like his brother who was lost at sea. Poetry is woven into the landscape of the Lake District and its peoples. It has no name: it just is. It spills over into everything. It is in a heap of hewn stones rather than in the 'outrage' of architectural madness it is destined to become. It is in the bower made of withered fern in which to lie down during summer in the company of sheep and from there through the 'open door place' (a hitherto unimaginable architectural term by the way) to gaze and gaze until the vision of what is, no dream can ever equal. And as for stone monuments what better than Ralph Jones, a giant made of stone, constructed as a lark by three lads on Great Howe at the foot of Thirlmere. Wordsworth would gladly have participated in its making because of its lack of pretence and the playful spirit in which it was conceived. This conception of poetry is absorbed in the everyday: it neither needs or knows of poetry in the customary sense.

Matters do not rest here. It is only logical Wordsworth should find encouragement and resolve not in the lives of the poets but in the lives of those who daily trod the fells. He would rather choose a leech gatherer as a guide than Virgil. This is the antithesis of Schiller's approach where art is midwife to the birth of a greater nature and the artist is on a higher plane to that of the life of the common people. Call it humility, call it what you like but I see a link between Wordsworth's attitude and the utter failure of revolutionary vanguards in this country.

Yet it is legitimate to draw comparisons between Goethe and Schiller and Wordsworth and Coleridge. However there is in England an absence of that mighty philosophical dimension which stretches from Kant to Hegel with in between the lesser figures of Schelling, Fichte and Schlegel. Poets in Germany, particularly Schiller turn their hand to philosophy. Goethe did not regard himself as philosophically minded, evolving an intuitive dialectic that is the antithesis of Kantian dualism and hence that of his friend Schiller who was also, despite himself, not comfortable with Kant. This intuitive dialectic also bears striking similarities to Hegel and springs directly from his scientific endeavours, Abandoning painting (as Hazlitt was to do in this country) he also turns his back on verse temporarily to grapple with a larger problem, that of the need to redefine science by imbuing it with the unwritten of poetry. Through awakened eyes that over time have narrowed to a squint bordering on blindness, Goethe seeks to poeticise science by magnifying its visual reality. Observation, by inheriting the artistic tradition, reclaims its rights, replacing a withered observation that is now dead to beauty and the cognitive power of beauty - hardly a Kantian conception. (Apart from its epistemological wrongness it introduces history which, if not entirely alien to Kant, played a small part in his total system. In fact Goethe was to write one of the very first histories of science. See his remarkable preface to his anti Newtonian, 'Theory of Colours') Hazlitt in fact does not take this path. Rather, abandoning painting he next writes a thesis 'An essay on the principles of human action'. Time and again in English romanticism we confront the question now open now hidden of human praxis as if beyond the arts, which have had their time, as beyond there lay more productive, fulfilling occupations. Compared to the potentialities of the whole man the arts are just a hindrance and an embarrassment. The plough is mightier than the pen and without mentioning Burns and his poetic production Wordsworth opts to heap praise on the Burns who knew how to plough a furrow, as if regretting he lacked the skill himself and therefore excluded from the truth of his own versifying which never should have become verse in the first instance. The cult of science and Goethe's challenge to that cult by stressing a more inclusive, rounded science which concentrates all human endeavour by transcending all art and science in a new unity never takes off in this country. Rather it is subsumed by the question of praxis of which science is but a part.

There is no philosophical resonance in England to match that of Germany. However the theoretical stabs and searching's of the English romantics are much more sui generis and can be found wanting if subjected to the tedium of a more strictly logical mind which however continues to remain haunted by the truths they have dismissed after a more discursive examination. In particular, I am thinking of the preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1797, composed jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge but really Wordsworth's own. In this preface Wordsworth yearns to leave art behind and to find fulfilment in nature. Ever afterwards these views torment Coleridge and he must seek out an adequate rebuttal by rendering it more palatable and thus rescuing art. In his 'Biographia Literaria' composed many years later he goes to considerable pains to correct Wordsworth views which on more sober reflection are totally overstated and in need of correction. That he goes to these lengths does suggest the Preface was having an enormous influence, an influence not to Coleridge's liking who by this time wanted a commissariat of cultural continuity, a super-ministry entrusted with the safe guarding of the heritage of words (and the things created by words) of which he would be the soul presiding judge. To the Wordsworth of 'The Preface' the passionate language of common people is poetry though it must be understood this passion is linked to the unfolding of reason in its highest sense and illumined through and through by the imagination which is unleashed by sensuous apprehension at its most intense.

But had not Coleridge done the same and this time in a trance which dissolved the boundary between poetry and reverie, anticipating surrealism' 'Kubla Khan' renders his famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination as set down years later in his 'Biographia Literaria', null and void. It is the one poem of his entire oeuvre he could not reconcile himself to or believe possible. And its creation continually reminds Coleridge of the days when poetry, unrepressed spontaneity and reverie were as one.

For once upon a time this to Coleridge was the bridge between 'art' and 'science' (again there is the same need for italics as in Goethe's case) and the unspoken basis of his relationship with the chemist Humphrey Davy. For a time they were as one. Davy's discovery of the intoxicating properties of nitrous oxide not only narrows the gap between poetry, reverie, spontaneity and science (the discovery of the gas was patiently arrived at through rigorous experiment) it is also in its way a concrete example of the central quest of Germanic absolute idealism, the unity of art and science and hence subject and object by the action of mind and body whose own internal make up reflected that of the external world and vice versa.(The unease this conception gives rise to - we need only think of Lebens Philosophie and the drag it exerted on evolutionary theory even as it strove to recognize evolution within the boundaries of the fixity of the species - this paradox is evident in both Goethe's Ur phenomenon and Hegel's Philosophy of Identity - could only be resolved by dialectical materialism and its more grounded approach which views mind as a historical creation.) It is also given a characteristically English twist at odds with the sober rigidities of German absolute idealism, that of intoxication from substance abuse: nitrous oxide became known as 'laughing gas'. Davy himself writes down his experiences on the drug, his descriptions possessing an unfettered richness like they were from the hand of Coleridge. Even to this day they are regarded as unsurpassed descriptions of drug highs. Davy and Coleridge compare notes and one is reminded of the close collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller to the point where none of them could be completely sure as to who wrote what. The collaboration between Davy and Coleridge is a completely new domain in comparison to which the experiments by Schelling comprehensible only in terms of his desire to get beyond the antinomies of Kant with the 'science' of mesmerism really are laughable. It took some time for Germany to make good this absence of hard science in contrast to England poised as it was on the brink of the earth shattering industrial revolution in which science as objectified through capitalist industry would increasingly hold sway. All that Germany had to offer instead were the mythologies of absolute idealism and the deceptive, easily derided, 'subjectivism' of Goetherian science, which could have yielded fruit, but not in the way its progenitors thought.

Once this particular collaboration between Coleridge and Davy ceased the antinomies of art and science would assert themselves once more. Yet both would continually strive to understand the other, Coleridge forever seeking to give a more comprehensive account of Davy's discoveries fitting them into a larger philosophical whole. And Davy, in turn, was flattered by Coleridge's attention using it as an entre into polite society He learns what it is to be a cultural snob for Davy plays second fiddle to Coleridge deferring to his self-appointed role as superior pedagogue to the practical experimenter. Through his acquaintance with Coleridge, Davy gains social ease, acceptance, and class haughtiness including the rancour that goes with it, particularly when a member of the lower class comes within their orbit, and proves to be better than they are, as happened with Michael Faraday, the blacksmith's son. In fact this relationship was to be of enormous consequence to the history of science in this country, and which was still being played out over a century and a half later in the late 1960s and with the question of revolutionary overthrow still dominating events and to the exclusion of all else this time, for now there were no privileged areas immune from upheaval.

As is well known, Coleridge single handed brought German idealist philosophy to this country. Interest in Kant and particularly Schelling and Schlegel dates from Coleridge's visit to Germany. He brings back dialectic in his suitcase though significantly he appears never to have heard of or ever mentions Hegel. He was slow to fulfil his early promise and meanwhile looked on as friends from his youth rose to stardom like Schelling and Holderlin. He had felt stirring within him a much deeper more thoroughly historical way of perceiving everything that lay before him and which took time to realize.

Pushing Coleridge to onside for the moment I believe I detect a link between Hegel's dialectical idealism and the part played by nature in Wordsworth's scheme of things. It is still I believe operative to this day and could be of major consequence to the conservationist and eco movements though this time the reason unleashed by contact with nature would necessarily involve a critique of political economy, consumer society, the state and wage labour. Hegel the atheist was a believer to the extent that he held that god, in other words the dialectic of theory and practise, was realized in the unfolding of history. Hence there was no prime mover, only the ever deepening profundity of dialectical thought in which god becomes, rising from inert matter through the vegetable and then animal kingdom and finally to man all unfolding within the universal history of a dialectical pan logicism but which by far the most interesting part is that of human history. Of all of Hegel's work that of the 'Philosophy of Nature' is the least interesting despite going to infinite pains to master his subject. The same can not be said of his 'Philosophy of the Fine Arts' which is still richly rewarding and is in every respect remarkable and profoundly innovatory. The dialectic gains strength over time. Thus nature is weak - in fact Hegel speaks of 'the impotence of nature'. But for Wordsworth it is strong and like Hegel ultimately the fount of reason. However this reason can only come about as a result of a passionate feeling for nature and it is only through contact with nature that we can discover this reason. And to find it we must become immersed in it its outward forms unleashing the imagination and laying bare mere appearances allowing us to connect with that reason which had been so cruelly betrayed by the French Revolution. For Wordsworth comes to nature after the destruction of his hopes in the French Revolution, that is why he hears in it the 'still sad music of humanity'. Though still retaining his commitment to equality it is the right of the dandelion that is proclaimed before that of the rights of man. We on the contrary have no choice other than to reject this truncated reason and go directly from nature to man which means confronting the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. Without that all life down to even the merest microbe is in jeopardy and what could be more irrational than assenting to that.

The conservation of Nature today should lead to a profounder line of reasoning than was ever the case in the past. This is the next and greatest addition to the Wordsworthian spirit articulated by him but never fully developed It should also lead to a reappraisal of history, of modes of production and of forms of art because all in some way or other are present in Wordsworth. But unlike Wordsworth, conservationists today don't seek in conservation an antidote to revolution but rather should find there a stimulus to revolution. And all are in one way or another being propelled in this direction. Beginning with nature, dialectical reason seeks to reclaim its rights.

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Dialectical lines for insects:

Goethe: Das Lebendge will ich preisen,

Das nach flammentod sich sehner

'I would praise the living thing that longs for death by fire'

'You no longer remain a prisoner in the shadowing darkness and a new desire snatches you up to a higher union. No distance can weigh you down, you come flying, fascinated, and at last, lusting for the light, poor moth, you perish in the flame. And until you possess it, this commandment: die and become! you will be but a dismal guest on the dark earth.'

c/f. Shelley: 'The desire of the moth for the star'

Keats: Imagination (fancy) as an antidote to the failure of pleasure at least as then understood by the prevailing utilitarianism and its crude psychology of what constitutes pleasure. Pleasure is perishable and domestic, the imagination is not: 'ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home' i.e. real pleasure knows no home comforts, it must stray far and wide. However the imagination (or fancy) is an interior affair; it rarely struggles to become real in Keats. Imagination 'opens wide the mind's cage door': properly understood butterflies liberate the mind or rather overawe the mind, unleashing a limitless inventiveness in thought (which wants to become real and has need of practical realities). Like the spider or the caterpillar, the imagination weaves a silk thread but one that has to be broken in order to truly liberate the mind: 'break the mesh of the fancy's silken leash; quickly break her prison string,'(Fancy) And so to 'Ode to Psyche'. Keats builds a sanctuary to Psyche in his heart. But like the intruder in the virgin undergrowth of Epping Forest who finds a pair of mating Ringlet butterflies in the grass - I have come to the conclusion they were Ringlets that Keats saw and I'm also convinced the location had to be Epping Forest - Psyche appeals to the 'untrodden region of my mind' from which branch 'shadowy thoughts', thoughts that no one has ever had before, wrenching the mind from its accustomed pathways and therefore sweetly painful. Thought becomes like nature ever creating ever changing, and the window left open at night with a light behind it that attract moths becomes a symbol of that process. For Goethe this desire of the moth for the flame becomes a desire for a higher union. It arises from the fulfilment of sexual desire and is released by it, an act of procreation that also procreates us, 'begetting as we begat'. It is a higher, more total, union though not qualitatively different from the 'warm love' of Keats though it requires we die in order to become. ('Stirbe und Werde!')

The hidden message of entomology is love not hate: it is about union and communion, an understanding and love of what is different - and what could be more different than insect anatomy -; it is about the liberation of desire, the greater dissatisfaction that desire brings, it is an anticipation of the higher person, an anticipation of the human community that reaches for the stars.

Keats says he recognises Cupid but that Psyche puzzles him. In the mating Ringlets he espies both Cupid and Psyche but significantly it is Psyche 'with awakened eyes'. (In the myth Psyche's eyes are closed when Cupid makes love to her).The eye is of primary importance to Keats: his first major work is 'Endymion', based on the mythical youth who dreamed whilst awake. It cannot therefore be the eye of the scientific empiricist but a fuller eye and one the optician needs to recognise is just as real. In 'Ode to Psyche' Keats' eye becomes not just an instrument of sight but a musical instrument though which he can sing for the first time the beauty of butterflies: 'I see and sing, by my own eyes inspired'. The Lyre ' 'the fond believing lyre'- belongs to the past of an enchanted nature that can never return, in the same way as the Greek gods can never return. Psyche was originally a mortal but a mortal who has outlived the Greek gods and is still alive, her 'lucent fans' (wings) still 'fluttering', because saved from the aging process of repetitive ritual. She lives because she symbolises that which is new and innovatory and seeking ever greater unity in a difference bound by love. Psyche then becomes the negation of myth, the embodiment of free thinking and the realisation of history.

Entomology should have made the best science because the last, the one that was most in step with the maturing of humanity. But entomology was always something of an afterthought; a leftover after everything else had been dealt with. Other than Aristotle, no other philosopher gave it the time of day and his basic nomenclature of head, thorax, abdomen still stands. John Ray's (1628/1705) last book was on insects and not published during his lifetime. Having described nigh on 19,000 plant species he then sought to bring order into the animal kingdom based chiefly on toes, hoofs and teeth. Insects were a poor third though Ray's refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to a restored king, Charles 11, and a newly arisen state religion, bequeathed to scientific natural history in this country an independence and anti-state cast of mind it has never been able to wholly rid itself of. This is still powerfully present in Keats and other romantics.

So overall there were no dead generations to weigh entomology down; it did not evolve throughout successive millennia to the same degree as the other sciences. Entomology was almost new born and never underwent a Copernican revolution. The lion and the lamb are more potent biblical symbols than the locust and the locust never did get to lie down with the lion and the lamb. For there was to be no redemption for insects in mainstream thought. But insects were everywhere and the scientific study of insects mirrored more faithfully the contradictions of the society it grew up in both as a reaction to it (the initial uselessness of entomology and therefore attractive to many who felt marginalized and rejected like cockroaches, a fugitive discipline for fugitive minds) and as most embodying the goals of industrial capitalism by eventually bringing about the destruction of all insects - the utter folly of GM foods and ever more powerful pesticides - and hence entomology as a branch of learning. Applied Entomology also encapsulates the most suicidal tendencies of modern capitalism.

Keats had an uneasy relationship with music and the Ode to Psyche is the least tuneful of his great odes. It could not be other. ' The Ode to a Nightingale' is a song to the nightingale but a song in which the nightingale's song outdoes the poem, if we could but hear it. But in the 'Ode to Psyche' we don't know what song is being sung. It is a song without a tune lacking any frame of musical reference. Not words set to music, rather something akin to musical eyesight. In that sense it takes up where the 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' left off: 'Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter'. They are, of course, heard in the inner ear of the imagination and so are similar to the atheist Shelley's craving for 'the music that is divine' and different from what we can now hear because it means fulfilment and not the promise of fulfilment. Keats found an intimation of this in the music of nature and from an early age his ear must have been highly attuned to natural sound for in his teenage 'Hymn to Pan' ( the spirit of nature) he refers to Pan as the 'strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, that come a swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors'. Are there such unexplained sounds that travel for miles? Have I missed them because I have become deaf in the same way as I am afflicted by partial blindness and am losing my sense of smell, taste and touch? In any case it makes me realize how little I have listened and need to listen in the future.

Why did Keats concentrate on Psyche and not continue to treat Cupid and Psyche as a couple? In isolating Psyche like he did I think he was feeling his way back, like a scientist and dreamer combined in the same person, to a first principle on which to found everything else. He needed to separate Psyche from Cupid who had been bound together throughout history, though in fact the unlike resonances that Keats is describing could apply to Cupid's darts. Rather I think the number of illustrations of Psyche on her own and looking more like a human butterfly than ever must have become more frequent in children's books and elsewhere because of the growing interest in Lepidoptera. Keats had perhaps unconsciously registered this. He was fragmenting myth in order to create a more plausible riposte to modern scientific empiricism which was leaving too much out. He was unweaving the rainbow to weave a better one.

What is the love Keats outlines between a male and female butterfly, Cupid and Psyche, and the rest of humanity? For this is about picture thinking and outlines. The butterflies are not clinched in a passionate embrace, rather they are sleeping in each others arms with merely a promise of kisses in the new dawn and the morrow which never comes. Though wrapped around each other they are 'disjointed' and 'their lips touched not', a posture which makes me think it could only have been a pair of mating Ringlets that he had seen in the woodland, for theirs is a triangular form of mating almost as if they were about to embrace, like humans, and they tend not to fly off when approached as do Meadow Browns. What other woodland butterfly could it have been? Mating Speckled Woods are an uncommon sight and probably do so in trees rather than in the grass. This aside, I think Keats was hinting at the growing apartness of modern love, that it exists (and exits) increasingly as an ideal, something much thought about but never experienced directly. There is sex and little else. Real love is then a separation, an alienation and a yearning. It also flies off into other realms and is quickly sublimated, displaced onto thought that is more than mere reverie, at once reasoned and highly imaginative. However it needs a living symbol, a practical act to express itself through. And this is achieved by opening the window at night so that moths, attracted by the light, can fly in. How much has yet to be rightfully attributed to entomology like species still awaiting identification, though different in kind from the conventional classification of insects!

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Marx and Heine in relation to Keats, Shelley, John Ray, Von Frisch and Mallarme - among others

Here in England there is nothing to compare with the encounter between Heine and Marx. There is a far reaching interplay between the two and both are deeply affected by the rising tide of revolt in Germany (or what was to become Germany) and the rest of Europe. By the 1840s' Heine is asserting that prose, not poetry, was a more appropriate form of expression going so far as to announce the imminent demise of poetry. Replying to a poetry competition in 1837 offering as a prize a golden quill, Heine sent four lines declaring the songbird is dead never to be re-awakened concluding with the recommendation 'to stick the golden quill up your ass'. (Such a blunt statement is unimaginable in England at the time but there was no one approaching Heine's stature either) However the young Marx, picking himself up from his failure as a poet, is able to formulate the beyond of poetry in so striking a manner that Heine is easily outclassed. He is writing at length about his love for Jenny and his failure to find a poetic form adequate to the emotions coursing through him. It is worth quoting at length:

'a remote beyond, such as my love, became my heaven, my art. Everything grew vague, and all that is vague lacks boundaries; onslaughts against the present, broad and shapeless expressions of unnatural feeling, constructed purely out of the blue, the complete opposition of what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts but perhaps also a certain warmth of sentiment and a struggle for movement characterises all the poems in the first three volumes I sent to Jenny. The whole horizon of a longing which sees no frontiers assumed many forms and frustrated my effort to write with poetic conciseness.'

It is, you will agree, richer and more eloquent than poetry and could equally apply to the hopes aroused by class struggle.

Echoes of Heine abound in Marx's early writings but undoubtedly the best-known example is Heine's characterization of religion as 'spiritual opium'. Marx refers to religion as 'the sigh of the oppressed creature ---- the opium of the people'. This also is a definite improvement on Heine.

We can also see the contrast between them when we compare what both of them have to say about the armed uprising of the Silesian weavers in June 1844 which was bloodily put down by the Prussian army. Heine wrote a short, very compact, poem on the uprising in which the desperate weavers weave the motto of the Prussian military God, King and Fatherland into a shroud. But there is no mention of brotherhood, freedom and private property. Though the poem was learnt by heart by generations of German workers finally we are more satisfied and cheered by Marx's comments which, though less melodious, have a distinct bearing upon the theory and practise of the proletariat that is directed toward a social totality and looks far beyond the immediate. In the 'Song of the Weavers' Marx sees a 'bold battle cry which does not mention the hearth, factory or district but which the proletariat immediately proclaims its opposition to private property in a forceful, sharp, ruthless and violent manner ------ whereas every other movement turned initially only against the industrialist, the visible enemy, this one attacked also the hidden enemy, namely the banker. (Critical notes on 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform').

There is a degree of impersonality to the 'Silesian Weavers' which is unusual for Heine. It is influenced by the ballad form like much of the 'radical' poetry of this era. Heine disliked conventional verse forms and is very specific in his condemnation of 'political poetry' which is also formally conservative. He is now able to pose the question of form in a more pertinent manner than Marx who is now on the point of dismissing the question as all but irrelevant having nothing further to say on the subject except for a few lines in the Grundrisse. 'Freedom', Heine declared, should manifest itself, 'in the treatment, in the form, by no means in the subject' and, 'artists who choose freedom itself and emancipation for their subject are usually of limited shackled spirit, truly unfree'. We can already see here how potentially explosive the issue is because it implies the artist is unfree who opts for moribund forms.

There is even the hint that precisely the form of poetry compromises the poet. Popular poetry of the late 1830's and 1840's represented an escape from the obscurantism of the Young Hegelians and it had the added advantage of not being subject to the same stifling censorship as critique. Its radicalism was therefore merely apparent even though Georg Herwegh tried to invade Germany from France at the head of a few hundred German exiles that were instantly routed. Another 'political poet' Freiligrath, who had been awarded a pension by the King of Prussia, is also only known to us from his contact with Marx. His chief claim to fame comes from handing on to Marx the three volumes of Hegel's 'Science of Logic' which had once belonged to Bakunin. And thereby hangs a tale. Maybe it is possible to rescue Hegel's 'Science of Logic' from the mortal blows dealt it by Engel's 'Dialectics of Nature' and its enthronement as a state religion in that dark farce of a communist society, the former Soviet Union and which could have ended once and for all any hope for humanity in that its shadow still falls over all who fight for social revolution today.

(Marx subsequently would only fleetingly refer to art, an oversite which could only have the most negative consequences: henceforth art would rise above history and take on the aspect of the eternal, stepping in for a fading religiosity. However Hegel gets the last laugh because his historicisation of form though wrapped in an idealist dialectic provides a more convincing account of the rise and fall of form).

Though Marx was the first to treat philosophy and religion as an alienation of humanities essential social power he did not apply the same criteria to art. Hegel did precisely that by absorbing and overcoming art within a greater philosophy at the very moment of its transcendence. It is to be sure a breath-taking concept with a reach that anticipates the avante garde of the early 20th Century. Hegel's Philosophy of the Arts is still viable and remains the only valid approach to the moment of art and its potential for transcendence up to that time. I well recall my astonishment on reading the concluding paragraphs in the section on painting where quite unequivocally he declares the task of painting to be complete. All that is left at best is illustration. There is even a touch of philistinism in Hegel's approach particularly in his emphasis on photographic realism. It was to be a white square on a white background painted in Russia a hundred years later that announced the lingering death of painting.

Hegel here is at his most direct. His books on architecture, sculpture/music and poetry are less forthright in their conclusions and it was left to history to provide the detail. The section on music ends with extravagant praise for a musician, possibly a gypsy, overheard improvising on a guitar and exceeding all the other pleasures Hegel has previously derived from music. Gone are the orchestras and choirs numbering hundreds of musicians and singers and all performing by rote.

The preface to the 'Philosophy of Art' begins with a unique and highly contemporaneous, analysis of situations. The first condition is a general world condition meaning really that though history has always existed it has not always existed as world history.The missing factor is in fact the world market. Out of this first condition indeterminate and determinate situations arise leading in the latter case to the creation of new values. The determinate situation alone involves meaningful action and the clarification of the situation is 'necessary to any enquiry into the true constituents of action'. It is the job of art to bring out the essentials of action in the sense of a genuinely historic action. But once humanity has fulfilled its destiny art is consigned to the prehistory of alienation and in its place the Hegelian concept reigns. Read critique for this concept and the dialectic of theory and practise in the act of revolution and we are a step nearer the truth. For Hegel art remains forever behind events but given his emphasis upon action he prefers forms that move (also reflected incidentally in his preference for animal life above the vegetative and inanimate) and have a beginning, middle and end. Architecture is superceeded by sculpture and then painting and all are static forms. Next comes music in this ascending scale and then finally poetry and drama.

When one looks at England in the 1840s' there is not even an inkling of a debate on form, nor even the merest hint that to raise such a question also raises the question of freedom. The possibility of any such debate had ended with the death of Hazlitt though Emily Bronte was to turn the ordered sequence of the novel inside out with her use of flashback.

Chartism is accompanied more by poetic bombast than verse not even remotely comparable to Heine's. And yet Chartism must also have had its popular songs and forms of expression. There is evidence to suggest these forms were losing their traditional cohesion and were coming apart at the seams. Both Coleridge and Shelley had stretched the ballad form almost beyond recognition, which is not the case with Heine. One wonders how much it reflected a more general undermining of popular forms. Given the speed of the changes taking place in agriculture and the beginnings of large scale industry it is unlikely that popular forms of expression would not also have bent under the strain.

It is not too much to say that Shelley became a reborn icon of revolt the moment he was introduced to radical Chartist workers. The slow uncovering of the amazing truth about Shelley subsequently became linked to the rise and the fall of the workers' movement. On top of the green Shelley there is now a red Shelley though both advance together.

The massacre of unarmed men, women and children in 1818 on St Peter's field in Manchester was an event no less important in England than the uprising of 1848 in France. Though exiled in Italy, Shelley's response on hearing the news, was immediate and furious. However the greatness of 'the Mask of Anarchy' taken out of context obscures the extent to which in the two months following Peterloo, Shelley was pushing at the limits of poetry, He was a 'modern' before his time easily some 80 years in advance of what was to occur and possessing a power of synthesis which in many ways outstripped it and would take even longer to catch up with.

One could analyse at length 'the Mask of Anarchy'. Suffice to say there is an anticipation of the form of the workers and soldiers council but only in terms of a mass presence, eventually, of both. It is a passive body that passively resists and not an anticipation of how historically they actually did move to take over. What prompts the soldiers to take the side of the oppressed gathered in a 'Great Assembly' is shame and the fact no woman would look at them. Nor is Shelley's notion of a great assembly taken a stage further: it does not take matters into its own hands becoming both a legislative and executive organ. Like no other poet before him he recognizes the power of the masses but then cannot conceive of an anti-statist legislative body. Though the son in law of William Godwin 'the father of English anarchism' the latter's theoretical anarchism remained a dead letter because it was built around the enlightened teacher who dispensed emancipation through the power of reason rather than being disarmed enough to receive it. Thus emancipation was known in advance and held no surprises. (Remaining aloof from the French Revolution and Peterloo, Godwin's legacy has bedevilled English anarchism ever since - wooden in its responses, insular, unable to move with the times and several steps behind the real movement).

In the 'Mask of Anarchy' there are undeniable pointers that could have led to a critique of political economy. Had he not died so young one wonders how the ageing Shelley might have responded to the young Marx. Possibly with an even greater enthusiasm and understanding than Heine: apart from the first 40 pages the rest of 'the German Ideology' remains uncut in Heine's copy.

In Heine's 'Silesian Weavers' there is no mention of money - or lack of it - but which is of course implied. However in Shelley's tract things are far more explicit. He speaks of the 'ghost of gold' meaning paper money ('paper coin') and though it may look as though he is arguing for an early form of the gold standard in fact his grasp of the significance of paper money is uncanny and opens up a rich vein of potential enquiry. 'Paper coin ' that forgery' could refer to the practise of printing money and its increasingly fictive character as time went by. As conceived by Shelley and also born out by reality it also leads to an increase in the rate of exploitation taking 'from toil a thousand fold more than e'er its substance could/ In the tyrannies of old'.

However Peterloo was a catalyst for so much more. It brought everything to a head. As one of the more responsible biographers of Shelley has rightly said his output that ran 'in an unbroken curve from 6th Sept 1818 when he first received news of Peterloo until 5th Nov ' suggest a state of exultant energy and vision 'that it is difficult to conceive in ordinary terms'. Shelley is frequently able to hit the nail on the head more in his 'prose' (e.g. letters etc.) than in his poetry. In a dedication letter he looks forward to a London that 'shall be an habitation of bitterns; when St Paul's, Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream'' This London may look empty but really Shelley is reclaiming nature for the people: the ruin of Waterloo Bridge is also a reprisal for Peterloo. In this fantasy of destruction and renewal Shelley has touched on the question of 'town and revolution' that a hundred years later was to become of such burning importance.

There is no doubting that Shelley's innovations outstripped his theorising and only now can we see where they were leading. In 'Peter Bell the third' which is a piss take on Wordsworth and Coleridge he writes about hell (i.e. London) reducing 'poetry' to an incantation of names that is almost pre-lettrist and yet also very powerful: 'German soldiers ' camps - confusion - tumults - lotteries - rage - delusion - gin - suicide - and Methodism'. No punctuation either, just dashes. And in a letter to Leigh Hunt outlining his defence of Richard Carlile on trial for sedition for defending the Peterloo demonstrators he was both aware of how the meaning of words could be turned in to their opposites by power ('though oppression should change names and names cease to be oppressions') and of the need to rescue language for the sake of 'liberty and the oppressed'. Note that this crisis of language was not just an aesthetic dilemma as it had a tendency to become in Mallarme but was central to the fate of humanity. In the same letter to Hunt he reflects on their respective differences of 'theory and practise' which he then crossed out almost as if he sensed he was running dangerously ahead of his time.

During this period Shelley writes the death certificate of English nature poetry: 'Ode to the West Wind'. Never again could it acquire the same degree of urgency and uplift us quite so much. Henceforth nature was to become something split-off but into which we could read the failed hopes of humanity and even for those who have an ear and eye for it, the formal transcendence of art into life though it would be more correct to say the 'life sciences'.

If read consecutively the 'Mask of Anarchy' and the 'Ode to the West Wind' seem to almost blend. 'The Ode to the West Wind' conceived within days of the 'Mask of Anarchy' could not but also be a reflection on Peterloo but this time within a natural setting. The very words become superimposed. The leaves driven by the wind like 'ghosts before an enchanter fleeing ' yellow red pestilence stricken' aren't simply sickly, poverty stricken mill workers but also the 'ghosts of gold ' paper money' which was already beginning to turn nature inside out.

Natural imagery would never again acquire this degree of unspecific generality open to a number of interpretations but whose bottom line, in any case, was the need for revolution. This combining of social struggle and wild nature corresponded to a deep undercurrent in the rapidly forming industrial working class and which left an indelible imprint upon it never to be entirely effaced. Shelley echoed this apparent contradiction though in a very striking way. That is why it is mistaken particularly in this country to view the proletariat as a cog in a machine that would inherit the world on the basis of large-scale industry laid down by capitalism. Ecologists who have viewed the 'workers' from outside as slaves to consumption have consistently failed to acknowledge this.

Nature and political revolution had formed an indissoluble whole in Romanticism. Hazlitt had unforgettably described Wordsworth's muse as 'a levelling' one. Nature was for the people, by the people and representative government was its direct consequence. However Shelley is the first to see that nature is also riven by class antagonism. Even worse, despotism could eventually cause nature to perish. He writes of the 'fish ' poisoned in the streams; the birds in the green woods perished' and finally with outstanding prescience and most alarmingly of all 'the insect rave ---- withered up' and 'avarice died before the god it made'.

We are getting perilously close to the situation described by Shelley and that grants significance to insects never previously accorded to them. In fact this belated but growing appreciation of the indispensable role small organisms play in sustaining life also unfolds against a background of increased commoditisation in which money strives to be the sole necessity even if that means its eventual annihilation because of universal destruction. Beside this nightmare scenario the abolition of money by means of concious peoples' uprising is beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam' from which the above quotes come was written in Jan 1818, a mere eight months before the Peterloo massacre. We are perhaps reading too much into these words of Shelley twisting them into the strait jacket of political economy when perhaps he held to a more simplistic, more political view of liberty as representative government. However Shelley was never specific on this point and designing constitutions was of scant interest to him enough to make one think he was at odds with the idea. There is nothing about votes for all, an elected parliament with a fixed term of office, an independent judiciary and whatever else takes the fancy of the typical constitutionalist, in 'The Mask of Anarchy'.

It has been said that Keat's 'Ode to Autumn' is also a commentary on Peterloo reflected through the prism of nature. If so it becomes a strain to penetrate the layers of allusion to get at the truth and even then we cannot be entirely sure. However more on this later. Enough to say that Keats' mode of poetical encryption was taken up by naturalists in their unconscious manner of alluding to something vague beneath the hard science of the text. Science, particularly natural science, was becoming enveloped in an all encompassing nebula of values and meaning that was almost impossible to decipher and doubly so once it became regarded as unhinged to draw attention to it. This 'symbolisation' of science and not just literature, which also heralded its end, has never received the attention it merits.

Far more so than Shelley who modelled himself at least partly on the materialism of Lucretius, the key to this splitting off of the natural from the social is to be found in Keats. This forking is given a far clearer expression in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' than in the 'Ode to Autumn'. In the former it is the bird (i.e. the study of birds - ornithology) that is able to escape the present condition of man and the desire for the peace of the grave: 'no hungry generations tread thee down' that is the generations of men, women and children that were shortly to assemble at Peterloo.

In the 'Ode to a Nightingale', perhaps the most famous of all time, Keats mapped out the territory on which the science of animal ethnology was set to unfold. Beyond certain limits transgression was henceforth forbidden. (In a rather different vein he was to do the same for entomology in his 'Ode to Psyche', only this time the jumping of fences into other fields was encouraged. Indeed it was the floating essence of entomology because its uselessness and scientific marginality implied it was not open to conscription by power having, 'no voice, no lute, no pipe').

Keats would have sung a different tune had he seen how entomology was to be transformed particularly by Pasteur and the growing acknowledgement of the role played by insects in the transmission of diseases. And also how along with worms they acted as a morphological bridge to the world of the 'infinitely small'. He might also have divined how insects would become a bogeyman of modern capitalist agriculture prepared even to destroy the pollinators and therefore agriculture, creating unprecedented famine.

That entomology has long ceased to be a discrete discipline, ramifying now into the chemical industry, bioengineering and genetic modification does not completely overturn the ground plan laid down more generally by Keats. In a book - one picked at random ''The Discovery of Animal Behaviour' by John Sparks the separate worlds of animal and human 'behaviours' are viewed less as a break in continuity between the human and the animal kingdom but rather as a fundamental division between town and country. All the great animal ethnologists of the 20th Century, Lorenz, Tinbergen, Von Frisch were brought up in a country setting and were stimulated by the presence of nature from an early age. But this enviable head start also produced a grotesque social retardation. It was a joy to find Von Frisch`s memoirs 'A Biologist Remembers' in a second hand bookshop but very distressing to learn of his deeply conservative responses to the Bavarian Soviet in 1918-19. And this by a biologist who did more than any other in the 20th Century to puncture the overweening anthropomorphism of the human species when he discovered the Honey Bee possessed a subtle language, the most complex so far known outside that of humans. Social turbulence, the unnatural life of the great conurbations - this is the forgetfulness of the great animal ethnologists, - that forgetting of the human condition which involved social warfare so ardently desired by Keats in the 'Ode to the Nightingale'. And by a bewildering reversal of perspective, animal behaviours are given an abiding relevance outside their proper employ by being uncritically superimposed upon the human. The 'immortal bird' of Keats' ode becomes an inverse anthropomorphism destined to live on in us because of a wilful refusal to face up to what really happened in human history.

Shelley's idea of love is not that different from Keats. Yet it has more to do with transcendence, the flight of thought as a prelude to action than in bringing opposites together or merely conjuring with the new in one's mind. And for that purpose insect analogies come to mind and yet they are more then mere analogies, they are living symbols: we take to the air with them and not merely by way of illustration.

The poem in which the memorable line 'the desire of the moth for the star' occurs is simply entitled 'To what' - To nothing in particular and everything. For it is also about the failing power of words which have lost there meaning not merely through repeated use but because their use has become devalued as the object of the word has become devalued. It is never recognised the author of 'In Defence of Poetry' - incidentally Shelley's view of what is poetry far transcends the written word having already escaped the page in the introductory sentences - increasingly had a problem with language, frequently pushing it beyond the limits of comprehension as language broke under the strain of what he really wanted to say. The ethereal Shelley was strangely rooted in the empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, struggling to create objects through words in a way inadmissible to empiricism, before they became a fact, He was lettriste avante la lettre, rejecting the conventional division of writing into poetry and prose as 'a vulgar error' and going so far as to maintain poetry could be reduced to just one word or, come to that, none at all, like in the absence of a predicate in the above title. Where words failed only a moth aspiring to reach a bright star could restore the meaning of the word love, a love he could no longer give outside of a new society.

Shelley finds love in nature because he can no longer find it in man. It is nature that responds to his thoughts and moods not man and is the more sentient of the two. Only when humanity is restored to its full self will he find himself in humanity and not merely nature. And when it does come he finds the desire of the moth for the star in the events of Peterloo.

The standard treatment of John Ray, the founding father of English natural history is typical. That Ray was formerly a clergyman always receives a mention accompanied by the rider we are indeed fortunate because he was then able to devote his entire life to the study of natural history. John Sparks in 'The Discovery of Animal Behaviour' goes even further and says that after the bloody civil war of the 1640s' Ray sought in the peace of nature a refuge from all this turmoil. It is much more complex than that. Ray refused to swear an oath that would have compromised his independence and made a state religion out of his puritan faith. He was sacked from his job because of his principles. The struggle for the recognition of nature goes to the heart of the English revolution. Not only did it signify equality but independence of mind. Even if there is not one sign of the tumultuous pleasures of the flesh in Ray set free by the civil war of the 1640s' it does not mean Ray did not regard them as also part of creation just as birds flowers fish and trees were: only that his passions were channelled in to soberly recording and describing the flora and fauna of England. But he is not the detached recorder of the bio-biographers, the ascetic scientist probing an external nature, a subject as lifeless as the object of enquiry. And nothing much is ever made of Ray's collection of country sayings and local dialect, except to note it. Did this not also imply a resistance to a state leviathan that was imposing uniformity on language that was capable of destroying minority speech even down to the local names for plants and animals? These frequently are extraordinarily deft and may even have contained the outlines of a superior certainly more memorable system of classification.

Ray was a great classifier but one cannot help but feel that in his descriptions he was seeking a beyond that if pushed invites comparison with Shelley: 'he will watch from dawn to gloom/ the late reflected sun illume/ the yellow bees in the ivy bloom/nor heed nor see what things they be/ but from these create he can/ forms more real than living man' etc.

The blurring of the outlines of the species can also be given a completely opposite treatment where the characters acquire a clarity of outline they do not possess in reality. And they appear bigger to our eyes. This is Mallarme's approach. His botanical descriptions belong to a changed, better world in which geography has been reborn even as it assimilates and transforms the most advanced geological thinking:

'Yes, in an island that the air loads with sight and not with visions, every flower showed itself to be larger without our discussing it.

Such huge flower that each one was invariably adorned with a lucid contour, a hiatus that separated it from the gardens'.

As is made plain this is not a visionary state: it could be an everyday reality. But it requires action to get there and typically Mallarme veils this recognition in the almost impenetrable obscurity of little known Greek and Latin names (uttered by a child that has 'abdicated from his ecstasy' in the passage to adulthood) that means 'arise'(the wild praxis of Dionysus possibly} and 'beauty', but a beauty 'hidden by the too large gladiolus'.

Mallarme's recoil from the endless hybrids and varieties of horticulture is also a search for a primal language free from social deceit and which also simplifies nature and renders it less artificial. When he says, 'flower' he wants us to see a flower different to those found in bouquets and in the 'hiatus (of) gardens' or in 'gladioli'. The great classifiers such as Ray and Linnaeus never deigned to describe garden varieties even though hybrids in nature were a problem for them: this would be left to the aestheticians of horticulture writing in garden catalogues and which in the late 19th century was already becoming an industry.

Mallarme's generic flower concludes 'variation on a subject', a rambling enquiry into the crisis of versification. Though wreathed at times in inpenetrable obscurity, Mallarme in this text and others was demolishing with soft hammer blows, a facade that had stood firm since Homer. Read carefully it also says something about the state of commodification then reached where 'to speak has no connection with the reality of things except commercially'. But this primitive accumulation of words by the commodity had yet to seize the inner world of reveries and it this symphonic parallel discourse of layered meanings that Mallarme (forever ambiguously) finds 'nothing or almost an art'. Mallarme's investigations into language has attracted the attention of professional linguists, particularly his observations on word tonalities, but it always comes as a disappointment to find it ends there. The division of mental labour is so ingrained that Mallarme's search for a language that means what it says and the fundamental crises of literature and so much else he spent a lifetime proclaiming is not just passed over in silence: it just does not go in.

For a brief moment in the UK, say from 1965 to the early 1970s', the real Mallarme, as distinct from the uncomfortable litterateur, began, though only just, to be recognised. Investigating the tools of his trade with a dimension and depth no other poet had even thought of doing, Mallarme found himself on the threshold of a new age: the age of revolution which posed all things anew.

This other Mallarme and what it was to lead to, transcends the fixed terms of the 'two cultures'. No other Situationist influenced grouping anywhere in the world in the late 1960s had so many ex-scientists as King Mob in the UK. Why this was so is a question that not only has never been raised but never gone into. That moment has now gone and we can't now ask the questions we needed to then when we were all in full flow simply because the individuals involved have dispersed far and wide and no longer have any relevant contact with each other. All that remain are memories of tantalising conversations and probings cut short during moments of passionate invention. The only ex-scientist fully congnisant with the death of art and yet able to write a critique of science was Phil Meyler in his book 'And Yet it Moves'. Though now out of print this book has recently been published in Spanish by Campo Abierto and as a poor substitute can be read on the www.revoltagainstplenty.com web).

Instead we are left with C.P. Snow's naive opposition from the 1950s' and which still forms the basis of Richard Dawkin's book 'Unweaving the Rainbow'. Dawkins is a militant atheist but as far as capitalism is concerned he is not even agnostic: he is an out and out believer. Not one word escapes his lips on the social utilization of science. The merest flickerings of revolt are entirely absent. So it is not surprising if his conception of art is limited by an almost quaint aestheticism, which belongs - and only just - to the 19th century.

[Libcom note - illustration above by Clement B Davis, from Fabre's "The Life of the Spider". This did not accompany the original article.]

Interweaving the naturalist's objectivity with fantasy Lautreamont created a nomenclature of horror superseding the polarities of science and art by creating a barely coherent third term that is still struggling for its form and truth. Out of the existing taxonomies he generates new species that interact with and re-assemble a human species pushed to the point of absurdity and disintegration. His disruptive imagery had its sights on the notion of the beautiful but in time its visual appeal came to constitute a surrealist aesthetic, though one very much against the movement's original impulse, and then finally formed part of the language of advertising. Despite aspiring to become a practical force, Lautreamont's vision, though reflecting an all enveloping pathology, still remained imprisoned within the form of a book that more than any other work of fiction announced the unravelling of literature.

"Look at the ancient spider of the large species slowly poking its head out of a hole set in the ground at one of the corner intersections of the room. We are no longer in the narrative. It listens attentively for any rustling that may stir its mandibles in the air. Alas! We have now reached the real as regard the tarantula, and although an exclamation mark might be put at the end of every sentence, that is perhaps no reason for dispensing with them".

(The Songs of Maldoror. Lautreamont 1868)

"Little Paul has his own insect cages; his own little garden no larger than a pocket-handkerchief, where he grows beans; his forest plantation, in which stand four oaks a hand's breadth high, still furnished on one side with the acorn that feed them. It all makes a welcome change from grammar, which gets on none the worse for it".

(Souvenirs Entomologiques. Henri Fabre - around the same time)

We look "at the ancient spider of the large species" through the eyes of a naturalist, hence what we see cannot be part of a literary narrative. And if there is to be a narrative it can only be like those in Fabre's 'Souvenirs Entomologiques' and insects are a great vehicle for scientific narrative particularly where metamorphosis is involved. We may call Fabre's approach scientific narrative yet where else do we find in a great scientific text chapter headings like: 'A well dressed caterpillar' that then goes on to describe in matchless detail the Puss Moth caterpillar's habit of adorning itself? Though the entomologist Latreille gave the name of 'The Sisyphus' to the scavenger beetle only Fabre, when describing the insect and its habits, can mix unconstrained enthusiasm with a power of close observation that for page after page never flags. We enter in to that world and dimensions change just as they do in Lautreamont. And as for Lautreamont's cryptic remarks on exclamation marks how many do we find in a scientific journal like 'Nature'!

There very existence implies a lack of impartiality allowing us to then write about the doom of humanity without turning a hair. But it is science, both 'good' and 'bad', that should now be apostrophised considering how much science, for good and evil, is now deeply involved in the ultimate fate of humanity. We can divine in Lautreamont a hidden plea for a changed relationship between subject and object and in how many other major scientific texts not just those to do with entomology (though there are specific reasons for it in the case of the latter) is grammar mentioned like in Fabre? As he says 'it gets on none the worse for it.'

A closer examination of the relationship Lautreamont and Fabre would be worthwhile. The French context is particularly important. The French contribution to the nascent science of entomology is second to none. We only have only to think of Fabre and Latreille in the 19th century and Reaumur before them. There is also a link, though not an obvious one, between Pasteur and Fabre that needs explaining. Microbiology dealt with smaller quantities than the smallest of insects. However Pasteur sought out Fabre when investigating the blight then ravaging French sericulture. The world of the 'infinitely small' (Pasteur) and the 'monde a part' of insects which Fabre did so much to introduce us to, involved a change of scale in the way we now thought about small organisms. Their importance as regards the human species would henceforth only grow to massive proportions - and is still growing.

The situation was very different here. This rescaling of insects both symbolically and in terms of the Order of Insecta was given a different twist. Possessive individualism and the Victorian passion for collecting tended to remove, particularly butterflies and moths, from their living context. However the arid series of varieties expressed a repressed wish to change life.

In comparison to France the great contributions of British entomology were almost an act of defiance. There was little educational preparation behind them in the sense of established institutions. Wallace was apprenticed to a surveyor at the age of 15 and at the age of 13 Bates was grafting for a hosiery manufacturer. Darwin, Wallace, Bates - all three had subverted the division of labour in their own way in a country, more than any other, gave it ultimate legitimation. It is yet another reason why the mere mention of nature has such an incendiary quality to it. When Darwin broached the idea of publishing his 'Origins of the Species' 10 years earlier it was not just his fears radical Chartists would see grinning monkeys in positions of power everywhere but that personally he had undermined the legitimacy of the division of labour and the crown prince of the free marketeers, Adam Smith. By contrast Latreille had gained his release from prison during the French revolution because of his chance discovery in his cell of a previously unknown species of beetle. Thus almost from its inception entomology became institutionalised in a manner totally at odds with its development in Britain although Fabre was to be denied the chair of Zoology in Marseille because of his peasant mannerisms ('ses allures paysannes'). Both Latreille and Fabre were opposed to evolutionary theory and yet both were in the closest contact with it. (One wonders how much academic state pedagogy has played in all this because opposition to 'official' science ' today we would say 'big science' - has in France largely come from outside since maybe the surrealists and not from within science as is more the case in Britain.)

We know next to nothing about Lautreamont yet only nine years separates the 'Origins of the Species' from 'Les Chants des Maldoror'.The latter is very obviously the work of a very precocious youth, one versed in the sciences, especially the life sciences. He had to have read Darwin or at the very least was acquainted with his ideas. Not however in order to refute him but redefine him. What scandalised him was not what man had evolved from but what he was evolving in to. And if Darwin appeared to make his peace with god in the concluding paragraph of the 'Origins', Lautremont steadfastly refused to do so. The evolutionary tree finally branches, because of manifold oppression, in to the most grotesque mutations imaginable. Not only are these mutants biologically unable to breed, they have also lost the desire to do so They may try, like the two sharks - one a shark the other a manshark - but their union is a 'long, hideous and chaste union.'

"I gave them fixatives, jars and boxes, and instructions for removing and fixing the brains (from the extermination camps) and they came bringing them like the delivery van from a furniture company. There was wonderful material among those brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile diseases.'

(The above is a quote from the Nazi brain scientist, Professor Hallevorden, director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Brain Research in Berlin. He was reinstated in his post in 1948 and continued there until his retirement)

"I cast a long look of satisfaction upon the duality that composes me--------and find myself beautiful! Beautiful as the congenital malformation of man's sexual organs consisting of the relative brevity of the urethal canal and the division or absence of its lower wall so that this canal opens at a variable distance from the gland and below the penis;------- or rather as the following truth: 'The system of scales, modes, and their harmonic series does not rest upon variable natural laws but is, on the contrary, the result of aesthetic principles which have carried with the progressive development of mankind, and will vary again'.

'as beautiful as the trembling of hands in alcoholism'

(The above is a quote from Lautreamont's, The Songs of Maldoror)

Today we find in Lautreamont the hint of something far more sinister that is fast becoming a reality. It is not generally appreciated how much bio-engineering is driven by an aesthetic/consumer eugenics which also resumes the project of the avant garde to change life. Lautreamont deliberately sought to undermine aesthetic niceties by introducing at every turn the pathological that is still then double-edged enough to contain a promise of humanity. That is why the above quotes from 'Les Chants' must not be read as affirming the words of the Nazi brain scientist: in fact the mutilation we experience deep within ourselves, and which Lautreamont describes with the factual accuracy of a diagnostician, is socially conditioned and therefore temporary. And how does he let us know this. By in the next moment historicizing artistic form - in this instance music - a concept which is also as beautiful as 'deformity'. (Where ever did such a quote come from, if it is indeed a quote).

When eugenics first made its appearance it was the brain child of Francis Dalton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Paradoxically it arose out of Darwin's failure to crack the laws governing inheritance which his theory of natural selection presupposed. But once known these laws could, in theory, be controlled in the way that evolutionary theory never could be because it is inherently unpredictable. There were economic benefits but eugenics then could not be run as a profitable private business. What the biology lacked in technical achievement it made up for in ideological conviction centred around class and race supported mainly by the state. We hardly need mention the sterilization campaigns, the assault upon the indigent, the mentally ill, the incurably sick, ethnic minorities and the camps because the apostles of the new eugenics will do that for us. What underwrites the certainty of the new eugenicists is their belief this time it will work because the market is now in control, for it was the state that formerly distorted the science of eugenics.

Eugenics has become a consumer item and Watson has gone on record as asking what's wrong in designing females with blonde hair, blue eyes and big tits as that's what men want? Yet female commodity stereotyping is infinitely more diverse than this and like as not today's infant and infantile eugenics may forever be condemned to follow the market, not shape it. In fact Watson's free market, and supposedly freely chosen stereotype, has definite Aryan characteristics, (the blonde beast not the beautiful blonde), and is every bit as likely, in the name of the beautiful, to produce nothing but horror. Ultimately it will prove to be the most devastating of ironies where, like in the past, it will be the insane that impose upon those with a chance of finding sanity. The only way out of this madness is collective creation and Lautreamont cautions us to read his terrible pages with maximum care..

Stuart Wise 2004

As common as muck: all male assembly around a piece of shit! Ranmore Common, Surrey, August 25th 2005. However the Adonis Blue is far from common and to see 10 together is a once in a lifetime sight. Included amongst them were a male Common Blue and a male Chalkhill Blue. Though female Adonis Blues were nectaring close by, none ventured onto this all male preserve. Male aggression and the territorial imperative were briefly forgotten as each butterfly drank its cocktail of mineral water at this faecal lounge bar on the roadside verge. Photographed over a half hour period around 13:30 hours.

The numbered sequence above captures the moment (Figs 9/10/11/12) the sun came out from behind the intermittent cloud. It was, for late August, quite a breezy, cool day, though perfect for observing blue butterflies that then did not hesitate to open their wings. The bank side that skirts Denbies Hillside (honoured with an aerial view in E.B. Ford's opus) was also sheltered from the wind and this, combined with the overnight rain that had softened the dried outer crust of the dog faeces, made the conditions ideal. Hence this wonderful chance occurrence, making up for what otherwise would have been a disappointing day. This marvellous natural spectacle will stay with us forever. Possibly because dogs are carnivores the mineral content of their faeces is higher than those of herbivores. On the manure left by the horses on the hillside only two blues, or at most three, could be found tarrying at any one time. Once the sun came out some Adonis Blues almost immediately quit their dog's dinner, necessary for the repair of cell tissue, and elected to nectar on the blooms of marjoram close by. On the far right of fig 12 a singleton can be seen doing just that. One can make out a male Common Blue with its wings open in the centre of fig 3and 4. In fig 8 a male Chalkhill Blue is just about discernible in the upper left corner.

The spring emergence of the Adonis Blue in 2005 had been exceptional. And if the 26th Aug 2005 was anything to go by, the second emergence was just as impressive. The cold spring weather of 2005 appears not to have affected the Adonis Blue though it decimated the first generation of the Common Blue. Our original purpose on Aug 26th had been to photograph the Common Blue, particularly the female Common Blue, on the Surrey Hills to compliment the numbers of second generation Common Blues we had photographed in South and West Yorks around Sheffield, Castleford, Leeds and Bradford. However we were disappointed to find the second brood of Common Blues all but gone. Even so, compared with the reasonable number we found in the north, there appeared to be far fewer.

The following is a theoretical drift sparked by this unusual encounter...........

This chance encounter of rare butterflies, dog excreta and two genuinely unprejudiced 'socio-biologists' (well let's pretend for the moment) keenly aware of the indissoluble unity of both man and nature and the need to conserve and liberate both in a single undivided act of revolution, immediately stimulated several lines of enquiry. For those attuned to the significance of 'chance', this encounter exhales the scent of certain radical avant-garde currents of the last 100 years, which have yet to bear their uncompromising fruits. However for the more 'scientifically' minded it led to a consideration of the nitrogen cycle, which is equally explosive. For the darling butterflies were intent on procuring the mineral content of the dog's faeces, in particular the nitrate compounds so essential to all life whether plant or animal.

When we allude to explosive consequences we were not just thinking of the discovery of nitro glycerine in 1846, of TNT in 1863 and dynamite by Nobel in 1867, all of them compounds of nitrogen, the 30th most abundant element. Though increasingly an essential element of war from the mid 19th century onwards, nitrogen became in the 20th Century also an essential element of agriculture. In fact one could say the agricultural use of manufactured nitrogen compounds was war carried on by other means, a war that is still being waged by biochemical companies, giant agricultural conglomerates and supermarkets to gain total control over food production worldwide. Prior to 1905 the fertility of soil had largely depended on plant bacteria and microorganisms in the soil. However in that year a German chemist Fritz Haber showed it was possible to make nitrogen and hydrogen gases react when heated to 500c to form ammonia, the basic feedstock for the chemical industry and the basis of artificial fertilizers.

78% of the earth's atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and today close on 50 million tonnes of nitrogen is extracted yearly from the atmosphere. It is an energy intensive process because nitrogen is an unusually inert gas and the nitrogen molecule N2 is one of the most stable molecules, being held together by an extremely strong bond. Only when a high temperature is supplied does a reaction begin to take place and ammonia produced. Ammonia is, of course, very soluble in water and ammonia based fertilizers (nitrates) can be poured onto the ravaged soils of the world's breadbaskets and rice bowls which, with each passing day, become ever more depleted of all organic nutrients. Had the soil a voice we would hear it repeatedly scream for its seasonal fixes of nitrates, phosphorus and potassium cooked and packed into bags labelled NPK/Agricultural Narcotics, K being the chemical symbol of potassium. Once set in motion the use of nitrate fertilizers becomes a vicious spiral it is nigh on impossible to escape from. As the soil howls for an even bigger fix of nitrates, it is a habit far harder to break than coming off junk because to the farmer and agribusinesses increasingly hooked up to, and hooked on, the world market there is even less margin of choice than there is to a junkie. Despite the growing organic sector, cold turkey on an industrial scale would spell near worldwide economic ruin as well as widespread starvation.

A century ago we were solar-derived energy eating animals. But not any more. Today for every calorie of food energy consumed, ten calories of manufactured energy goes into its production and transportation. As we vainly strive to reproduce the energy that powers the sun (atomic fusion) we are becoming less directly dependant than ever on that energy. This primal act of hubris can only result in the most terrible disaster.

Prior to that watershed year of 1905 for agriculture, war, pesticides and chemical defoliants, nitrogen fixing was almost entirely an organic process. When we inhale we take in oxygen and breathe out CO2. However the large percentage of nitrogen we breathe in returns to the atmosphere unchanged. The process of biological nitrogen fixing, without which human and animal life could not survive, is the work of symbiotic bacteria, rhizobium, present in the root nodules of certain plants (the leguminosae) and which are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, and azobacter, free living soil micro organisms. From there the fixed nitrogen was (and still is, of course!) incorporated into living things both plant and animal and from which it emerges as excreta from animals and from decomposing dead matter.

There also has been an enormous increase in the atmospheric nitrogen that soils can absorb and which previously was largely due to lightning that caused the highly stable nitrogen element, because of the high voltages passing through the inert atmospheric nitrogen, to change into a weak solution of nitric acid (HNO2). Combined with rainwater it reaches the ground where it forms nitrates, which are then absorbed by plants. Back in 1850 it has been estimated each hectare of ground received about 10 kilos of nitrogen per year, mostly from nitrogen compounds dissolved in rain. Today however about 45 kilograms per hectare is deposited annually. Most is from the burning of fossil fuels, car exhausts and the fuel burnt to heat homes, which produce various oxides of nitrogen. It is only now becoming apparent that this is seriously threatening the diversity of plant communities favouring certain grasses, in particular mat and bent grass. Combined with global warming encouraging the unseasonable growth of grass, it is paradoxically leading to a year round, bilious greening of the countryside at the expense of other plant life. Together with the brochure appeal of smart rye grass, so favoured by house builders and newbuild industrial construction firms, this deathly green substitute for the deceased and unlamented Astroturf, only adds to the depressing spectacle of invasive expanses of mono-grassland with not even a hint of daisies and dandelions to relieve the monotony. Again we are just learning about this as we are about the role of nitrogen in the acetcholins, the neurotransmitter that passes messages from one nerve ending to another. Nitrogen is also a component of many other biologically important molecules such as haem - part of haemoglobin. So the storehouse of knowledge increases but to no avail because true knowledge and the capacity to use it has been stripped of power. Sciencia no potestas est.

But to return for a moment to those lovely blue butterflies feasting off excreta. Like every other butterfly enthusiast we were familiar with the sight of butterflies drinking their fill around the perimeter of rainwater pools on non-porous soils. This rainwater also contained water-soluble nitrogen compounds. In old woodlands the nitrogen content of standing pools would be largely organic deriving from the action of largely non leguminous, nitrogen fixing bacteria of the genus Frankia and other tree and plant bacteria and finally micro-organisms in the soil that are uniquely adapted to absorbing nitrogen from the atmosphere and turning it into a usable compound.

However because chalk and limestone are porous this terrain dries out far quicker than it would on more acidic soils. So the chance of rainwater forming pools and remaining for any length of time is considerably lessened. In that case for downland butterflies the only other ready source of nitrates has to be animal excreta, especially excreta that has been made soluble by a downpour. Hence the somewhat revolting and quite common sight of beautiful butterflies gorging themselves on shit and so different from those fairy-like woodland pools, glinting in shafts of sunlight, around which assemble White Admirals and even the occasional Purple Emperor.

We also began to wonder if faecal feasting was once a much more common sight than it is today, not only on chalk and limestone down land but on all types of soils. Reliant as soil was on crop rotation (the practise of leaving fields fallow) and natural organic processes, nitrates would have been in much shorter supply than they are today and so butterflies would have tended to seek out the excreta of grazing animals far more than they now do simply because standing water and damp, muddy soils are nowadays far richer in nitrates than they were in times past. We are, of course, guessing but the reasoning is soundly based even if the facts are lacking. The most destructive excess of this super abundance of nitrates can be seen in the phenomena of eutrophication, the excessive growth of algae and higher plants on natural waters due to their 'fertilization'. The plant life dies off and pollutes the water as it decomposes, removing oxygen in the process and killing of fishes and other freshwater life. In fact fertilizers are the largest source of the pollution of ground and drinking water.

Happy as pigs in shit, these Adonis Blue males were wholly absorbed in downing their faecal cocktail. They were oblivious to our presence and had we wanted to feast at the trough alongside them they would have given place but not flown off. A National Trust estate van passing within two inches of them and even a dog sniffing around as dogs do, failed to rile them and only the suns rays seemed to affect them, closing their wings when it clouded over. This was a living testimony to the power of nitrogen and if we reflect that that the average human being carries around a total of 1.3 kilograms of nitrogen that is quite a weight to lug about. We cannot argue the case for nitrogen too strongly: it is a constituent of DNA and as such is part of the genetic code and a constituent of the many amino acids that form enzymes, the basic ingredient of all proteins.

It must have been a rich cocktail indeed because one certainly cannot approach puddling White Admirals, Clouded Yellows, Purple Emperors or the Brown Argus with the same ease. The fact that it was a carnivore's faeces and not a herbivore's must have made all the difference. The high protein meat diets of dogs contain more concentrated nitrogen compounds than that of typical ruminant let out to pasture and which invariable spends more time feeding - and defecating. And so the liberal amounts of horse dung on Denbies Hillside proved far less attractive to the butterflies when compared with the dog dirt moistened by the over night rain and partially reheated by the sun. Admittedly the dung was more exposed to a cooling breeze on the hillside but, even so, one or more butterflies would, as they did in the past, occasionally alight to imbibe the nitrate content. But a closer inspection of the dung clearly showed the presence of plant fibre (i.e. undigested cellulose) because most mammals lack the enzyme catalysing the degradation of cellulose and which is found in some invertebrates (e.g. termites) fungi, bacteria etc. Had the horses on Denbies Hillside been fed with artificial feed rather than left to graze on sparse down land grass it may well have been a different story. It also led us to wonder how much artificial feedstock, either directly or indirectly, went into canned dog food and just how energy intensive the rows of Chappie on the shelves of supermarkets really were, including the energy that went into the manufacture of the tin cans. For any estimate of the nitrogen cycle, which is today a highly capitalised cycle, must include an estimate of the vast amounts of energy expended on the manufacture of artificial fertilizers not to mention the energy expanded on the global food transportation network. The nitrogen cycle is inescapably part of the looming energy crises and these assembled Adonis Blues were radiating a message from those unclouded blue wings, the most saturated, intense blue wings of the genus that in the not too distant future, thirty years at the maximum, the game will be up.

With the rapidly approaching energy crises there will undoubtedly be a return to a more traditional form of agriculture, particularly soil husbandry. Already the value of the nitrogen-based fix is being increasingly questioned. For instance the UN's Food and Agricultural organisation admitted in 1997 that wheat yields in both Mexico and the US had shown no increase in 13 years. An intensifying energy crisis will only increase the cost of artificial fertilizers as soils become ever more organically impoverished. And it will take years for these manufactured soils to recover from decades of drug dependency. But what form the social content of this latter day farming revolution will take is any bodies guess and is dependent on the tempo of the struggle against capitalism, a struggle that has been all but annihilated and never have the rulers of this world felt so secure in their desperation.

It could result in a hell on earth, somewhere between a warped physiocracy (with a bizarrely reworked 'Tableau Economique' to match this new agrarian emergency) and modern feudal vassalage with the manufacturing sector restricted to the repair (recycling!) of whatever machinery is still around. Paper money would cease to exist and there would be a return to solid coin based largely on the produce of the soil with vast estates inherited from today's immense agriculture concentrations, overseen by vicious modern landlords disposing of the labour of armies of truly 'post modern' agricultural labourers living a brutalised hand to mouth existence. Defra could be replaced by a lethally bureaucratised Soil Association. For the moment, this amiable, approachable though somewhat naive association has yet to undergo the malforming transformation of a high profile organisation like Greenpeace. Though never a paragon of clarity, its woolly populism once gave more than a margin of free scope to individual initiatives and to a joyous, if confused, contestation. Not any more for Greenpeace is today a 'bloated corporation' run by suits on 'substantial salaries while someone else does their job', intent only on avoiding confrontation, striking deals with oil corporations and putting the rest of the organisation's employees on short term contacts. (See the interesting article 'War and Greenpeace' by John Castel, former captain of 'Rainbow Warrior', in 'The Independent' 8/8/2005). It all sounds very familiar and Greenpeace looks to be gearing up to face a future that in terms of previously unbelievable and aberrant forms of capitalism, will make the last 30 years of fictive values and treading water appear 'rational' and benevolent.

It is becoming obvious that if humanity is to be in with a chance of surviving the next hundred years, the future will have to be predominantly agrarian once more. The number of individuals compelled to draw this conclusion is rising exponentially. Inevitably it is a very mixed bag, ranging from the greater clarity of Rene Riesel (formerly of the Confederation Paysanne in France) to the far more muddled Colin Tudge. The latter's latest book 'The Secret Lives of Trees' is a fascinating study of trees and, by continually emphasising humanity's never ending dependence on trees, revolutionises our evaluation of them. Not quite the same can be said of 'Oak: The Frame of Civilization' by W.B. Logan, a book that appeared around the same time. Though it is about the oak tree's human story, the age of oak ends with the steam driven, iron-clad ships of the American Confederacy in the civil war of 1860-65. Dealing not with a particular species but with the tree family, the sheer quantity of tree science Tudge gets to grip with in a masterly fashion, leads him to conclude we can never do without trees. He is therefore forced to confront political economy in the shape of money, government, political parties, big business (however not the state, which is crucial) but by seeking an alternative within political economy rather than its abolition which includes money, government, political parties, business and the state, it is unlikely he will be able, in the long run, to prevent a single tree from being felled. Riesel would never make the same mistake and thus neither he nor Tudge would ever see eye to eye. However it is up to Tudge to make the first move. For we have every reason to believe this totalising approach is on the increase, particularly from within the life sciences, though it also turns up in other unexpected places with increasing frequency (e.g. geology). This approach is driven, as never before, by scientific logic, it does not come from without in response to a social upheaval. It is therefore not a moral choice but recognition of inescapable fact. However there are false and true totalities and regrettably it is the former that is likely to predominate and do more harm than good. Hence it is necessary to stress, above all else, the correct critique of political economy. Yet this very wording 'correct' causes the flesh to creep reminding one of all the other absolutes no longer relevant. What you can say is that over the last 75 years a certain still largely unknown path has been clearly though slowly demarcated which we now have to traverse and discover a lot more about negotiating its many twists and turns. It began with a Marx contra Marx, a separation of the state capitalist Marx from all the theoretical subtleties surrounding Marx's analyses of the capitalist mode of production and the potential points of transcendence. Such approach has already accounted for a great variety of insight. For those looking for a more grounded approach to the ecological crises this montage is yet in its infancy and for those who are naive on this subject they could do worse than peruse Loren Goldner's website at https://www.breaktheirhaughtypower.net/ all the while recognising that Loren has yet to bring eco-critique and energy crises into his wide-ranging and excellent general orbit. Despite the well-intentioned and broadly right perspectives belonging to the green anarchists there lack of theoretical rigour leaves much to be desired.

And now for another drift related to the Adonis Blues.....

Extremes meet and a coda has to be affixed to this scientific preamble one that stems directly from the avant-garde movements of the past 70 years and their harbinger from even earlier times. The manner in which chance - a once in a lifetime chance opportunity - has been emphasised and its capture on camera is significant. For some it will immediately evoke that now classic instance of all chance events, 'as beautiful as the meeting of an umbrella and typewriter on a dissecting table'. To describe it as an image (though it let loose an endless stream of images in art and advertising it cannot be held responsible for) is just plain wrong for it is intended as a frontal assault upon the stock in trade of literature. Most likely written within weeks of Darwin's publication of the 'Origin of the Species' it has the quality of a direct observation, a record of a simple, though disturbing, coincidence, something that the man, Isidore Ducasse, and not the author, Lautreamont, had chanced upon on his daily rounds. It is overwhelmingly present in a way a novel restricted to a specific place and time, and therefore safely cordoned off by history, can never be. It is also not intended as a poetic metaphor, a mere seeming that alters nothing in reality: it simply is. Lautreamont's observation was intended as a blunt instrument that doubled as a demolition hammer and a tool essential to the task of reconstruction.

The objects that make up Lautreamont's embryonic observation are utilitarian objects that were, at least as regards umbrellas and typewriters beginning to be mass manufactured. They are not ornamental but everyday objects free from the stylistic mishmash borrowed largely, though not exclusively, from the Greco/roman/renaissance past an anxiety ridden industry, fearful at the lack of precedent, was becoming good at faking. The concomitant Greco/roman/renaissance body beautiful ideal was also undermined by Lautreamont when he wrote 'as beautiful as the trembling of an alcoholics hand'. It would be a mistake to think Lautreamont found beauty in disintegration rather that the realization of beauty is not possible other than by personally undergoing a profound experience of disintegration and understanding it from within. Otherwise one will be trapped by one of the palliatives to capitalism none of which ever succeeds and only makes matters worse.

And in an aphoristic addendum entitled 'Poesies' (more like the 'pocketful of poesies' that plague victims caught a sweet spring-like whiff of as they were first struck down) to the Songs of Maldoror, Lautreamont states unforgettably 'poetry will be made by all'. This chance meeting, the most famous in all 'literature' even as it was consigning literature to the dustbin, also implied praxis, a praxis that was to be taken up by the most radical moments of surrealism in the 1920s and early 1930s like their perambulations, which endeavoured 'to leave behind the ball and chain of art'. Though 'a dismal failure' by 'setting out on the road' they set a powerful and very influential precedent that would be repeatedly taken up in one form or another, throughout the rest of the 20th century. Unquestionably the most significant was the derive initiated in Paris during the late 1950s which sought to rid the perambulations of their aimlessness and overarching emphasis upon chance. They were meant as a prelude to urban insurrection (and in fact were in retrospect) a reconnoitring of terrain with that end in view.

However from its origins in Lautreamont (and others like De Quincey and up to a point Nerval) these perambulations, becoming ever more lucid with the passing of time, at least up to the mid-sixties when the original purpose of the derive was irrevocably lost, were overwhelmingly urban in character. The countryside was dismissed as boring, uneventful and predictable, the antithesis of encounter - by chance or otherwise. There is no adoration of nature in Lautreamont: it is as repulsive as everything else. It is a grotesquely deformed, aberrant nature that has evolved (the debt to Darwin is obvious) beyond anything we would recognise as nature. With hindsight the Songs of Maldoror could be said to be an anticipation of the bio-economy, the stage at which biology becomes industrialised and Fordist assembly lines give place to the bio-assembly line of genetic engineering and bionic prosthetics. Unlike Fukuyama's 'Our Post Human Future ' The Consequences of the Bi-technology Revolution' (the title of his 2002 book) this supernature has all gone horribly wrong and, at the end of history, the promise of a superior technohumanity is cruelly betrayed and turns into the ugliest, subhuman, deformity.

An anticipation of what is still to come, this hateful nature has become the ultimate commodity. But even before Lautreamont, in fact from the closing decades of the 18th Century, nature had become the object of a rescue operation. To the failed painter Goethe, it had to be visualized differently one that implied the metamorphosis of painterly values (transcendence of art and post Newtonian science) into a new unity of nature. Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' was unquestionably the main influence behind this advance. Under the theme of 'Nature as Art' it was carried further in the Germany of the 1800s than anywhere else, a development that has never been recognised, still less analysed, as fully as it deserves to be. It led to the most preposterous claim to be able to see into the life of things to such an extent it was possible to surpass nature and become a demiurge of creation, a designer of life. For this was part and parcel of the logic of absolute idealism. It was in this spirit that Goethe wrote his grandiloquent creationist preliminaries for what would eventually become the very sober 'Metamorphoses of Plants', though his idealism reflected that of Hegel rather than Kant who would never, for one moment, have countenanced such exaggerated claims.

These inflated pretensions were a response both to the French revolution and the industrial revolution and in them there is a deepening awareness of the dialectics of man and nature and that, though a part of nature, man - universal man - was beginning to impose himself on the rest of nature with a power and scope unprecedented in all of human history and in the process appeared to be reinventing nature, society and man.

Strangely enough in the hands of Keats' poem 'The Song of Opposites' this dialectic becomes a homely cockney dialectic within nature: a cheery song of opposites and chance occurrence as if nature itself was becoming a boring routine event, the natural equivalent of mass production. One says 'strangely' because of course Keats is far from cheery enmeshed as he was in an opulently-denied despair and yearning with nature as a vast metaphor of promise and thwarted desire. Looking for the unusual in nature also became a disguised wish to change life and hence comes into the inheritance of the avant-garde tradition. A history extending back over 200 years also shaped our response to these Adonis Blues, which we were well aware of at the time.

After the defeat of the UK's miners' strike (1984-5) all hope of a better world ended in this country. And so the both of us some 15 years ago began to seek solace in the countryside. Something then happened we were not prepared for, that caught us unawares like we had been pushed from behind. Not only did unexpected things happen within the order of nature like finding a Hedge Brown a 150 yards from Wormwood Scrubs prison and then a few years later stumbling by chance on a small colony on the scree slope of Malham Cove, but we began to have significant encounters in the field. If we chanced on someone with a camera or a pair of binoculars it invariably led to far more than an exchange of pleasantries. These encounters would with increasing regularity hit on the very basis of contemporary civilisation by continually asking awkward questions seldom raised elsewhere. Conversation would float as effortlessly as the clouds over head from observation on the behaviour of a butterfly to the catastrophic consequences of a consumer boom in the newly emerging BRICS (Brazil Russia India China) as if neither contradicted the other but were profoundly interconnected - as they are.

Tramping, as we often did around the Surrey Hills and the Chilterns we were struck by the place names which were richly evocative of the puritan revolution and the civil war of the 1640s, names like Burford, Puritan Way, Milton Close, Pulpit Hill and St George's Hill forever associated with the name of Winstanley and that profound moment that was to ring throughout the ages, when a group of men and women took over the land and began to dig. From a patch of ground on which the Small Blue was flying we had gazed at the hill from afar. A short while later, without ever leaving heath land, we were on Banstead Down where the Marbled White was introduced during the 1950s after dying out there. As for Pulpit Hill -----we had gone to Little Kimble in the Chilterns in the late spring of 1997 to look for the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary when we came across this rounded, steep sided, chalk mound with the name of Pulpit Hill. Entirely by chance we had, earlier on in the day, stumbled into the ground of Chequers, the prime minister's country residence. We had left quickly not because ordered to by security staff rather that we had no desire to remain there, it was so park-like and barren of wild life. How enticing in comparison was Pulpit Hill, the true victor in the civil war and not Chequers or parliament.

On the summit of Pulpit Hill there was a lone cow, as unmoving as stone, framed against the deep blue sky. There was also a thick grove of hawthorn through which ran a carefully tended tunnel roofed by impenetrable branches that had been cut and shaped probably centuries ago. And round and about the Common Blue teemed in such numbers that, when they came to roost, as many as five could be found on one grass stalk. And yet we also felt something was missing, the name reminding us of the days when the countryside was also teeming with people and hedge preachers who found in nature not just equality but the blessings of desire, a god given and therefore equal right to indulge the passions freely, endowing what was to become the stand point of enlightenment scientific neutrality with a new meaning: 'nature to be commanded must be obeyed'. However this was passionate, not instrumental reasoning in which we ourselves have still to be the test beds of the humanely possible.

This also has became a feature of the new terrain of encounter a place where a hidden love of darting, stolen looks of undoubted warmth and the thoroughly genuine seems about to burst its shackles and find new forms of expression. The air crackles with a muted eroticism as though the sexes were beginning to be at ease with each other and more able to speak their minds and be their true selves. A surrealist worth his or her salt would have instantly recognised it. Once when visiting Hell's Coppice in Bernwood Forest a couple of miles walk from Sandbeds on the outskirts of Oxford to search for the Brown Hairstreak we happened to bump into a middle aged couple with grey hair who had also stationed themselves in a lane bordered with buckthorn and blackthorn in the hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive insects. After awhile they moved off and we followed a half hour later. We knew the Brown Hairstreak likes to jink around tall ash trees usually ashes situated on higher grounds. There were several large ashes that bordered a large ploughed field a few hundred yards away and we had in the past espied the Hairstreaks on the top branches. The path to these ashes ran through a dense woodland so thick with scrub it muffled the sound of intruders. And intrude we did, for on straightening up after crawling practically on all fours through a tangled mass of low branches and brambles, we came across the couple leaning up against a tree laughing and kissing each other full on the lips, the woman's skirt riding up around her waist. They were not the slightest bit abashed and carried on as if all that had surprised them was a pair of muntjac.

We were slower to recover from our embarrassment and yet we both remarked how such a scene would once have been typical and that the divorce of human passion from the setting of nature was to the detriment of both. To the lyrical sound of giggles coming from within the wood we did see our Hairstreaks high up in the top branches of the oaks. A couple appeared to be performing a pre-nuptial mating ritual and presently disappeared from view. How I wish at that moment I had a balloon which could carry me up, up, up and away just above the canopy for I knew no one had ever witnessed or photographed a pair of mating Brown Hairstreaks in the wild.

Climbing up into the canopy would not have been the same as hanging there just above the tree tops, able to move about silently and at will without disturbing as much as a leaf. I half imagined to myself a dream like structure that could do this. Viewing 'A Treetop Odyssey' in the summer of 2005 I realised that my dream machine had become half fact and was even being devised whilst I lay on my back in the ploughed furrows staring up at the top ashes sometime in the late 1990s'. This scientific adventure story was about a journey atop the canopy of Madagascan forest, a unique vantage point from which to view a unique island with a unique flora and fauna. An airship had been used from which was suspended a webbed cradle, nicknamed the pretzel, which enabled scientists to walk the canopy. However the thrill of the new at what up to then had been impossible, soon gave way to doubt then contempt, and finally outrage. The cost must have been colossal and the credits gave no indication who paid for the bulk of this expedition. Led by Prof. Halle from Montpellier University, academic funding could never have stretched this far. Seeing that the expedition included a couple of botanists employed to capture scents by a cosmetics company and other scientists employed by biochemical companies in search of - in fact the biopirating - of yet another block buster drug, the source of the funding was immediately clear, so clear that on no account had their sponsorship ever to be mentioned. This was a seductive example of the kind of bio rapacity that had underwritten the Rio biodiversity conference of 1992 and the rules stated, though no one dared say so out loud, that conservation had to yield a profit. This, after all, is the opinion of the eminence grise E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist and myrmycologist, whose views on bio diversity had played such a part in the conclusions that flowed from the Rio conference. That biodiversity - not withstanding its profound scientific claims that biodiversity tends to yield even more biodiversity - has been guided by the profit motive from the moment it began to slip glibly off the tongue, is a major reason why biodiversity groups attached to councils (yet another reason for their being totally ineffective) are worse then useless at the local level when it comes to stopping the annihilation of the species. Capitalist society is rotten to the core. Nature is not yet but could be entirely engulfed by it, beginning with the free market monetarist philosophy that underlies biodiversity.

What gladdened me the next day were the number of friends I met in the street who had watched the program and had felt the same way as I did without me needing prompt them. This indignation was much greater than could be expected given the present climate of rewarding robber barons, pension fund cut purses and the haves and have more. It demonstrated how sensitive the issue of nature is becoming, as sensitive as the cap on a phial of nitro glycerine.

It was in Hell's Coppice we encountered an amateur naturalist who though an ardent wild life photographer and still high from having photographed a Wilson's Petrol (possibly the world's commonest sea bird but not around these shores), had long ago rid himself of his TV. He was so proud at having done what, at some time or other, we had all wanted to do but lacked the resolve. Would our lives change, had his, and the question went unanswered because no one asked it, though I could now kick myself for not asking it. Here was an opportunity to probe the depths because TV is a media that has yet to find its form and content and will never do so while capitalism exists.

Earlier on that day we had fallen in with a tutor from Balliol College. How the conversation drifted is yet another example of the potential that now exists for encounter in the countryside. It began innocently enough, while we were casting our eyes over the blackthorns. 'Looking for the Black Hairstreak,' he enquired, for this was the exact spot the Black Hairstreak was discovered by a school boy in the early 1900s'. Immediately the news got out the place was swarming with lepidopterists from nearby Oxford University and come Friday afternoon tutors would say 'see you in hell' rather than 'see you after the weekend'!

We have yet to see our first Black Hairstreak in Hell's Coppice but according to this young man still in his 20's he had, several years back, counted as many as 20 on one bush. They may now have gone for good and he also mentioned he had been privileged to see the hibernacula of the March Fritillary by the side by the side of the path leading to the makeshift car park. Not anymore for the National Trust in its absolute lack of infinite wisdom had seen fit to lay a tar macadam road to the now paved over car park, and - heyho - the Marsh Fritillary is now only a distant memory. We each shook our heads in disbelief and it was then by the by it came out he was a tutor in Balliol College almost as if it was something to be ashamed of, for he certainly did not go out of his way to mention it. Of course we immediately wanted to know if the memory of another being, a human being, had survived the passing of time - that of E.B. Ford's. Very much so, and we were regaled with a number of telling stories, well worth recounting some day, regarding this great lepidopterist. The close relationship between J.B.S. Haldane and Ford had always interested me for Haldane had dominated the biological sciences in this country during the 1930s and 1940s, exercising a profound influence on Ford. Knowing Haldane was a 'red' (though being a Stalinist that also meant red with the blood of the workers he idolised, and writing trenchant articles on scientific subjects for their edification in the pages of 'The Daily Worker') I attempted to move the conversation in this direction. Alas, he did not perceive what I was driving at and all he could say, in this respect, was that Ford had objected to opening up the senior common rooms to women on the grounds their voices were too shrill! After the scandals surrounding 'the dark lady of DNA' (Rosalind Franklin, who succeeded in photographing the helical structure of DNA before Crick and Watson deduced it and who has only received a very belated recognition and astronomers like the all but ignored Henrietta Levitt who painstakingly mapped the Cepheid Variables, crucial to understanding the scale of the universe), the male dominated scientific fraternity is now desperate to make amends for its sexist past, an act of contrition that conveniently covers up a far more fundamental question; the relationship between capitalism and science. Despite the increased integration of women into science this question is still scarcely ever asked.

This also had a bearing on my desire to know more about Imms who had written a very influential book in the 1930s entitled 'General text book of Entomology' though he was better known as the author of 'Insect Natural History' which came out after World War Two as part of 'The New Naturalist' series. He had also been a close friend of Ford's and when he died in 1949 it was, to Ford, not only a loss to entomology but a deeply felt personal bereavement. Imms had brought together a vast mass of material into a very readable whole. He also marked the moment entomology lost its innocence and was fortunate enough not to have straddled the two worlds of pure entomology and applied entomology with World War Two as the dividing line. Even so he anticipated this development being appointed in 1913 reader in agricultural entomology at Victoria University Manchester and then, on the outbreak of war, crop inspector of the board of agriculture and fisheries. It wasn't immediately apparent that the chlorinated gases used as a chemical weapon on the western front could, once suitably modified, be deployed against insects.

At the same time Imms was putting together his masterwork, Vincent Wigglesworth was composing 'The Principles of Insect Physiology' which came out in 1939. With a name to match the job description, Wigglesworth profoundly influenced the course entomology was to take following the end of World War Two, hitching entomology's so far unsullied reputation ineradicably to the bio chemicals industry and the green revolution, actually the first of the 'green' misnomers. The post war green revolution was part of a campaign to sell a complete package including heavy machinery, prodigal irrigation schemes and hybrid varieties of soy, wheat, rice etc. responsive to pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. It was the first attempt to gain global control of agriculture, the latest being that of GM foods.

Entomology's changing face began commendably with Wigglesworth telling his students at the London School of Tropical Medicine that more people had died in the First World War from insect borne diseases than had been killed in action. With this sobering thought, applied entomology had come of age, just as the shift in emphasis meant any extra entomological investigation into social causes would henceforth be strictly off limits, especially a probing analysis - and one that badly needs to be done - of the relationship between applied entomology and the agrochemical industrial military complex. A 1945 edition of 'Time' had published a picture of the first atomic bomb explosion alongside a report announcing DDT as the ultimate weapon in the war on insects. In 'Silent Spring' Rachel Carson had cited four examples from the 'Journal of Entomology' wherein researchers had listed chemical industry support for their researches. The Colorado beetle is perhaps the worlds most recognisable and notorious beetle. It was also the first to become resistant to pesticides: genetic variation and the insect's rapid rate of reproduction kept yielding generations able to tolerate each new poison.

The indiscriminate use of pesticides violates a fundamental law of evolution and it always amazes me how the agrochemical companies in their search for the ultimate insect poison, continue to overlook the obvious. Or do they? Most likely they are aware of it; only it does not make business sense to publicly acknowledge it. In fact Wigglesworth spanning the two worlds of pure and applied entomology was also aware of another shift, that from state to private capitalism. He did not unfortunately express it as bluntly as this but the tendency towards the privatisation of science bothered him greatly not seeing that state sponsored science was not the same as a genuinely public science, a science open to all and only possible once commodity society is abolished. This confusion continues to this day and was particularly marked in the feud that broke out around the mapping of the human genome. Of course we prefer Sulston, and the others that helped him, to Craig Venter who threatened to undermine this international effort and make the human genome into a corporate monopoly. But the title of Sulston`s book 'The Common Thread' detailing the history of this scientific breakthrough refers to more than just DNA for it is also a plea on behalf of the public realm which, as is typically the case with virtually every scientist, becomes confused with that of the state-of-the-common-people, which, regarding the present day state (or any other), is a meaningless populist illusion.

There is a revealing entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Wigglesworth - and also telling on account of its pulled punches but which is enough to wish for a more candid exposure: 'By the time he died much research in his chosen field had become managed, unpublished, or even hidden, with untested information reserved for industrial gain, business profit, political showmanship or military power'. Perhaps the only well-known scientist in this country in recent years who would have scoffed at the dichotomy of public and private in terms of the state v the private market is Dr. Chris Pallis, the eminent brain surgeon and former 'head' of the ultra leftist group, Solidarity but who was nonetheless, quite nervous about mingling his scientific research and career with his theories on society. In a way this was hardly surprising as the frequent visits to his house by the Special Branch received savage tabloid attention. It can be said that Chris Pallis as a scientist was partly in the tradition of Needham and Haldane, his specialism separate from his identification with the workers' movement. It was though a significant advance as Pallis forthrightly saw through all the cruel and bloody deception inherent in what officially was known as the past workers' movement, not only its variant social democratic forms but those of Leninism, Maoism and Trotskyism. However lack of a critique of society's totality (which also marred Solidarity's contribution) meant comments on medicine and medical research were limited confined primarily to a condemnation of the growth of a cumbersome NHS bureaucracy.

One of Wigglesworth students, James Beaumont (who was later to be knighted as indeed was Wigglesworth) - we have come along way since Lady Glanville was judged to be off her rocker, citing as evidence her passion for butterflies - found that insect skins were covered with an infinitely thin layer of wax. It would be a mistake to think an entomologist like Beaumont was an unwitting dupe: his researches on the permeability of insect eggshells that are even more waterproof than the insects were done with the aim of showing how poisons can get in. In the 1970s he was to work for Geest devising a means of coating bananas in wax which did away with refrigerated containers: these cryogenic bananas would still look fresh after being shipped thousands of miles and unripe fruit became a thing of the past. The analysis of insect wax had advanced the science of poisoning; now it was serving the make believe art of fresh-food retailing, which since the 1970s has invaded the shelves of every supermarket.

The career of Sir James Beaumont reflects the changing fortunes of entomology from its gradual acceptance as an academic discipline of no 'use' to anyone, to being of central importance to the giant agrochemical companies and latterly to biotech firms seeking a final solution to the insect question.

We had wanted to put these questions to our new acquaintance from Balliol College in the hope this more informal setting in a country lane, well away from the prying eyes of academia ever ready to snitch on those not prepared to shut up, would lead to a more frank exchange. Surprisingly he had never heard of Imms and was temporarily put on the back foot but his new regard for us was at once apparent. The only chapter in Imms 'Insect Natural History' which could be of practical use is the one on biological forms of control, the only really effective form of insect control up to World War Two. However to read it as a statement of Imms's ecological sympathies would be mistaken: he was lucky enough not to know any better.

I am indebted to our new friend for another reason for he made me aware of the surreal starting point of Ford's book on butterflies. 'What other book on butterflies' he claimed, 'begins with the Fall of Constantinople'' He was right and I had forgotten or rather the fact had never struck me, as it should. Yes, there was always something not quite right in the head about lepidopterists and would that we got out of our heads more often.

However this young lecturer was not altogether secure in his ivory tower. With a wry smile he mentioned how the city of 'dreaming spires' had been renamed the city of 'screaming tyres', referring to the habitual practise of 'taking and driving without care' cars from the city centre and racing them to an appointed spot on the Blackbird Lees estate where residents of all ages and sexes would turn out to watch the live performance. This was not much more than harmless fun with an edge and well before the fire and brimstone game playing became a deadly business and the screech of tyres a prelude to a drive-by shooting. Though town and gown and the saga of the Cutteslow Walls - a wall separating the university precincts from plebeian quarters - have long passed into history, this lecturer was still gnawed from within by something more demanding than a social conscience in the abstract. If butterflies were to die out (and make no mistake, this is a very real possibility) so would his scientific specialism. To him the former luxury of scientific neutrality was not an option and his indignation at the wanton destruction of the Marsh Fritillary in Hell's Coppice that of a person with his back to the wall.

Not everyone we meet in the field is quite so committed to nature though as a general rule there is a great openness and readiness to show interest. This is particularly true of brownfield sites and other places that have so far eluded classification permitting nature to flourish unchecked and unaided and frequently the better for that. In the summer of 2005 - on the 9th of August to be precise the very same day we were to see second generation Dingy Skippers at Waleswood, South Yorks - we met nearby a former engineer on what had once been the Kiveton Park pit spoil heap now in the throws of the most goddam awful makeover sponsored by Yorkshire Forward. We explained we were concerned about the fate of the Dingy Skipper and that despite specific instructions, essential habitat requirements had been wilfully ignored. He was immediately interested and soon he was giving us an invaluable lesson on the geology of the spoil heap, picking up bits from the surviving portions of exposed spoil without which the Dingy Skipper does not stand a chance of surviving. What I had taken to be iron ore or oxidised iron and which imparted to spoil heaps a touch of ochre was, I learnt, burnt shale and a reminder that these nature rich heaps once had a tendency to catch fire. A self-taught geologist, he was fascinated by atomic weight and marvelled how a small lump of iron ore could weigh as much as a far larger chunk of coal.

This former engineer was an innocent at large, a typical South Yorks type whose disarming authenticity and sincerity belongs more to the industrial past than present. Though he didn't say so in as many words, the miners' strike of 1984/85 had changed his life. And now he passed his days drifting from one derelict site to another, rummaging amongst the bones of long dead industries in and around Sheffield like he was searching for his sanity and lost hope in the crumbling remains. He said he had taken early retirement but he was only in his early forties. Bit by bit the true story came out. He had become a victim of the intensification of labour and the lengthening of the working day, driving 200 miles to work where he was then expected, at eight in the morning, to launch himself into exacting calculations, on which lives depended, and then, come knocking off time and tired out, do the return journey amid ever mounting levels of traffic. He was going to visit a friend in prison who was convinced the CIA were listening in on him. His friend had been given a 7 month stretch for boarding a bus, snatching a mobile out of a woman's hand, and then after first smashing the mobile to bits, fighting with other passengers and the bus driver. It was possible to sympathise with this 'theft' of a mobile, for this act of paranoid critical activity had nothing to do with making money. A mental hospital was by far the more appropriate place where, if lucky, he could at least rest. But from now on our new found lapsed-engineer friend would be looking out for the Dingy Skipper on every abandoned spoil heap he visited.

Of all mental disorders there is today none more ubiquitous than depression. It is a growing affliction seemingly hell-bent on becoming a universal malady, the mental equivalent of the common cold. I recall some years back reading a book on botany that mentioned how a particular botanist was prevented from completing important work on account of a recurrent manic-depressive cycle. I mentioned this to a friend - the same who had come up with the title 'Dialectical Butterflies' for this website - how such details were becoming worthy of mention. 'And not before time' he replied.

'Nature Cure' by Richard Mabey is an account of a depressive episode in his life and his subsequent recovery from it in nature's arms. Yet there's no escaping the fact it is a 'nature' reeking of wealth. Nowhere in his book do we meet up with the forlorn souls who are in the habit of frequenting nature reserves, heathlands and wastes where traditionally idiots get the drop on royalty and being without money is no stigma, unless of course you are tempted into a hut run by the RSPB. At one point Mabey was so bad that he admitted himself into the same asylum near Peterborough the great John Clare had passed the majority of his later life. The penniless Clare was sectioned, Mabey went of his own accord paying for the privilege, which would not have come cheap. Rejected by a farmer's daughter because of his lowly labouring origins and then eventually made homeless by the enclosing of common land, Clare gave a new grounding to the romantic treatment of madness and depression. He was driven mad - and nature with him - by social forces and the loss of nature that he felt so deeply, was also an act of the expropriation of his livelihood down to his childhood memories. Though much transformed, this melancholy dialectic of man and nature is essentially our own.

This is not to minimize the pain of depression but it is obvious that the sad people we have met and cause tears to prick at the mere thought of them, have a different tale of woe to tell than that of 'Nature Cure', one of broken relationships, of lives blighted by poverty and unhappiness with not the slightest prospect of ever finding a job.

Like the person we met in Strumpshaw Fen, Norfolk one day. His torn coat, frayed trousers, shabby shoes and spectacles held together by elastoplast, told its own story. He was from Nottingham and his weather beaten face meant his life was passed in the wild. He was carrying an old tripod on which was mounted a very battered, second hand birdscope, the very inferiority of his equipment contrasting with the very latest in camera and optical technology competitively hung around the necks of a number of others, for the fen is managed by those fat cats of nature conservation, the RSPB. He did not fit in and we instantly warmed to him as he did to us. Whenever he sighted anything of interest he made brief notes in a fat, soiled notebook. How we would have loved to dip in that notebook. Did it contain more than just field observations, perhaps cryptic records of his mental states, or equally brief accounts of his conversation with others, which only he could understand? Where did it begin and where did it end? Did it even have a beginning or end? Were such notebooks the start of a real dialectics of nature, a taking up where Clare left off, though minus the rhymes, in which madness, nature and property relations, which the seizure of common lands was only a part of, were raised? We discussed train times journeys and travel concessions, one that would have enabled him to get to and fro on the same day from Nottingham to Ashstead on the North Downs where, with any luck, he would see the Purple Emperor. In the meantime we would break off to look at a Marsh Harrier or Swallowtail or fall silent to listen to Ceti's Warbler in between discussing the pros and cons of introductions, which he was unsure about. For this guy was learned and with a past he preferred to forget about and by becoming totally absorbed in nature able to achieve, in the best sense of the term, forgetfulness of self.

Fragments of conservations that were going somewhere and other half forgotten recollections slowly worm their way up. Like meeting an ex-soldier dressed in battle fatigues, his army issue tent draped over a branch in a corner of Raw Nook, a former railway siding on the line between Bradford and Halifax. He had made himself an unofficial warden of this now rich wild life habitat. By expressing a need to draw closer to, and bivouac if only for one night, in the heart of nature he clearly wished to do more than just conserve nature. Nature was a bolthole in more ways than one for it allowed him to escape from his housing situation on the Woodside Estate where his harmless eccentricity had attracted, and was bound to attract, the attention of conformist local bullies (i.e. not youths) who never gave him a moment's peace. The fact that he was ex-army - and therefore not a danger - would only have increased their cowardly determination to hunt him down. He had come upon me unawares, materialising out of the undergrowth, and causing me to jump. His army uniform of green and brown and likewise his tent were the green and brown of nature's primary means of camouflage Used by standing armies worldwide for aggressive and defensive purposes, this camouflage had been put to other uses permitting him to close in on shy birds and take impressive photos. It also allowed him to disappear into the background and find the faceless anonymity he craved.

Sometimes addresses and e-mails are exchanged on parting and the polite au revoir, 'be seeing you around', turns out to be true.

Once upon a time we chanced on a school teacher in her thirties in Strumpshaw Fen. A year later we just happened to meet her in the same location. We straightaway asked her if she had managed to get up to Garton Loch to see the Ospreys. Her blushes were poignant and lovely and, starting to feel more confident, spoke of her hatred of teaching and how like a prison school had become and the little she actually felt for her pupils. She couldn't wait for Friday afternoon when she would make a dash for her car and race through the countryside like a mad woman, ignoring all the rules of road safety, just to get a glimpse, for instance, of the Stone Curlews before it grew too dark. Still living at home with her parents and sleeping in the little bedroom she had been brought up in, nature was her salvation, her release, her reason for living, the benchmark from which to judge the rest of society, and the bedrock of her frankness when it came to speaking her mind about school. For this woman cared and did not have to lie and spout nonsense in front of nature like she was required to do in the classroom.

On brownfield sites especially those, which by definition implies a significant amount of industrial dereliction, other kinds of fruitful encounters are possible, especially if the industry is still just to say ticking over. These places attract industrial historians - and in the case of Healey Mills Marshalling yards in Horbury, West Yorks and where the Grayling was discovered in 2003 - railway enthusiasts in their droves. Sometimes they position themselves at the perimeter and stare through binoculars and many is the time we have asked them what bird were they observing. They, in turn, immediately assume we are there for a final examination of the elderly rolling stock that has been shunted into this industrial grave yards prior to being interred by the yard's undertakers. From talking at cross-purposes initially, a strange cross-fertilization could ensue. On being told of the yards unexamined, but already astonishing insect life, and the need, at all costs, to preserve it, appreciation of this living museum turned to wide eyed wonderment. One often feels like accompanying these train buffs if only to learn the correct names what to us, is little more than a heap of scrap metal but which is essential if we are to bring out a reality that is sometimes beyond belief, like when the Grayling lands on an old hand-operated railway points lever.

It also brings back memories of our childhood in the 1950s when one day we would be out chasing butterflies, the next sitting at the end of Doncaster or York railway station with another identification guide in our hand: Allen's 1/- guide to the steam trains of the LNER. And how in the company of other kids and, in the genuine spirit of youth, game for anything, we would sneak into the railway sidings and poke our heads around the corner of Doncaster engine sheds or the Roundhouse in York sidings. We knew it was not really permitted but a blind eye was turned more often than not. How I wish I could today trespass with the same ease onto the sprawling and increasingly derelict railway sidings of Doncaster, York, Leeds and elsewhere to see what wonders await amid the decaying rolling stock, now too eaten away and fallen to bits to ever move. Nationalization is not the same as socialization but even so the illusion that nationalised industry was owned by the public meant access was far less restricted even to us kids. Some must have been injured for hoards would invade sidings and main railway stations on a Saturday but still the practise was tolerated. Nor were we ever really warned of the dangers of playing on railway lines not on account of parental irresponsibility but because we were freer to make up our own minds and equally free to shoot the rapids and drown in the river Calder if the raft made from oil drums and odd bits of wood nailed and lashed together had capsized.

On the 23 July 2005 I was detained for a short while in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards and threatened with arrest. Prior to this for some three weeks in the late summer of 2004 I became quite depressed and took to my bed. A dismissive letter from a stuck-up biodiversity official on Rotherham Council saying he had not seen the Dingy Skipper on the site of the former Orgreave coking plant had been the trigger. Nor according to him had there been any other recordings even though we'd seen them there in relative abundance. And his word was law so let the destruction roll-on, this time with the approval of the local biodiversity group. It was enough to make anyone give up the ghost. Having found the Grayling colony in Healey Mills the saving of it has become a deeply personal matter to the both of us. As I was being escorted out the yards perhaps 10 or more Grayling rose in front of me. I excitedly pointed them out to my captors: 'look, look' I said 'the Grayling'. I forget the exact reply but the intention was to crush all life out of the Grayling and me: there were plans afoot to develop the yards in the next eight years and if I was ever to go anywhere near the yards again I would be arrested on sight. Just the thought of pulling the wings of the Grayling and every other butterfly and insect in the yards excited their malice like they had regressed to being five year olds, bloodying a stone with the bashed-up bodies of flies and beetles. It was this that I found the most wounding. How I wish I'd had the foresight to keep my camcorder on and I know now never to turn it off during confrontations like these. For it gives an idea of the unspeakable readiness of people, invariably that little bit higher up the social scale and in some minor managerial position, to quite happily consent to the destruction of every living thing, not just as onlookers but as active participants. I had been in the yards during weekdays and the May Gurney track maintenance workers had paid no attention to me, which had given me a false sense of security.

As I walked up Healey Rd, Ossett and then on past my old school, the road rose up to meet me and my eyes were blurred with anger for I couldn't see straight. The last time I had done this walk was over 50 years ago. I mentally rehearsed a gallows speech as I was been led of to the cells of how it was a far, far better thing to save the Grayling than my own life! Back in Bradford the mock-heroic, self-dramatisation gave way to more considered reflections. Why hadn't my captors taken me out by the fishpond when I specifically asked to be led through the grounds of the angling club that rent the land from EWS, the yards owners? Were they afraid the anglers would come to my rescue and point a few things out, like the yard's ambiguous legal status? With a long tradition of poaching from country landowners behind them, anglers make excellent backroom lawyers, for the seizing of fishing rights had been a big part of enclosure. (No account of Thomas Bewick, the greatest bird and wild life illustrator this country has known, would be complete without mentioning his sympathy for poachers and his unswerving loyalty to radical causes up to his dying day in the late 18th century). I had pointed out that public rights of way ran through the yards and were clearly indicated on old maps. Later I was to find out the land the Yards had been built on had been requisitioned by the War Department during World War I when a de facto nationalisation of industry had prevailed. It was essential the coal and iron ore be quickly moved to the furnaces to aid the war effort and the area between Horbury and Huddersfield and around Dewsbury was crammed with pits, the last ones at Emley Moor and Caphouse closing after the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985. (Incidentally both sites may well have contained colonies of Dingy Skippers. Emley Moor is now a bleak modern industrial estate with bleak nature-furnishings and Caphouse the site of the National Mining Museum. Though we did not find any trefoil on the latter site there was plenty in the lanes round about, which suggests it grew on the former soil heap prior to it being made into, of all things, a nature trail!) But before 1914, the land the Yards now occupy was under water for some of the year, for it was swamp land, part of the wide Calder flood plain and possibly it was on this very spot a singleton Swallowtail, once on show in the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield, was seemingly caught in the 1840s. Swamplands, or to give them their more fashionable title, wetlands, belonged to everyone, even more so than tilled or grazed common land where a system of primogeniture based on custom was in operation. Enclosure of common lands in each case required a separate act of parliament, which plainly did not happen when the wetlands on which the Yards are now situated were first seized. It was an illegal act, that for reasons of state ignored parliamentary procedure and if push came to shove EWS could find themselves in a very awkward position. Even if EWS are unaware of the doubtful legal grounds it is standing on overall (as unstable as the land it was built on, evident from the widespread subsidence), the brutal over re-action of local managers suggests they are bent on preventing access by blocking off both ends to what they admit is a legal right of way through the yards along the elevated pathway that runs from Horbury Bridge to Healey Mills.

A protracted legal campaign could bring EWS to its knees or at least to the negotiating table for, as I learnt from one train buff, EWS is deeply in the red. Nonetheless, if past experiences are anything to go by, the heart would go out of the Yards if they became an official nature reserve. The fact that it is an underemployed working yard and functioning industrial museum in which the exhibits quickly end up as scrap metal, makes it a constantly changing environment all the more magical because nothing in it is simulated. It is for real. Everyday one freight train pulls out the yards around three in the afternoon. It grinds slowly forward along the railway lines that have buckled under the weight of the big diesel locos and lack of a proper foundation, a legacy of the haste at which ballast was thrown over the bog at the outbreak of the First World War nearly 100 years ago. The train does not dare to pick up speed until it joins the mainline to Dewsbury otherwise it would almost certainly be derailed. Out of sight we watch the train pull past us. It is long and drawn out and the effect can be mesmeric close to. After that the yards proper fall silent but we never feel safe until we have seen the May Gurney van depart. The yards are then ours but we now know not to expose ourselves to the view of passing passenger trains. We keep an eye on the same signal box we did when we were young kids in short trousers and dive for cover if on the off-chance we should see anyone, though we are by now pensionable hooligans.

And now imagine (it's easy if you try) a tannalised wooden fence running down the centre of the yards: to one side there is a functioning marshalling yard with its splendid array of old diesel locomotives, burnt out carriages, aged rolling stock, thrown away oil cans, rusting bolts, rubber pads, rotting sleepers, concrete pads and what not. On the other there is a large area of exposed hard core from which the rusting railway lines and all pieces of jagged metal have been removed, everything in short likely to remind us this was once a railway siding. Sure the Grayling is there and doing very well but nothing is going to stop me or you from looking wistfully at the other side of the tracks as a Grayling flies over the fence and weaves in and out of the silent, drawn up locomotives and rolling stock. I know what I would do: I would ignore the signposts telling me this is the limit of the nature reserve and not to trespass on the railway sidings and be over that fence like a shot. For we cannot confine nature to the nature reserve and if we continue to believe we can safely section it to places of asylum where it will be looked after, we ourselves will eventually go mad and die off.

What angered me most about my temporary detention in the Yards was the humiliating manner I was infantilised by this wretched nobody of a yard manager (or so he said) who was only obeying orders. His first words to me, so loud they echoed around the deserted yards, were 'do you know you are trespassing on private property' not that I was in danger of been run over, though it was quite obvious the only way these crooked twisting railway lines could accommodate rolling stock is if it was shunted up the track inch by inch. There was no reasonable answer to such a question: at 61 I was a naughty boy all over again. It would have made not one scrap of difference either if I had asked why there was no notice warning people not to trespass at the entrance to the yards on the path that leads from Horbury Bridge. And it would merely have been academic to this apology for a human being, used to giving and taking orders rather than questioning them, had I pointed out that when I was a schoolboy how come no one, including the police or rail workers, had ever once said to us kids 'do you know you are trespassing on private property''. Rather we were ushered off railway precincts and warned not to come back for our own good, which of course we still roundly resented. This yard manager's first words to me had emphasised the retreat of the public domain and the fetishism of private property to such a pitch it was now hallowed ground. By rights I should have instantly sunk to my knees. For it reflected the wholesale privatisation of life where even the public realm is being swallowed by the private as we are forced into a cell like existence(i.e. home life) somewhere between a monks cloister and a prison landing.

Private debt good public bad and the raving insistence on private property before all else.

Earlier on that day the first of August 2005 waiting for the cloud to clear I had taken refuge in 'the heather triangle', the site of the former Ossett sewerage works where in the space of 50 years since its closure there has been a rapid succession from sphagnum moss, to clumps of soft rush and other grasses that root on boggy ground, to broom, birch and sallow and finally to heather and trefoil and a generous covering of early marsh orchids. Whenever a passenger train travelling from Wakefield to Dewsbury had passed I would slide down deeper into the heather to avoid being noticed. Though in a good year the Grayling normally flies in the triangle I saw none in 2005 so, to pass the time, I had glanced through a newspaper article entitled 'Pester power: Trouble in Store' about kids as consumers by Madeleine Bunting. Still smarting, that evening I wrote the following entry in my 'nature' diary: 'these born to buy kids (not born to live kids) by the age of 10 would frequently know 300 brand names and more. Would that they knew 300 species! M. Bunting is one of those journalists who sees something but never able to grasp a subject with all the radicalism it demands. Sitting here alone I could only think what kind of a future is there for humanity when today's children are like they are and that it is increasingly being left to much older people to fight for the right of nature to exist'.

Two hours later I couldn't have been more infantilised by authority for if I had been an ultimate consumer, say a teenage biker rigged out in all the latest gear caught crashing through the Yards on a Harley Davidson (which does happen), the flunkeys who apprehended me would have been far more inclined to render homage to consumer brands and have treated that biker with far more understanding and esteem than was to be my lot. On the scale that calibrates infantilism there was none lower than I. Moreover it seemed to reflect the growing infantilization of nature. In this increasingly actual, comic book, pop up world of nature, trees in public spaces, are pruned to become lollipop trees resembling the first naive attempts of tiny tots to represent trees. Rabbits likewise have taken to living in cottages because their burrows have been filled in as they are a bio-hazard and a danger to passers-by who would sue a fly for buzzing too loudly if they could get it to appear in court. Recalling the sheer obtuseness we encountered over the past year my lip quivers with fury. The high profile given to all things green belies the hostility one meets with on the ground. Much of this has to do with how we are inducted into nature by the media and especially TV and thereby persuaded of its fullness, for paradoxically nature as representation is closer and nature as reality further away than it ever was two hundred years ago, The immensely popular 'Spring Watch' is unmistakably live and in comparison to which my spring watch is as denuded as the bare trees. Though trumpeted as a reply to Reality TV, like the latter it blurs our perception of what exists. Recently a well off young couple tried to get a rookery destroyed that had been mentioned in the Doomsday Book on the grounds that the rook parliament was disturbing their peace and privacy! In fact this says it all, for it is all about the loss and stamping out of whatever communication is left, even amongst birds! I rather think this couple could have paid lip service to green issues but come the crunch, the reality of nature was just too much and couldn't be switched off like TV. By the same token if we wish to conserve nature all we have to do is click on the box that says 'do you want to save nature' and it will be.

It is not even a matter that nature is alright in its place, for today nature itself is not right unless its sting is drawn and designed by a health and safety executive mindful of litigation. The result is to take the risk out of nature, to render it innocuous and teach it manners at the very moment it is about to give humanity a lesson it may never recover from, never mind ever forget. This is why I made a plea earlier on to keep the Yards as they are though knowing full well this is not possible in the society we live in. Should the Grayling and other butterflies like the Brown Argus and Dingy Skipper, also present in the Yards, be rescued they would be made to drag out their lives in a sanitised habitat protected from the only disasters that really matter, like laddering a pair of tights or getting chewing gum stuck to the soles of one's shoes. No one will then even begin to guess at the pleasure, at times bordering on ecstasy, I felt that day I discovered the Grayling in the Yards - how it was like walking on air when I saw them flying amid the toxic industrial detritus and stationary locomotives, flushing them up wherever I went until quite late in the evening.

The Yards are a perfect example of what have come to be called a brownfield site. There has been along standing prejudice that nature cannot possibly thrive on such sites. Amongst the New Naturalist series outstanding for their combination of text that does not talk down and a preference for brilliant informative photography - Markham, Beaufoy, Hoskins and even Julian Huxley - over illustration (as though one of the aims of the Russian Constructivists that the reactionary role of the artist had to be replaced by the revolutionary one of the technician had been taken on board in a typically British absence of mind that only reinforced the overall cultural conservatism) there is a volume which includes a chapter on the magnesian limestone strip that extends from north of Nottingham and peters out on the cliffs of Cullercoats Bay just north of Newcastle. I underlined the following comment on account of its ready acknowledgement of prejudice.

Wanting to know more, I found out we had been raised on the magnesian limestone strip just north of Darlington and running directly beneath Heighington Station where Stephenson's Locomotion No 1 had been placed on the level crossing of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. For a mile and a half to either side the countryside was astonishingly rich in wild life particularly in the railway sidings and on the railway embankments leading up to, and just beyond, Codlings Bridge. Trains and butterflies went together and many is the time we would be tearing up and down these embankments chasing a Dark Green Fritillary when a steam train thundered by pulling thirty or more wagons filled with coal from the Durham coalfield. Never once were we told to stop by the railway authorities or ever warned to be careful by the platelayers who plied the line, swinging their long hammers with unerring skill to bang in the wooden chocs that had fallen out the joints holding the rail in place.

The passion that we feel for Healey Mills Marshalling Yards is an attempt to relive, as the French surrealists exhorted some of the best moments of our childhood and youth in a present that has become much more property conscious and paranoid. We also see it as a right to the reclaiming of childhood where there was not the same division between nature, industry and human habitation.

So it is already more than mere sentiment and about recognition of the facts. No one has done more to put the issue of brownfield sites on the map than Oliver Gilbert. Though a specialist in lichens from his chair in Sheffield University he became aware of the fig trees by the banks of the Don writing two influential books 'Habitat Creation and Repair' and 'The Ecology of Urban Habitats'. These fig trees are still there (as is the unrecorded one by the muck beck by Shipley Station, Bradford) but the steel furnaces against which they were photographed for Mabey's 'Flora Britannica' have gone forever. Recently we have travelled the road that leads from the M1 to Sheffield city centre many times It is a landscape of industrial devastation a still overpowering reminder of Sheffield's former industrial might now grown silent and like a bomb site in places overgrown with buddleia and sparse grasses - just perfect for the 'urban' Grayling! It has to be our favourite street in the entire world.

But where the devastation ends landscaping begins and, with a sinking feeling, one soon notices the carefully tended, very boring, flowerbeds on Sheffield's roundabouts bearing the Vertase logo, a firm specialising in the reclamation of toxic land. Gilbert Oliver had ended up teaching landscape architects and no doubt he tried to drill into them a need to respect and encourage the overlooked biodiversity of these sites. There is very little evidence that he succeeded and we had to ask ourselves has there ever been an instance latterly where a landscape architect has improved the visual appearance of reclaimed land never mind showed proper care for whatever wild life was there in the first place? To the last man and woman they are nature sculpting deadbeats we can well do without, put to work whenever a local council has a mind to improve the appearance of a wasteland that left to itself is showing lots of promise or when industrial new build or a housing estate needs to be set off by a sham of greenery.

Oliver Gilbert may not have objected to brownfield sites being renamed urban commons because the changed definition implies they were here to stay. No such luck, as the on going destruction with even worse to come, of former pit spoil heaps of South and West Yorks, shows. Nowhere is safe for long and everyone who seeks to give a nature a hand by planting some tender shoots of say trefoil must know the bitter disappointment when the following year they have been dug up and destroyed in the name of development. It happens with a frequency that rules out chance mishap.

And yet we are likely in the long run (40/50) years to have the last laugh. But it will be a bitter laugh and a pyrrhic victory one not worth the having because of the cost involved. For anyone with half a mind who takes time out to reflect will realise the present day civilization is doomed, doomed by its all consuming need for energy and raw material driven by the power of money and capital.

We are almost on the brink of a historic turning point at least the equal of the Neolithic revolution of 8 to 10,000 years ago. Its immanence has yet to sink in and though the numbers that would unhesitatingly agree are still a trickle in this overheated world trickles can become torrents within minutes.

It is not just consumer capitalism that is a stake but a whole way of life based on industrial capitalism, which in the not too distant future will be judged the most gigantic act of hubris in the entire 3 million years of Homo erectus. We are suffering, far more than enjoying, the last days of consumer capitalism where no thought is given for the morrow, where last week's must have is not this weeks, where the day - and only for the day - of instant fashion in clothing and electronic gadgetry in particular draws ever closer.

For like minded people the question that is forever on their lips is when will the realization sink in there is no turning back and that humanity has sleep walked into the most gigantic catastrophe from which recovery becomes more impossible with each day that passes. Its immanence is such that one cannot help but wonder how people will react when they wake up from a deep sleep to a nightmare world. Struck dumb with horror are words that come to mind. And dumb animals, frightened for their lives and at their wits end, are easily stampeded and easily herded once exhausted.

Right now the only hope I have left is that there will be, come the hour, an explosion of practical intelligence and that in the last moments people will come together and prove able to launch a final, desperate act of resistance without which the cause not only of human freedom but of life itself is lost. There are years of conditioning to be sloughed off, years and years of systematic cretinisation with each generation more dumb than the last. And there is so much relearning to be done, so many footsteps to be retraced in so little time, if there is to be any hope at all. The accumulated contradictions today are so immense and of such incommensurable proportions the mind reels before such enormity and critique lies dying unable to raise an arm in protest and offer hope. To live without hope is an impossibility and just about the worst thought that can occur to anyone is that the hope of utopia has gone for good.

And yet coming through apocalyptic end-of-oil scenarios in particular (though not those of global warming) is the unmistakeable influence of utopian schemes that bring to mind Sir Thomas More, Charles Fourier, William Morris and others. The authors of these latter-day scenarios whether former economists or retired geologists have no left wing axe to grind. The logic of events has forced these conclusions upon them rather than they forcing themselves on events. And so roads will become orchards, back alleys, gardens, parking lots, fields and motorways the new strip cultivation of the agri-nature future. Craft production will return, as will draught animals and a mode of transport far more dependant on animals. The country will take over the towns and cities and whatever is left of manufacturing industry will be of a local nature and globalisation in 50 years time a dim memory.

There is a neat inevitability to these schemas, the heir actually of the crudest economic determinism arising from a simplistic reading of Marx ('Capitalism like an iron law of nature begets its own negation') as though the brightest of daybreaks is possible on the last second to midnight.

There will be a return to an agri-nature in place of industrialised agriculture. Again there is no margin of choice. But it will be a parody of a genuinely transformed relationship between man and nature, of that higher relationship that has long been dreamt of. It will be the cruel awakening from past utopias their ultimate disabuse, as it will be for the utopian hopes of conservationists that this sustainable agriculture will be nature friendly. Frightening though it is to admit it how long will it be before mass starvation becomes a fact of life not just in Africa but everywhere? 'Give me the bread motherfucker' will mean just that. Quite simply with the energy crises agricultural yields will fall with an accelerating rate despite the fact there are limits to agricultural yields from the application of industrial fertilizers. And rather than food for free, food prices will rocket. Whatever is left of nature will be left to look after itself, such will be the pressure to feed the world's population. Against all the odds it may thrive surprisingly well. However don't for one moment be seduced by the idea that the 'greening' of the cities will be a urban commons writ large. It will be a place of nightmares and not dreams a caricature of Clare's common land where nature was not there, as it is today, but here, there and everywhere.

I see in the crumbling Healey Mills Marshalling Yards a vision of industry's future. Whatever manufacturing capacity is retained it is bound to be dramatically different from what it is today. A great deal of dismantling will need to be done and America, Europe, Japan and China will resemble a vast junk yard of spare parts awaiting to be put to new uses, a real scrap heap challenge for history's terminally dispossessed and not for the delectation of TV audiences. Again only the deaf could fail to hear in this an echo of the appropriation of capitalist industry by the workers and its reorientation toward social ends, which required the closing down of most of it. Whatever role consciousness would have played in all this, - and this reorientation of production would have entailed the widest ranging public debate in all history, truly the stuff of dreams and not to be missed - what lies in store for most industry is its auto-destruction with the workers performing little or no part in it, at least initially. Taken out of their hands the workers historic destiny would have been, once again, done for them, expropriated this time more by the tools of their trades than by the vanguard parties they naively put their trust in. When consciousness arrives too late upon the scene the most dangerous events are given free reign to do their worst behind the backs of people.

On the day after I was detained in the Yards I was out filming the Purple Hairstreak in Odsal Woods when a man approached me in his 70s who asked me what I was doing. My head still whirling at the thought that precious habitat might shortly be destroyed by a brutal act of vandalism with not a voice raised in protest, I was immediately on the defensive fully expecting to be ordered off this right of way because it belonged to South Bradford golf club. Instead he showed an interest and glad to have a sympathetic ear for once, poured out my tale of woe. Having lived in Bradford all his life he knew of the Yards and was intrigued to learn they harboured such an amazing array of species. However the fact that butterflies were doing so well in this working industrial environment did not surprise him because his memory stretched back to war time Bradford when every piece of available land, including railway embankments, were covered in allotments. More than anything else it was the butterflies he remembered, more than he had ever seen before or since in Bradford. I asked him if they were 'Cabbage Whites' attracted by the rows of brassicae but he assured me there were many other 'colourful' ones, presumably Small Tortoiseshells and maybe Red Admirals. He delighted in the memory of such profusion for we never remotely see the likes of it today.

These allotments were part of the 'dig for victory' campaign, in fact a greening of urban spaces on a scale almost impossible to imagine in post war - or even pre-war - Britain. The onset of the first oil crises in the 1970s had revived memories of this event or, more precisely, images of this event, with rock posters cashing in on the act and photographs of a horse and cart been drawn through a square in Brussels, headquarters of the EEC, and therefore invested with additional symbolic weight. Cars even more that after 'the night of the barricades' in May 1968 began to look finite creations though for very different reasons. The car survived the trashing of May 1968 as it did the oil crises' of the seventies and early eighties. In fact as an object of consumption it grew and grew in number and importance becoming bigger, flashier, more stretched, more energy-intensive, more necessary, more of a machine for spending yet more time in, a life in itself and here for good - only then to start choking on what it was guzzling. It never ceases to amaze me how the cars eventual demise, despite having yet to fully sink in, resumes through an altogether different route all but forgotten radical projects as though there is no escaping, in one form or another, the historical denouement sketched out over 40 years ago. I had thought the chief danger to the Yards came from housing overspill from Horbury Green, an expensive looking, legoland fold with an interior courtyard (for cars not people) but this proved not to be the case. It would have meant building a road bridge over a main railway line and that would be enormously expensive. Ironically it is the energy crises that may spur the Yards transformation from a near derelict siding into a modern facility once the cost of road transport begins to dramatically outweigh that of rail transport.

In a front page article, which attracted considerable attention in The Independent, James Lovelock, warned that it may well be too late now to do anything to halt global warming. The 'siege economy' (though these are not his words) he now regards as inevitable resembles that of wartime dig-for-victory though another name is equally applicable; that of 'war communism'. Lovelock is under no illusions either about green alternatives to fossil fuels like bio fuels: there simply will not be sufficient agricultural land to grow such fancy items on. Though he does not expressly say so (though that is what's implied), climate change and the looming energy crises will effectively bury the car industry. I had half expected the article to endorse nuclear power but by now Lovelock probably realises nuclear new build in Britain will not make one jot of difference overall and that the nuclearization of the world is just a scientific phantasm and can never become fact, at least in its fissionable form.

There is a new tone of desperation in the article, the expression of a mind on the brink matching that of the earth. Lovelock has finally lost his faith in the capacity of science to effectively respond to a challenge on this scale: there is no wonder of science in the offing powerful enough to defeat this monster. The normally optimistic boffin, secure in the knowledge science will eventually come up with an answer, has become unrecognisable both to us and to himself. Adrift in uncharted waters like so many others from the science monkey house, there is a chance, though a very remote one, he will finally begin to make anti-capitalist sense. Gone are the barmy schemes for umbrellas in space the size of the moon to deflect the suns rays or flippant gestures we are not sure if we are meant to take seriously or in fun - like his readiness to welcome a lead case of spent uranium fuel into his kitchen because the heat generated by radioactive decay would save on his electricity bills!

Lovelock had also warmed to the deserted concrete sarcophagus that is now Chernobyl. In the first flush of enthusiasm for nuclear power he had outrageously suggested that the original inhabitants of Chernobyl return, not because it was safe to do so, but because it was becoming an eco-tourist destination: if plants and animals were thriving there why shouldn't human beings and what matters if genes mutate, cancer abounds and lives are cut short, we are all going to die anyway, the only difference is we are the only species to know that. Behind the mask of stoic indifference he had a point to prove: if the price for maintaining the equilibrium of gaia was nuclear contamination, even world-wide nuclear contamination, then it was a price worth paying. For certain he did not see in Chernobyl, as it now is, a vision of the future (though a post- human one that oddly almost doubles as post-revolutionary one) for he had spent his life ignoring the fact there was an alternative to present day society. The gaia hypothesis had appeared in the early 70s at a time of revolutionary ebb that would eventually turn into the most sustained period of reaction in all history. By an irony of history eventually a horrible mockery of this revolutionary alternative will almost certainly impose itself brutally.

The nearby town of Pripyat was constructed in the 1970s to house 48,000 people a typical, soviet style, concrete jungle (now actual jungle) of communal living, blocks sports stadia, community centres and so on. It could be Livingstone, it could be Roehampton, it could be Dunkirk, it could be Rotterdam, in fact anywhere in Britain and Europe. In the silent town square poplar trees sprout through the concrete and the football pitch has become a small forest. Herds of rare wild horses roam the streets, as do foxes, wolves and wild boar. For the first time the place looks fit for human habitation - and, with a few essential alterations, it is, if it weren't for the radiation. Nature left to itself has renovated these loveless blocks of concrete making them more appealing then any design makeover to date and in a far shorter space of time than it took the Healey Mills Marshalling Yards to undergo a similar transformation. And there is much that is enticing about Pripyat and not only to the herds of rare species of wild horses, the foxes, wolves and wild boar but something that is now humanly desirable about it, and fit for habitation for the first time. But Lovelock's attraction is essentially different to ours: rather than see gaia upset he would prefer to see the place inhabited once more and if the price for that is to live in a radioactive world well it's a price worth paying. That nature left to itself has carried out a task of reconstruction on these loveless blocks of concrete far more appealing then any makeover to date is not what he means. Lovelock's vision of a self-regulating planet is a natural process in which homo sapiens is part of that process but not a dominant part. Rather than use such finally nonsensical terms as positive feedback it would make more sense to substitute consumer capitalism. That would begin to make for a proper debate one that could appeal to the mass of the people because it would put the destiny of the planet firmly in their hands. It is now obvious the equilibrium has been upset and the full import of Lovelock's theoretical anti-humanism becomes apparent shifting toward a perverse rationalisation of what could well have been an initial killer instinct.
There is a letter of Shelley's written to Maria Gisborne. It is a most unusual letter because it is expressed in metrical form and could be called a poem. However it is a letter and as always with Shelley at his best, in his eagerness to find what lies on the other side, pushes hard at the formal limits of poetry. There was not his like anywhere else in the world at that time or anyone able to fully appreciate his radicalism, including Shelley, for he often leapt outside himself and far into the future.

The letter is not just formally innovative, an anticipation of the decline in literary form that was to mark the rest of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th century, it is also a statement about the formal possibilities of industry as though the first major uprising in history by the industrial working class at Peterloo needed to be rounded-off by a fundamental refashioning of science and industry. For Shelley the potential is limitless, the task protean. It begins with the hammering of swords into ploughshares but beyond that who can say. Shelley is a trifle bewildered by the objects of industry he finds at hand in an engineer's study. They are mysterious objects but their very indefiniteness is a powerful stimulant to the imagination, an imagination that henceforth would be in the round and not confined to a piece of paper. In their protean presence the traditional Shelley i.e. the poet Shelley is outclassed - and knows it: poetry, that archaic lumber-room and museum of the imagination, has had its day.

Unable to suppress a childish impulse he makes a paper boat and floats it across a bowl of mercury for the industrial revolution is not just a sign of the maturing of a universal humanity but also has the potential to realise childhood dreams. The bowl is of walnut, the liquid in it mercury. The naturalist Shelley is effortlessly able to name the wood and he must have been familiar with mercury's notoriously toxic properties and its mind-altering reputation.

The toxicity of industry was in Shelley's day a fraction of what it is today. Yet never the less we are at a comparable protean turn but an end rather than a beginning which would continue well after Shelley's death and found its most advanced expression for a few brief years in Russian Constructivism both socially and technically. The late 1960s and early 70s were the last occasion a creative renewal of industry was on the cards stretching from the sabotage of assembly lines, industrial detournement and even industrial reconstruction naively expressed in the alternative Lucas aerospace plan was on the cards.

There is scarcely even a glimmer of such constructive insurgency today. And yet at the same time industrial capitalism is being undermined in a way its customary gravediggers had never anticipated but which the archly conservative Ruskin had foreseen. In the meantime we can only wait and wonder when will the truth of these dire warnings sink in, for with each day that passes the planet drifts out of our orbit and beyond our saving.

We are approaching a cross roads from which there is no turning back a reminder that Marx had written in the 18th Brumaire 'at long last to create a situation from which no turning back is possible'. However the emphasis - an emphasis that makes all the difference, is on create: what we are facing is a situation that will have been largely decided for us, one we did not make and is not of our choosing.

Stuart Wise. January 2006
(with critical omissions and additions by David Wise)

Preamble concerning E.B. Ford

After completing several books and papers on hereditary, genetics and eugenics (for it was all the rage) and two enduring ones on butterflies and moths E B Ford, (a.k.a. Henry) conscious of his growing reputation, would ostentatiously carry with him into the senior commons rooms in Oxford a thick binder labelled genetics. Everyone was anxious to see the great man's scribbles and on his death the binder was eagerly opened and to every ones astonishment it contained---nothing.

However stuffed inside the blank pages under the title 'A Memorable Fancy' were the following notes. Perhaps they were for a book he intended to write but like every other naturalist never dared even contemplate doing. Had he done so it would have been dismissed as philosophy and not natural science. And this bare outline does sound like a lot of hot air but we feel the florid language has a basis in fact if turned right side up and made more concrete.

Hegel's chapter on the Absolute Idea gives us a final comprehensive demonstration of dialectical method. Here it is presented as the objective process of being, which preserves itself only through different modes of the 'negation of the negation'. It is this dynamic that eventually moves the absolute idea and makes the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind.

However it is dialectical thought and thus contains its negation; it is not a harmonious and stable form but a process of unification of opposites. It is not complete except in its otherness, as object.

The absolute idea is the subject in its final form, thought. Its otherness and negation is the object, being. The absolute ides now has to be interpreted as objective being. However being is a different being from what began Hegel's Logic. For being now is a concrete totality wherein all particular forms subsist as the essential distinctions and relations of one comprehensive principle. Thus comprehended, being is nature and dialectical thought passes on to the 'Philosophy of Nature'. Hegel says that 'the idea freely releases itself' into nature' or freely 'determines itself' as nature. It is this statement putting the transition forward as an actual process in reality that offers great difficulties in the understanding of Hegel's system. (I had the greatest difficulty getting J B S Haldane to understand this but what could be expected from a Stalinist with a bourgeois conception of nature as something completely external and other. It must be remembered he was a firm friend of that notable crystallographer, Bernal who, as a faithful Stalinist and follower of Lysenko, denied the existence of genes in his 'Science in History' when it was first published in 1954. In the Penguin reprints in 1965/69 these embarrassing passages were nowhere to be seen. In this work science and the appliances of science are treated as an unequivocal good, especially once stripped of their capitalist wrapping as in the Soviet Union! It is an erudite, though very banal, interpretation of science in history and one that completely disregards essential concepts as alienation, praxis, the total human being, abolition of the state, money etc and is therefore little different from western fanfares to science. The two continued to remain good friends but the brilliance of both was much diminished by their appalling social conceptions. Bernal, using his knowledge of crystals, ventured into biophysics determining the structure and composition of biological molecules by X ray diffraction, a line of research that was not only closely followed by Haldane but which eventually led to the discovery of the double helix model of DNA. However let's continue...)

Nature achieves its truth when it enters the domain of history. The subjects development frees being from its blind necessity, and nature becomes part of human history and is increasingly shaped by human history and reflects therefore historical stages and social relationships.

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Hegel and Political Economy

Hegel's Philosophy of Nature in regard to evolution (Griffin)

Evolution in the direction of greater plasticity and autonomy. The unprecedented digging up of the earth's crust with mines and canals and the insights it brings into rock strata and the fossilised remains peculiar to each strata is not specifically mentioned. Earth's "history" (a term which has to be used advisedly in this instance - but only in this instance - in Hegel's work) is chiefly concerned with establishing the point the inorganic becomes the organic and rejecting in so doing an evolutionary perspective (however he calls Lamarck "a gifted Frenchman") "Argillaceous earth and coal formations become transformed unmistakably into peat, where mineral and vegetable are no longer distinguishable; for peat has a vegetable origin and yet all the same still belongs to the mineral kingdom." In fact it is the other way on: coal is derived from peat which is soil mingled with half decayed vegetable matter which then becomes lignite or "brown coal" and, continued further, becomes coal. "Argillaceous earth" must mean clay which can be transformed into shale consisting of thin layers and then, under great pressure, into slate.

Hegel then goes on: "it is the limestone formations which, in their ultimate formations, tend towards the osseous nature of the animal (passing over) into forms of which it cannot be said whether they are mineral or animal (molluscs)". They are not yet shells which could be regarded as the remains of an extinct animal world; although that is one explanation of the petrified animal forms - "(This is the key bifurcation: Hegel, the supreme historicist denies evolution in plants and animals - even the best biologist will subsequently deny it in human terms: "the struggle for existence" is also that of the war of one against all (Darwin): a bees nest is also a piece of real estate (Gould)". "Rudimentary organic forms in the geological organism, are also found in the coal measures in which the tree form is very often distinctly recognisable." Hegel also maintains fossilised remains are to be found in the boundaries of rock strata which would be logically consistent with his view of the organic proceeding from the inorganic and which he calls "playful essays in organic formations"). But, crucially - "these organic forms - are not to be thought of as having once actually lived and then died: on the contrary they are still born". He likens the process to that of a sculptor or painter who produces "forms which represent life but are not themselves living: Nature, however, does this directly, without needing such mediation". Hegel's conclusion here is similar to that advanced in the "Philosophy of the Fine Arts" that nature is superior to the arts even, it may be said as petrified nature. Actually, a few pages previously, Hegel, unaware of the inconsistency, was less tendentious in the situating of fossil remains when probably precising a standard works on geology. Of fossil remains in mountainous regions (he cites the Pyrenees, the Andes and the Alps) he says they "are not scattered throughout the whole mass of the mountain but occur only in individual strata, often in the greatest order, as if in families etc." Though he accepts geological time running into "millions" of years (a huge underestimation but daring for then) it is essentially of little interest because "the interest is confined to what is there before us". Earth history comes to a standstill in the bourgeois epoch with Europe and especially Germany as its epicentre: "the earth spirit- awakes (from) the movement and dreaming of one sleep, and receives its consciousness in Man, and so confronts itself as a stabilised formation". Henceforth nature everlasting becomes a given, like wage labour and the commodity. The shorelines of continents and the human species are here for all eternity. The present transcends geology and biology and the battle with nature is won. Global catastrophe can only be a retrograde fantasy because natural (i.e. unconscious) history is at an end. Catastrophe then tends to become the province of representation, something one views or reads about and not experienced directly until engulfed oneself.

Hegel's standpoint precludes any further empirical investigation into geological epochs because it is wanting precisely on that account. "To explain the geological organism usually means to make the order in which these different formations succeeded one another the chief business; but this kind of explanation is only external. This mere happening, which involves only a difference of time, this temporal succession of the strata, does not explain anything at all; or rather it completely ignores the necessity of the process, the comprehension of it" We soon learn that this necessity is a pre-formationism: "Nature's formations are determinate, bounded, and enter as such into existence. "The Mosaic story of creation is still the best in its quite naive statement - Man has not developed himself out of the animal, nor the animal out of the plant; each is at a single stroke what it is". Hegel is very insistent on his anti-evolutionist stance and his need to combat these theories which stemmed in particular from Lamarck. (As mentioned Lamarck is acknowledged in his "Philosophy of Nature" more, surprisingly, as a systematist than as a proto-evolutionist. The anti-evolutionist Cuvier is also cited but not the quarrel between the later and Lamarck) Hegel describes the monkey as "a satire on man". One could almost claim the same for his funny anti-evolutionism, which is more of a satire on creationism because of his obvious awareness of opposed arguments, which are more in keeping with Hegel. That he felt extremely threatened on this account is food for thought. Perhaps he feared he could not arrest nature with the ease he could immobilise dialectical thought in the Prussian State and in that sense his fears are also ours.

And now for Findlay's comments:

"Hegel's view of nature ' is to be understood as throughout working towards an end which will ultimately carry it beyond itself. It is arguable that this immanent teleology is a better and less prejudiced foundation for empirical investigations than the half-formulated absolutisms current in natural science."

And "Hegel: a re-examination"

"But though Hegel remains within the world of common sense and science, and does not underestimate its reality, his approach to it is neither commonsensical nor scientific; he sees the facts of that world in a revolutionary manner, which is not that of any other philosopher. Hegel, as we made plain, sees things in terms of a "principle of Idealism", which is not the principle of Berkeley, nor that of Plato, nor Kant, nor any previous thinker. It is quasi-teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it. This principle ' may have certain remote, long term empirical consequences, which we cannot precisely locate or pin down". (P. 351)

For a philosopher Hegel's knowledge of nature was exceptionally detailed. Essentially a work of synthesis he was only surpassed by Aristotle who did make original contributions of his own particularly in the field of systematics which could be said to have its origin in him. Yet in spite of the empirical detail one cannot help but be irked by the philosophising which comes as an unwelcome imposition on the text, though not because of Hegel's unease with natural science as insufficiently explanatory and begging of further questions. It is just that the questions we want to put to science cannot be addressed within a philosophical framework we suspect is fantastical rather than "deep". But as regards the detail, there is so much Hegel has to be right now and again. Even blindingly so when, for example, with fortuitous prescience he judges fungi to be closer to animals than plants however erroneous his process of reasoning is: "inorganic-organic forms like lichens and fungi which one does not rightly know how to classify ' peculiar, tough substances coming near to animal life." (P298) DNA studies have shown that fungi are closer to humans than to trees though a need for a separate phyla has long been recognised from the days when Linnaeus bracketed them alongside plants.

Fungi appear almost as an aside in the concluding section of "geological nature" ' a bridge between the inorganic/organic and "plant nature" which is the subject of the next 45 pages. (Geological nature occupies only half of that and which is also grouped specifically under "organics"). Goethe's theories on plant life are much in evidence. Indeed Goethe's name crops up constantly in the "Philosophy of Nature" not only as regards plants but also in his treatment of colour (in which he sides with Goethe as against Newton) and animal morphology. Obviously Goethe esteemed him deeply as a scientist because Goethe's obviously satisfied Hegel's quest for wholeness. As he remarks "Goethe's Metamorphose der Pflanzen marks the beginning of a rational conception of the nature of plant-life, in that it has forced attention away from a concern with mere details to a recognition of the unity of life", adding "Goethe with his great insight into nature has defined the growth of plants as a metamorphosis of one and the same formation "noting that his has major botanical treatise published in 1790" has been "treated with indifference by botanists who did not know what to make of it just because it contained the exposition of the whole".

Stuart Wise (1998)

(PS. Findlay was Prof of Philosophy at Newcastle University in the late 1950s. His book Hegel a Re-examination is still regarded as one of the best there is on Hegel)

Some Thoughts on Butterflies & the ensuing collapse of all categories... From naivety to greater coherence

Some thoughts on butterfly migration

In butterfly migration there is an instinctual sense of purpose. The key to migration is to understand that it is regulated largely by RHYTHM and SEQUENCE OF EVENTS, rather than by reason and foreknowledge.

The migrating butterfly keeps to one straight path. ...they have been seen flying through railway tunnels, through the windows of houses, through an afternoon of thick fog. ...beating their wings against walls trying to fly through rather than over them.

In migration butterflies 'know no fear' .Fear is suppressed. ...they may be stroked, and lifted onto one's finger. They have been seen flying 6" above the waves in mid-Atlantic; on the Rongbuk Glacier, 18000' up Mount Everest.

Spectacle

A swarm of Monarchs in New Jersey was described as 'almost past belief. ...millions is but feebly expressive'..miles of them is no exaggeration. They covered every twig in an area about 200 yards wide and over 2 miles long. The green landscape was changed to brown'.

In 1879 Painted Ladies flew northwards over Europe in such numbers 'as to cast a shadow on the ground'''. They have been seen from aeroplanes as great spiral nebulae, or as faint coloured gasses moving amongst the Cumulus''

Merill, an American astronomer, saw millions of Monarchs come into view of his telescope, clearly illuminated by the Moon.

The entomologist Skertchley observed the beginning of a migration in the Sudan in 1869. He saw the wiry grasses among the sand trembling though there was no breath of wind. With a closer look he saw that all the grasses were thickly hung with Painted Lady chrysalises - wriggling violently in the act of emerging. In half an hour they had dried their wings -and in a SPLIT SECOND the whole desert seemed to take to the air as a brown cloud and move away to the North East.

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In 1887 swarms of Silver Y moths reached the sugar beet fields of Lincolnshire and Norfolk in such numbers that the sound of their wings was distinctly audible .''.Wind and rain once beat a huge flock of white butterflies (a snowstorm) into a lake in Upper Bavaria; later they were washed ashore in thousands, forming a white rim round the lake.
''Dead Camberwell Beauties a rare migratory species formed a purple tide at Seaton Carew, Co. Durham in Autumn 1827; they had been driven from the coast of Scandinavia by a storm.

In August 1911 Professor Oliver was visiting a small island of about 2 acres on Sutton Broad, Norfolk. As he approached he saw the whole island covered with fluttering white butterflies,all of them were caught on the sticky leaves of the Insectivorous plant, the Sundew. Each small plant had captured 4 to 7 butterflies; mostly they were still alive when Professor Oliver saw them. Several counts gave an average of about six million butterflies caught in this gigantic trap.

Habit and myth

In Australia the aborigines once depended on the seasonal mass flight of the Bogang to the caves of N S Wales as valuable food.

E B Ford in connection with mimicry and warning colouration in insects writes: 'I personally have made a habit which I recommend to other naturalists of eating specimens of each species which I study'.

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The Javanese call migrating butterflies PILGRIMS''' In December 1883 there was a very great flight which the natives took to be the souls of the thousands of people who, in August of that year, had perished in the eruption of Krakatau.

Butterfly movements in Ceylon are said to be pilgrimages to the footprint of Buddha on top of the Hill of Sama Nalahanda''. The butterflies are said to go to the peak yellow, and return white - purged of their sins.

The enigma of the Large Blue

For years entomologists were unable to rear the Large Blue. The caterpillar would feed on Wild Thyme, reach the third moult, wander aimlessly, and then die.

Purefoy happened to pull up some thyme in Cornwall and found a full grown Large Blue larvae in an ants nest. The secret was out. ...Immediately Purefoy devised an ant-hill out of a huge walnut shell which was placed on a pile of earth in a tin box. This was placed on a large platform surrounded by water to prevent the ants escaping. A Large Blue caterpillar was put near the nest. Soon a foraging ant showed great interest and began to caress the caterpillar which responded by producing a drop of sweet fluid from the back of its neck. An hour later the caterpillar hunched its back and the ant bestrode it and staggered away carrying the huge prize to its nest. Inside the guest turned carnivorous and commenced to eat the ant larvae. Purefoy, unable to restrain himself, opened the nest on Christmas Day to show his friends. The caterpillar was neatly suspended from the roof of the shell, where it pupated after the winter.

In May 1915 a male Large Blue emerged and dried its wings on top of the walnut.

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A note on the cover: Period: 1900 to 1950 (from the original magazine)

Evreinov ' for reconstruction of the audience'/ de Chirico for his diatribes against 'modern art'/ Buffet (Bernard) - for his honesty / Aragon ' for throwing Maurice Martin du Gard's typewriter out of his window /Peret ' for spitting/ Morton (Jelly Roll) ' for snooker / Eisenstein ' for the early things/ Parker (Charlie) - for dying with laughter/ Sherman ' for eluding his followers/ Trotsky ' for Literature and Revolution/ Griffith for Intolerance/ Khlebnikov ' for his soup-lakes/ Duchamp (Marcel) ' for being Villon's brother/ Feks ' for factory for the eccentric actor/ Mayakovsky ' for not 'rummaging through yesterday's petrified crap'/ The rest for HEROISM and Jonathan Swift for today.

(Note 2004:Sherman never existed. We invented him as an amazing genius seeing people could be conned by anything.)

Notes on Icteric: Why the above? A litter bin of random notes from 2005

Icteric was a 'radical' arts magazine produced in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1966 and late 1967 representing the views of a small group of people holding somewhat similar views.

It was in retrospect a confused attempt - though brave for the time - to get to grips with a hidden history; that of the negation of art which throughout the 20th century had such profound though not generally recognised, consequences especially here in the UK. At that time we were faced here in the UK with a profoundly conservative cultural establishment (if not in pop music then certainly in the high arts) and any attempted re-evaluation amounted to heresy, fit only for the flames. The reproduction of one of the yellow covers illustrated here gives an idea of the iconic figures we revered in the mid 1960s. (Icteric meant jaundice as well as a cure for jaundice - hence the use of yellow and was a name picked at random out of a dictionary in the time-honoured Dadaist tradition). The exploding volcano is that of Andre Breton, the French surrealist (who, incidentally, was deeply interested in butterflies) because at the time his wide ranging thoughts seemed to us to knit together much that had previously been separated. Lettrism was then just a name and identified merely, at least in the English speaking world, with its artefact, concrete poetry. We knew nothing of Isou's post war theory of the rise and decay of form but, had we done so, would instantly have taken it on board. On another pinnacle there is the name Kasimir Malevich, the Russian constructivist, whose 'White on White', announcing the end of painting, fascinated us. It was to us a thing of ineffable beauty not because of how it looked but of what it implied compared to which the statements of American Abstract Expressionism like those of Rothko and Barnett Newman were mere wallpaper that enshrined rather than demolished the museum.

So Icteric was a kind of emancipatory ferment playing on the boundaries between art and life and in the process leading to the dissolution of artistic form particularly painting, sculpture, poetry, the novel and architecture. It didn't just stop with these traditional forms for as a group we were all journeying out of the enclosed world of art, 'the hysteria born within a studio' - as Tzara, the notable Dadaist had characterised it - or any other cultural setting, like staged performances, plays, concerts - jazz, rock, folk - toward an everyday world we dimly perceived had to be transformed.

It was, if you like, Isou avante la lettre. We also passionately sought to disinter as much of the buried past as we could, translating into English for the first time Jacques Vache's Letters of the War, put together just after the First World War by Andre Breton. This text, demanding we leave behind the ball and chain of art, became a founding document of surrealism. (Vache had a nihilistic disdain for the world, the war and the avant-garde and committed suicide as a joke. Amazingly he had first come to our attention when sitting our O levels and we had been much impressed by his habit of uprooting healthy plants and leaving sick ones be. At the time we had in our bedroom a cage full of Northern Eggar caterpillars we had collected on Fewston moors above Harrogate. But rather than kill them when they emerged we let them go, such was our growing horror of collecting. The beyond of art and the setting free of nature were unconsciously already present.

In the mid 1960s' we even attempted, we were travelling that fast, to read Hegel, because his name kept popping up in Surrealist texts. We had no idea Hegel was a much derided figure in the English philosophical establishment. We had all barely turned twenty.

We really weren't quite sure where we were going, though deep down we felt we were on the right track. Following on from the radical concepts behind Duchamp's ready mades we questioned the existence of artefacts. Art could be anything we said it was and we slowly began to think that Duchamp had betrayed his original promise. Despite moving to America to escape the stranglehold of European cultural elitism (and incidentally failing to see that America was destined to overtake Europe on that score) Duchamp continued, as Rimbaud said of Baudelaire 'to live in too artistic a milieu'. A master of irony and word play would Duchamp have savoured the irony of seeing his Urinal hailed as the most important single contribution to the evolution of modern art by cultural pundits (see The Guardian, December 2004). Unfortunately he would most likely have been flattered. The Urinal is now Tate Modern's altarpiece surrounded by a culturally beatified host of imitators. One wonders what effect a gesture like smashing the urinal would have in the media, on decrepit youth and the avant garde (rather arriere garde) of the cultural establishment. especially if accompanied by a coherent explanation. We are almost tempted, but the thought of the ensuing court case, accusations of cultural vandalism equivalent to the burning of the books, even a prison sentence and certainly a crippling fine for having destroyed a priceless work of art when the aim of the original piece was to debunk any such pretensions, is enough to deter anyone.

Surprisingly, some of the articles in the Icteric magazine are not entirely without merit. The piece on butterflies is one of them. It is not quite accurate to describe the Icteric text on butterflies as a natural ready made. One cannot help but marvel at some of the descriptions. The ready mades were simply chosen at random: aesthetics never came in to it. And if we now admire The Bottle Rack as a fine piece of design, as does Banham in his Theory and Design in the first Machine Age that was not Duchamp's intention, even if later he did go on to say that the only works of art that America had produced were its plumbing and bridges. In fact the piece on butterflies owes more to someone like Rodchenko, (a contemporary of Malevich) particularly his factographs. It is neither art nor science but rather awe before breathtaking natural spectacles rendered even more poignant forty years later by their gradual disappearance. And we were conscious; even then, the spectacles we described had virtually gone.

We had some inkling of how deeply we had been influenced by romanticism and the English nature tradition. Butterflies had, after all, been a youthful passion predating by a couple of years a passion for delta blues men and women and we well remember 'setting' dead specimens to the sound of Bessie Smith, Pinetop Smith, Earl Hines and so on (see Street One & Codlings on www.dialecticalbutterflies.com). The article on butterflies was also an attempt to recapture our childhood enthusiasm for butterflies, yet coming when it did it was brim full of an awareness of the break up of poetic form and diction harking back to the 19th century French poet Stephane Mallarme and even earlier. We wanted to communicate an intensity of lived experience poetry was unable to provide. We wanted the authenticity of real life. And we wanted, like the surrealists, 'to relive with intensity the best moments of childhood.' This phrase was never far from our lips and we gave it, and others, a renewed lease of life by reproducing them and plastering Newcastle with stickers. The Surrealists in some of the most remarkable texts of the 20th Century were to ask 'Is suicide a solution?' So we repeated the experiment and like the earlier investigation got disappointing replies and unsurprisingly received nothing like Artaud's who rejected the question by refraining it as 'an anterior form of suicide' meaning that we have all committed suicide already.

English poetry has always excelled in natural descriptions, surpassing all other rivals whether German, French and Italian. We have only to think of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets and then the Romantics. However with the Romantics nature begins to come into its own and starts to leap from the page. Most of the great romantics begin to take unprecedented liberty with form, anticipating by a 100 years the revolution of modern art. And even in an orthodox poet like Keats the signs are there a plenty ' 'a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme'/ 'heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter'/ 'her book a churchyard tomb' (an observation Mallarme would have just loved!). We could say that this aspect has never been properly appreciated but that would be wrong: it has never even begun to be appreciated. And it was only after our ignominious flight from Newcastle that we began to appreciate this fact of overwhelming importance. (It is given a more comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, treatment elsewhere on the website). In a way we were seeking to realize our own native romantic tradition and were its true heirs and not the piffling nonsense that has passed, with the odd exception, as 'poetry' since the death of Shelley and Byron. But we had no idea that this was the case for we had no one to guide or advise us. In this venture we were as alone as could be and disparaged on every side as 'mad' then 'bad' and finally 'dangerous', such was the wall of incomprehension. We were bound to be eventually broken by it, just as we were quickly radicalised through clashing constantly with it and getting nowhere.

In those far-off days the word ecology was hardly used at all. Yet it was the natural, more than anything else that obsessed us. We spoke of 'trembling nature'. And from that starting point we wished to reinvent the city, to bring nature into its heart and into people's living rooms, not as potted plants but as outrage. It was to be nature in excess, wild, exuberant, uncontrollable 'kinetic nature' and not one tailored to the mundanities of patio gardens. Down with polite horticulture, Newcastle was going to be the place of the new Amazonia. Seeing we lived right next to the north east coalfield we wanted to deposit a giant colliery spoil heap in the town centre. We wanted collapsing gardens, trees that raced along roads. Our cellar was converted into a lake by first banking it up with earth and then filling it with water. We loved it when cities flooded and waterfalls would cascade down the steps of newly constructed Arndale centres and living room floors gave way to reveal streams with easy chairs and dining room suites perched by the sides of these new embankments. This was decor with a difference.

We greatly admired the sacks of coal which Duchamp hung from the ceiling of the second surrealist exhibition. We were even more impressed when we found out a coal burning brazier that had been installed in the exhibition had singed the bottom of a couple of sacks which had then broken open, scattering coal everywhere.* One of us had a lorry load of sand delivered which was then deposited around the bed to create an interior desert in which to sleep and wake in. And, to one side, there was a Perspex cage in which thousands of flies were breeding on rotting meat. We lived what Damien Hirst sought only to exhibit. And the thought of making money out of it was the last thing in our head, which is the only thing in Hirst's.

For one of our experiments we reared a couple of dozen Privet Hawk caterpillars which were purchased from a butterfly farm. Eventually they pupated and, seeing we had long given up killing insects, let them go when these large, beautiful moths emerged. It was the humane thing to do and releases weren't the problem they are today. In fact a few years previously someone had taken it upon themselves to restore the Marbled White to the North Downs and today we are all very glad of it. Imagine our surprise when in the 1990s on looking at the distribution map of the Privet Hawk we noticed a small dot where Newcastle is and miles from the nearest location. Had we been responsible for inadvertently introducing the Privet Hawk in to Newcastle?

Even then our approach was fundamentally different to that of Hirst. We wanted to free up and then collaborate with nature not murder and then display it. The French for a still life is nature morte and the fact that Hirst wanted dead nature shows he has not broken with the artistic tradition at all in this respect, and also in many others. Instead of using an old butterfly collection which we did when we attached some butterflies to a pair of shoes (see the above photo from Icteric which even then was a tired update of e.g. an artefact like Meret Oppenheim's Fur covered Cup and Spoon), Hirst actually pulled the wings off recently killed Blue Morpho butterflies and then stuck them down as a decorative addition to his fashionable Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill. And the Shark, commissioned by the Saatchi's in the early 1990s, and which launched him on his money grubbing, brand name plc of a career he is now so proud of, was originally meant to be a Great White Shark. Days before he was due to bag one, it was placed on the endangered species list and Hurst had to make do instead with a Tiger Shark. It has just been sold for '6 000,000. A lifer in Wormwood Scrubs a few years back threatened, once outside, he was going 'to do' Hirst. If he should make good his promise we would suggest that afterwards he pickle Hurst in a tank of formaldehyde and then put him on display. Nothing in Hirst's life would then become him like the exhibiting of it. Rather too good for the Turner Prize however. In 2004 the winner of the abominable Turner racket, Jeremy Deller - and slightly more interesting than the usual prize winners- produced a film on Texas called Memory Bucket which ends up with a 10 minute sequence of millions of bats flying from the mouth of a cave into the night sky. It was nothing in comparison to Some Remarks on Butterflies.

Icteric was a brief moment in an altogether much bigger creative unfolding taking place all over the world from the mid 1960s onwards. A year and a half later in 1967 we were ambushed, almost unawares, by the far greater coherence of the International Lettrists and Situationists and their theoretical and practical contributions. Once confronted with these critiques we knew instantly this was what we had been groping towards all along in the dim twilight which was then Britain ' and in which nowadays there is even less of a flicker. With pitiless disdain we cast Icteric aside, and thought no more of it, ashamed of our juvenilia. Years later we were to be reminded of it when , in the late 1990s, we were told back copies of the magazine were fetching astonishingly high prices ' some said '1000 - though we can't believe it, and, what's more to the point, not even interested. One of us had also done a series of photo montages illustrating surrealist suggestions for altering Paris. They were done solely for money to go in an exhibition put together by R Hunt, one of the founders of Icteric, called 'Poetry must be made by all'. In the 21st century we were to find out the exhibition, which we then thought was evading the real issues, had acquired an iconic status even receiving a mention in Jappe's unimpassioned, somewhat academic, book on Guy Debord.

Otherwise we made no money whatsoever out of these avant garde experiments. In fact not only were we worse off economically but a target of ridicule. And to be sure, to give the opposition its due, they were only signposts and faintly ludicrous ones at that, toward a more lucid negation, as this ever more monstrous world appeared to totter.

In disgrace and calumnied as self-destructive idiots, and spat on from virtually all sides we were forced to leave Newcastle. And only if we were prepared to recant and return to the good old ways would the derision cease. But that would be tantamount to suicide so we 'chose' to be cast into oblivion instead and become the unmentionables. However, as so often happens in history, though we had been debarred in a manner of speaking from ever entering the city, in a manner of speaking the city also fell to us. But what we got instead was not the Newcastle Commune which one of our stickers had called for (Prepare now for the Newcastle Commune) but Newcastle, City of Culture and with growing embarrassment it began to be apparent to us that the origins of Newcastle's transformation, by realising a trajectory we had so vehemently rejected, lay partially in Icteric. It is indeed ironic to note how the converted Baltic Flour Mills on the banks of the Tyne is ranked second to Tate Modern (itself a former power station on the Thames embankment) as the 'modern art' venue. After our departure the art school and art scene in and around Newcastle University lapsed into a time warp from which it never awoke - as did every other art school and scene after 1968 and nor could they ever. Meanwhile the number of programs devoted to the role art schools played in Britain's 'creative renewal' in the 1960s grows and always neglects, deliberately or through sheer ignorance, to mention how they also nurtured a radicalism that exploded in 1968. And the currents present in Newcastle art school from the early 1960s onwards were the most coherent manifestation by far. In fact Newcastle never even gets a mention in these programs ' and if it ever does it is only in relation to Bryan Ferry who we lived next door to and had nothing but contempt for. It is as if they were a forerunner of the Cool Britannia business ethos, the sickly sweet, clueless Gallagher brothers and so on, though there was enough of that also.

And so the likes of Icteric became centre stage but even in their present manifestation are a world away from what we meant then and light years away from the only logically possible direction that was to immediately follow on. This particular apology for art history we are not proud to be part of, is closely linked to the world of advertising and corporate sponsors and unfailingly promoted by the media, particularly by The Guardian, The Independent and Channel 4 TV all of whom find it 'challenging'. The pathetic Jon Snow the Channel 4 newscaster is forever asking 'but is it art' but we doubt if he would get the joke if someone was to intervene and ask of a scene of total destruction, like the bombing of an Iraqi hospital, 'but is it art'?

In fact our critique in its more fully worked out form - and post Icteric - 30 or so years later found its way into the geography dept of the university via a belated repeat of psycho geography now out of historical context. A viciously reinstated Newcastle art scene was by then so cut-off from theory and reality that it hadn't the foggiest idea of its past never mind knowing what psycho geography meant. Nonetheless, in this city where anti-art as an essential part of a modern revolutionary critique was once proclaimed loudly, the simple realisation that art is nothing but a consumer appendage or that popular culture is now inseparable from advertising in an utterly commoditised social life far more dire than in the late 1960s has again been reaffirmed.

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(Footnote: That coal was central to Newcastle, worked as it were, behind our backs. Alongside the proposals for moving giant spoil heaps into the centre of Newcastle we had made small scale environments/installations of pit spoil heaps with model locomotives running through them surrounded by fake smoke ' another reinvention of childhood. It was a momentary phase in acquiring greater coherence. The explosion of the late 1960s with its profound anti-art drift saw miners from the local north east pits beginning to turn up curious yet attracted to the ensuing ever-widening subversion).

David & Stuart Wise. Winter 2004

Further Notes on Icteric

For decades afterwards we tended to treat the formative years in Newcastle as an embarrassment, a period in our lives we would prefer to forget. At best it was a necessary waste of time leading ineluctably to a much bigger picture expressed far more fully in May 1968 in France. However it is now painfully apparent there was nothing ineluctable about it and only now is it possible to reconstruct bit by bit the stages of this process and pose the essential question why then and not now, especially since what we were doing in Newcastle prior to 1967 has come to occupy center stage in the 'art' world. Unlocking these memories has not proved easy, especially as they have lain dormant for well over 36 years.

And so it is with the 8th/9th century Chinese 'poet', Han Shan. Purchasing a copy of Arthur Whalley's 'Chinese Poems' in a second hand shop for £1.50p, I re-read Han Shan in the very same book I had first encountered him. It was though I had last read him yesterday. Some lines had become imprinted on my memory which even then I felt were prophetic 'Even my own wife turned against me'. Ah yes, how true that would shortly turn out to be. 'Slip slap goes the wind in my face': of all the lines this is the one I most remember ' no poetic genius was required to write such a line for anyone could have written it.

Though of course we read Han Shan in translation, the literal descriptions eschewing practically all metaphor and metre seemed to point beyond poetry. We thought the same was true of the Japanese writer, Basho, especially the incident wherein he recounts trying to sell his snow covered hat. It seemed to us to subvert the conventions of the market because it was the snow rather than the hat that was important. But even so we felt uneasy about making it into a marketable commodity though we couldn`t then specify precisely why. The point, surely, was to awaken people to the beauty and possibilities of snow, not to make a living out of it

Han Shan's name is forever identified with the Cold Mountain, his chosen place of exile. Though the Cold Mountain was a place it was also a state of mind and it was the surface facticity that so attracted me indicating it was possible to imbue a bare fact with beauty and significance even in so drear a place as the Cold Mountain with its perpetual snows and fogs.. It was but a short step from this to investing a fact with social significance as to whether it enhanced our lives or not. By late 1967 this would be the overriding requirement: reborn people in a reborn world of 'facts' in which the government of people gives way to the administration of things, a state of affairs which has yet to exist. And it was the tireless nature lover J.J. Rouseau who was the first to succinctly formulate it thus - the anarchist tinged Rousseau and not the etatiste Rousseau. Though most people attribute this formulation to Engels he had in fact lifted it from Rousseau but in doing so gave it a far greater coherence.

At one point Han Shan breaks off to doubt if what he has written can ever capture the lived reality of what he is experiencing. 'Down in the pool there is not really a moon, the only moon is in the sky above. I sing to you this piece of song but in the song there is no zen'. Even then the reference to zen made us wince for we associated the zen cult with the beat poets like Ginsberg and their abysmal fetishization of literature. I fact far from being libertarian zen was institutionalised in the Japanese military, no matter that Han Shan had made a different use of it. The Cold Mountain tract was nature writing with a difference because it also exacted a refusal of the world, the one not being possible without the other. The mysticism was also very low key, in fact hardly present at all and infinitely less so than in the deist Wordsworth who rejected becoming an anchorite even though he felt pulled by it seeking, if only briefly, unlike Han Shan, a collectivist resolution through a bourgeois democratic revolution in which even grasses ( in fact rather more so than people!) were to be accorded rights. Hidden within Wordsworth there is also a rejection of the world, but crucially a world defined by the division of labour and Adam Smith which Han Shan, imprisoned in the last analyses by the ageless immobility of Chinese society, and despite his rejection of it, could not possibly have anticipated. And so a growing part of Wordswort`s legacy is his huge influence on the nature conservation movement (made necessary by industrial capitalism) and even modern anchorites like Thoreau and Muir have had, by sheer force of example, a similar massive influence on the conservation movement whatever their initial desire to have done with the world and get permanently lost in nature. I recall reading in Newcastle in the late sixties Gary Snyder's re working of Han Shan in which he attempted to give it a contemporary appeal by situating it in modern day San Francisco. But by then I knew there was no realistic alternative within capitalism, that we were not free to take it or leave it and that the Yosemite National Park was no substitute for the Cold Mountain. And besides there is no way a person would be permitted to camp out on the granite outcrops for any length of time - the Park Rangers would see to that. Today the illusion there is an alternative way of life within capitalist parameters has, over the past 35 years, gone forever, but paradoxically we are all increasingly becoming media anchorites locked away within four walls, finding it evermore difficult to venture out and only able to dream of nature as projected on TV. It is more than possible that in the end the only nature there will be is a parallel nature of digitised imagery that virtualizes the 'electric (electomagnetic) butterflies' of Rimbaud`s ravings. I have vivid memories of throwing myself on the bed in despair in Eslington Tce. in Newcastle and wishing, at the end of art, I had a cinematic device I could press closely to my face that would transport over the hills and valleys of North Yorkshire as if I was in a plane. How easy that would now be. And to think I once considered it a temporary cure for that acute sense of loss that comes with the death of art once we are prevented from seizing the social totality.

Han Shan was also a Taoist and Lao Tzu's writings also attracted us. We saw a link between the readymades and a line of Lao Tzu's: 'Exhibit the uncarved block'. Now of course we would rightly query why exhibit it in the first place To my knowledge no one has asked this question, certainly not Joseph Needham in his scholarly volumes on Chinese science, though he did enlighten me on the subversive role Taoism played in Chinese society, nourishing scientific enquiry in opposition to the prevailing Confucianism. (Needham was a member of that interesting bunch of British scientists who were influenced by 'dialectical materialism' as a result of meeting delegations of soviet scientists in the late 1920s and early 1930s and by which time the revolution was well and truly over with. So their wider vision, at least in comparison to their counterparts today, was also cruelly deformed by soviet style state capitalism which not one of them ever saw through. Though Needham was able to write a chapter dealing with Coleridge as a biologist in his The Sceptical Biologist (1929) - which few, if any, scientist would today be capable of - he ended up becoming a sickening apologist for Mao) .

Paradoxically wedded to this love of surface appearances requiring little further alteration other than in the social relationships, was a desire to realize metaphor by making it a fact, for here extremes met. French symbolist poetry had a peculiar plasticity about it as though always reaching out beyond the page. To us Rimbaud was more pure description then fantasy so imagine our delight when we read that the French communards had during the Commune of 1871 uprooted the trees that lined the grande boulevards and replanted them with their roots in the air and branches in the ground. It was close enough to Rimbaud's 'havoc of avenues' and to us symbolist imagery was a thwarted effort, confined to paper, to remake the world which was only possible through collective action such as happened in the Commune of 1871. Accordingly one of us printed a sticker with the slogan 'Prepare now for the Newcastle Commune' where only a couple of years previously we had reprinted surrealist stickers. 'Imagination with all its force tends to become real'. We were more alive than ever to Breton`s superb combining of Marx and Rimbaud: 'Marx said change the world, Rimbaud said change life: to us these two mottos are one and the same'.

Living in Newcastle a place world famous for its coal mines, shipbuilding, and heavy industry we had all become very 'French' and blind to the hostility we were provoking. Reaction in Newcastle always packed a punch. During the general strike of 1926 the middle classes armed themselves and were prepared, like nowhere else in the country, to drown the strike in blood. We were also unawares that the region had generated a radical critique of some aspects of culture, particularly mass cinema, in the shape of Jack Common that compared well with anything on the continent. Common was also able to link his critique to his profound working class experience and his observations on how, at night, engineering problems would be jointly resolved in the kitchen with the aid of a piece of chalk on grate blackening are priceless. Making use of whatever was available and in terms of sheer improvisation this was way beyond the uninspiring technical drawing we were instructed in at school. Later I began to wonder if my enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism in the mid sixties in Newcastle had not, in some roundabout way, been influenced by this local tradition. We had, as children, attended the Timothy Hackworth school in Shildon in Co Durham and every morning passed the great locomotive engineer's very modest house and famous engineering works, which then looked about to fall down, it was in such a state of disrepair. If not engineering in particular, construction was certainly in our blood.

But meanwhile English speaking symbolism meant nothing to us. TS Eliot was simply deplorable and we wondered how he ever could be placed alongside Mallarme, Rimbaud and Valery as Edmund Wilson had done in his famous 1930 book on symbolism, Axel's Castle. I recall that Robin Page, a happener from Leeds who came to stay one night, had contemptuously tossed to one side a copy of Eliot's Four Quartets that he had noticed on the book shelf. He had no need to bother however, it was simply a leftover from our school days and I still pride myself not one volume of Eliot`s disgraces my shelves. And the same fate befell W B Yeats whom we also had been taught to appreciate at school and though I have never been able to read Yeats since, his collection of Irish fairy tales is in a different league to anything Eliot did and provides a stepping stone to Singe's sojourn with the Arran Islanders. In its own way this was an attempt to realize symbolism and comparable with the best on the continent and still something that lives within me.

But we felt very alone and in face of a hostile world were virtually inseparable, because we only had each other. We were faced on all sides with a terrifying wall of incomprehension for there was nothing in the immediate past and little in the last 100 years in this country that was leading up to what we were doing- not to mention the revolutionary critique that was to rapidly follow on as naturally, or so it appeared then, as day follows night!

I can still remember the thrill of delight when on first opening in 1968 Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical enquiry into Freu, he had included an intelligible, highly relevant, reference to Mallarme in the intro. Here at last was someone in the English speaking world able to give Mallarme his due, not as an obscure poet but as a profound critic of language and so much more beside - which Marcuse does not begin to bring out. One can search the whole of Raymond Williams for even an appreciative murmur regarding what Mallarme was really about. Typically Williams had treated the forms of art as a given and only the social relations into which art is inserted as changeable. So we had in the late 60s`impatiently thrown aside his Culture and Society 1780-1950 as largely irrelevant because it did not remotely grapple with the question of form and missing out therefore on an essential, totally overlooked aspect, of the great romantics he venerates

Around the same time Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero appeared in an English translation which also contained a reference to Mallarme. The book lay on the floor beside my bed in Newcastle for several weeks. I avidly read the little book because there was nothing at all comparable, simply on account of its modernity, by English speaking critics. And yet it lacked directness, deftly evading, at every twist and turn, saying too much that was leading. Only now am I able to see it as an academic rationalization of aesthetic lettrism ' and a stupid one at that - by a fink of the first water who professed to represent the movement more fully because of his wide ranging historical knowledge, which most of the more sincere lettrists just did not possess. But even so it is still more on the ball than a book I liberated in the 1990s by an English author Gordon Millan, Prof of French Studies in the University of Strathclyde on Mallarme entitled Mallarme: a throw of the dice. It is so vacuous I think I should be compensated for the effort it took to liberate it. How anyone can, after all these years, write a book on Mallarme in which the emerging anti-poet Mallarme is absent, is beyond me and only demonstrates yet again how empty universities really are and how backward Britain still is. The blurb on the cover provides a measure of the book's unrepetant orthodoxy: "defender of Manet and other impressionists, supporter of Zola and Rodin, Mallarme is now regarded is now regarded as one of the key figures of modernism." I had a right to expect better but it did show how isolated we really were in Newcastle all those years ago. The wonder is we have lived to tell the tale

I remember coming back from a pub one night and turning the corner into Eslington Tce. I noticed a child holding up a spool of magnetic tape(cassettes had yet to be invented) that was steaming in the wind. I was enchanted by his absorption and thought only a revolution will save him from having to grow up. 'The child abdicates his ecstasy' wrote Mallarme and his difficult poem entitled, fittingly, Prose:for des Esseintes (the character in Huysmans proto anti-novel Against Nature - and the only novel Mallarme ever really liked) is, I'm convinced, about that, though he could not bring himself to say so directly in his 'poem', which is wreathed in impenetrable obscurity. However it certainly seems to be about the need to take action, otherwise beauty will remain forever hidden by gladioli that have become too large, screening us, because of their overpowering presence, from true beauty. (Mallarme used the example of a simple flower to describe what he wanted from language, which Marcuse quotes in his above mentioned introduction). However we were fascinated by Mallarme for another reason. And that was because of his emphasis upon silence, which connected with our interest in John Cage. That a poet should be obsessed with silence was every bit as contradictory as a musician's obsession with silence yet one of a kind as we shall later see.

How we came to move beyond music, the precise steps that led up to it, escapes me somewhat. But I do remember that sometime after 1966 I became lucidly deaf to music and entered the world of pure sound from which I was never able to fully go back from, today more than ever, just like a growing number of other people in search of a theory as to why they can't. There had been precedents in the avante garde of the 20th Century beginning with Luigi Russolo's noise machines, Tzara's exhortation to musicians to smash their instruments, Satie and so on. We had even made a point of interviewing John Cage when he came to London and were particularly impressed by his opposition to the Vietnam war, which was then only just beginning to be an issue in Europe. In the interview he gave, and which we reproduced in Icteric, he said America was after the tin and tungsten in S.E. Asia which certainly was not the real reason America became embroiled in Vietnam. This literal interpretation of Lenin's Imperialism showed how limited Cage was on the broader questions, aside from the fact he never really turned his back on music, remaining a performer, 'a musician of hollow nothingness', to the end of his life. In fact, no musician qua musician has ever been able to arrive at a profound critique of the social totality, despite tendencies in that direction.

Next door to us in Newcastle, lived Brian Ferry. We regarded him as a good-looking dipstick and not much else - in fact, our attitude bordered on contempt because of his assiduous cultivation of the 'in crowd'.

Sometime in 1967 I started to share my flat in Newcastle with Gordan, a mathematician who was studying for a PhD. He was a member of Solidarity, a spin off from Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. We first got to know Gordon because of his irreverent denunciations of Trotskyites (who had a large presence on Tyneside - in fact Mr Newcastle himself, Dan Smith, had been one in his youth) at meetings called to oppose the Vietnam War.

We were fully in accord with Gordon's anti-Leninist stance, and eagerly read the pamphlets that Solidarity put out, many of an archival nature like those on the anti Bolshevik uprising in Krondstat in 1921 by Ida Mett and Alexandra Kollontai but which were useful in helping demolish the hold of Leninism. However wanting as we did by then a total revolution, mathematics was not exempt from entering the field of human praxis and we would have heated and frequently drunken discussions with each other.

For far more than old style workers' democracy was involved here and looking back this was an encounter that never yielded the fruits it promised like so much else then. Through Gordon I first came to know of Kurt Godel (the Austro-American mathematician) and Gordon would spend his days feeding the punch cards he had prepared at home into the main frame computer at Newcastle University. Though our discussion appeared to border on complete craziness, looking back I now think they were far from crazy and possessed a sort of inspirational lunacy and bizarre logic. They were taking place within an anti Bolshevik, libertarian perspective and therefore anything was possible had things been allowed to develop. I knew enough by then to know that Hegel, though smart enough to give mathematics its due, treated mathematics as a quantitative sum that could not brook contradiction. Though rigorous within its own terms it was finally only a part of a far more profound, dialectical, logic. For reality was essentially contradictory and the resolution of contradiction was what drove history forward. Hence for Hegel and Marx, dialectical logic became the only valid element in the whole of existing logic. I was also opposed to mathematics from a psychoanalytical viewpoint because I was then immersed in reading revolutionary interpretations of Freud. In psychoanalytical theory numbers and anality are one of a kind, mathematics originally being the sublimate of far more basic outpourings. Anality was also identified with sadistic fantasies of control and however barmy my pronouncements on the subject then were, few would deny that mathematics nowadays is more in control than ever through the binary notation on which digital technology is built. Gordon certainly did look at these revolutionary interpretations of Freud but whether it caused him to waver in his regard for mathematics as above history, I cannot say. In fact he interpreted the question of de-sublimation as more and better sex and like many others at that time opted for Reich. And when Solidarity finally did come to deal with psychoanalysis it was through the eyes of Reich and at the neglect of the far wider, explosive and disturbing question of repressed Eros.

All these years later I now realize that Gordon was studying the mathematical basis of computing and that had I enquired further I would have found that his line of study would lead directly to the creation of modern programming and the internet. I wish now I had been less adamant and had asked him more about Godel for I now know that Godel had anticipated the coding mechanisms of modern day computers by stating in the 1930s that mathematical systems contain paradoxes: systems could be logically coherent but judged from an external frame of reference can code for downright madness. Though it isn't strictly analogous to what Godel had in mind, Adobe's 'Photoshop' strikes me as just that. And at bottom this sums up how most people feel about computers, as if they are being tricked in to becoming part of a parallel reality, which they eventually will succumb to.

Gordon was also a classical music fan and at times I had to shut my ears to the sounds coming from his room. So in my proselytising, life and death, zeal I thought it right to acquaint him with the history of avant-garde noise makers from Satie through to John Cage for Gordon maintained there was a profound relationship between mathematics and music. However to me I no longer knew what was meant by music and the question which to me then hung over its existence has become over time a full stop to a growing number of people. In fact I felt utterly compelled to undermine the assumptions behind this long-standing postulate. Since then I have often pondered on Max Planck and Einstein playing classical compositions together on piano and violin, Heisenburg playing Bach on the church organ high above the caves on the outskirts of Dresden in which he was engaged on developing the A-bomb or Roger Penrose incessantly listening to Mozart as he pondered the mathematics of a singularity at the heart of a black hole. Did their 'revolutionary' physics and maths preclude every other kind of music excepting that of classical music?

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What Happened in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. (from a Critical, Hidden History of King Mob)

The mid-nineteen sixties and Icteric. Re-evaluation of a dissident European past. Russin nihilism. Recuperated artistic dada and revolutionary Dada. The forgotten revolutionary aspects of Surrealism. Conflict with the Tyneside poets. Closing down an Art School. Meetings with Black Mask in New York.

King Mob was initially a coming together in London of the then constituted English section of the SI – beginning somewhat to fall apart - and an ex-group, together with some other like-minded individuals, around the often confusedly anti-art magazine, Icteric, from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. (Icteric, let it be said, was spuriously anti-art but we weren't to know that with such clarity at the time). Let us first deal here with the Newcastle experience as it has never been documented before.

Icteric, founded in the mid-1960s was, more or less, a name chosen at random from a dictionary and therefore in that somewhat time-honoured tradition of modern art emanating from Dada. It meant jaundice and a cure for jaundice at the same time – which everybody felt at its very inauspicious inauguration was appropriate. Simply put, everybody present was pissed-off with art in an institution or gallery, wearied and jaundiced about it if you like, and looking for something rather more turbulent and effective. Icteric's central aim, and quite resonantly put at the time, was the coming together (fusion) of art and life and was mainly the brainchild of Ron Hunt1 who was the librarian at the Dept of Fine Art at Newcastle University. Ron Hunt had been appointed to the post at the instigation of pop artist Richard Hamilton who taught at the university and who, ironically, around the same time, acquainted Don N. Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hamilton though, for some time had abandoned all semblances of radical critique pretty much falling into a benign, left social democracy, coolly and uncritically encompassing consumerist icons. A cool take was to be the essential in overcoming all adversity! In fact, it was a variant of the same terrible English inability to grasp most essential breakthroughs in perception and form which so marked the 20th century and much of the latter half of the 19th century. Despite penetrating social critiques like that of William Morris and George Orwell everything else was always to be done in such a seamlessly nice way and ever so watered-down.

Considering this was taking place in England (and in a relative back-water at that) covering an avalanche of omissions, repressions and outright hostility, Ron Hunt bravely at the time, delved into the history of modern art and began to put the record straight beginning to place all the long lost and forgotten (on purpose) radical experiments into the beginning of some coherent trajectory whose outcome at the time we were all rather fuzzy about but which was slowly but surely becoming clearer each day. Icteric became, more or less, the fulcrum of this unfolding - enlightening primarily ourselves - before any concern for anybody else. Basically, it was motivated by getting hold of anything that wasn't stultifyingly "English" in the conformist sense we found so unappealing. We went back and re-evaluated the Russian nihilists of the mid-19th century like Dobrolyubov and Pisarev whose The Destruction of Aesthetics hit a chord. We liked the hardness of their comments: "Shakespeare or a pair of boots"etc. Pisarev had said of himself he "would rather be a Russian shoemaker than a Russian Raphael". In a sense though it was their rebellion we liked even though it brought prison and calumny upon themselves. Pisarev's: "Denial is a hard, tedious and deadly task" meant something as we eagerly read Lampert's Sons Against Fathers in preparation – unbeknown to ourselves at the time – of our own revolt of sons (and now daughters!) against fathers! Could we go along with it to the letter? Hardly, but it was another of the necessary ingredients which later was truly to go somewhere. Finally though and perhaps inevitably, we found the concepts of the Russian nihilists too severely utilitarian for our liking. True, it was utilitarianism bordering on the apocalyptic but that didn't really fit in with our growing rejection, or rather, that suppression and realisation of art we were searching for despite being none too clear about this at the time. It wasn't just an either/or question. It wasn't just a question of the hungry and dispossessed for whom culture was a luxury they could ill afford. In fact, concern for the poor didn't even come in to it. We were arriving at the simple, though very dialectical, recognition that culture within its own frame of reference no longer possessed the slightest quality and the subsequent emptiness beckoned towards the creation of something entirely different. The conclusion that this meant inescapably the destruction of the commodity economy, social revolution and the creation of an entirely new world we didn't immediately perceive, but it did mean that a blow by blow repeat of Russian nihilism was irrelevant and quite beside the point. After all, during the lifetime of the Russian nihilists, great art particularly in the form of the Russian novel was at its height. However, Tolstoy's final rejection of the role of novelist was more in tune with Pisarev's essentially moral rejection – and incidentally illustrating the powerful impact of the nihilists on Russian society – than in the prepatory self-destruct of the novel's form as undertaken by the much younger Marcel Proust around the same time. A destruction which was to be continued and carried on to the final rampage of liberated words in Joyce's, Finnegan's Wake. Slowly but surely we were getting some sense of this, though always and perhaps inevitably, in a pretty chaotic way.

We mustn't though be too simplistic here about Pisarev's views. He wanted to see the emergence of a "non-cultural" scientific culture neither invented nor abstracted which could only be represented, "in actual living phenomena". As Lampert was to put it: "It was to be a culture which reflected man's changing and unimpeded vision of the universe, free especially from all the burdens of the past, and with none of the hot air of exalted places. It's "temples" would be "the workshops of human thought." It would eschew the artist as a sacred monomaniac, misunderstood and misinterpreted and ensure his status as simply a human being, endowed with a special gift of articulation and free from somnolence and escapism. His business would be roughly, to articulate on behalf of the inarticulate, to express for those who are unable to express themselves what is conducive to their growth as human persons and "thinking proletarians". He would be a spokesman for others and the despair of aesthetes yearning for elegant elaboration". Whilst the language of some of the above is too loose and imprecise for our times, a little later, around 1966, we couldn't help but make something of a connection between this and Dziga Vertov when first viewing his 1920's film Man with a Movie Camera and reading about the concepts behind Kino-Eye and the factograph, though more about that later....

The first Icteric magazine contained a translation by Anne Ryder of some of Jacques Vache's Lettres de Guerre (War Letters) and the first such translations to have appeared in English. The rest of the letters were to appear in the next edition of Icteric. The War Letters were a reflection on Vache's profound nihilistic experience of the First World War; an experience which also seems to have been the active fillip in mapping out a new subversive terrain whereby roles were played with and the spectator violently eliminates the performer. In a way, Vache's letters set the tone for what was to follow within our own hearts and minds which we interpreted as down with gallery art so, from now on, we were to take a serious look at those historical figures that attempted to negate art in the far-off days of Dada, Surrealism and Russian Constructivism. The painters and poets of these movements were quickly pushed aside and downgraded for their orthodox, though for their time, radical avant-garde representations. Eventually, we were only interested in these people if their activities, pointed clearly towards the hoped for real transcendence of art, that moment where everyday life would be splendidly renewed on a vast communal level. Finally, we preferred the real negation, so for us, the future lay in the lifestyle and comments of Arthur Craven, the boxer - the supposed nephew of Oscar Wilde - and the vitriolic producer of the Parisian based, Maintenant magazine, Vache (again) and Rimbaud at the moment he quit poetry. (Little did we know at the time that Breton criticised him for this evaluating his subsequent activities, like gunrunning, as dubious). Simply put, it was their negation of art that meant everything to us. We really responded with an ever-growing deep sympathy for the best of Cravan's comments like, "You must absolutely get through your head that art is for the bourgeois, and by bourgeois I mean: a monsieur without imagination"... and... "Soon you won't see anyone but artists in the street and the only thing you'll find no end of trouble in finding is a man" (Remembering this great comment by 1972, a comment was placed in a diary: "It's taken this long for "soon" to become reality". Thirty years after 1972, it was to have an even more astounding truth). We also really liked some of the early Surrealist experiments like the meeting at the relatively unknown church of St Julien de la Pauvre on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, followed by the early kind of practical psychic-automatism like drifts inherent in the Surrealist walks proceeding from a point based on where a pin had randomly been stuck into a map. We weren't so foolish, naive or headstrong as to not consider that some of these random drifts nearly pushed some of these protagonists into suicide. Then there were those supposedly brutal Surrealist slogans like; "leave your children in the woods set off on the roads" etc which we really got off on, even though we didn't take this exhortation at face value! We also admired some of the imaginative environmental projects of the Russian Constructivists around 1920, particularly Klebnikov's soup lakes and the proposed slow flying white on white squares schemes proposed by Malevich etc. Indeed, Icteric made a replica of Malevich's coffin that was exhibited in some exhibition some years later, which Jappe was to praise for its "excellent iconography" in the bibliography of his theoretical biography on Debord in 1993. We were interested in the concept of the factograph and bearing El Lissitsky in mind, it seemed like the starting point of an anti-literary presentation. Cinema wasn't spared either as we dismissed the entertainment industry, preferring – as previously stated - Dziga Vertov's films of the early 1920s and the first collaborations between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, particularly Le Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or produced during the 1930s.We blindly accepted that cinema as provocation had come to an end at this point when rioting greeted the latter's first screening, although truth to tell, it was a riot instigated by enraged Catholics, and certainly wasn't a riot against the passive audience / performer relationship which was what we were aiming for. Nonetheless we were impressed and had anything like this happened since? We wanted to do likewise simply unaware of more recent and precise statements of the Lettrist anti-film particularly Howlings in Favour of De Sade which had provoked public outrage but we were only to learn about these events some three years later.

However, all this growing lucidity was jumbled up within Icteric together with a hotchpotch of modern art repeats, which Duchamp was to characterise around the same time as the "double-barrel effect", a point we noted at the time though we reacted with dismay when we heard Duchamp was making multiple editions of his old ready-mades for sale, no doubt aping Andy Warhol's activities living just down the street from him in lower Manhattan. We felt it was a sellout, which of course, it was. Though for all of us painting, sculpture, novels and poetry were dead, over and out, nonetheless some environmental constructions were deemed OK, those perhaps that were somewhat akin to artefacts that would have been more or less at home in those international Surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s and 40s. Not necessarily the most spectacularly weird artefacts but nutty things like the full coal sack hung from the ceiling of some art gallery. We particularly liked the fact that the sack accidentally bust open and all its mucky contents were scattered over the floor. Maybe our special liking for the latter had something to do with the Icteric collective living in Newcastle and the presence of the northeast miners - who's to say? More importantly, within a year or two we were also to realise the futility of this notion of 'new' objet d'art praxis, the more we developed a critique of the commodity per se.

Icteric produced anti-sociological questionnaires, some of which were Surrealist repeats. "Why not commit suicide" was one of them and people were invited to fill these questionnaires in. The responses were arid and, perhaps not surprisingly, even worse than a disappointed Breton had hoped for decades earlier. We had no budding Artaud around replying to the original questionnaire like: "I am unhappy like a man who has lost the best part of himself.....who has committed suicide already". But did we want a budding Artaud when we knew of individuals – even in this relatively optimistic period – who'd had enough of the total shit and slashed their wrists in the bath anyway? We shuddered and with no answers giving any signs of a eureka moment we concentrated on producing stickers again tending to be repetitious of the past such as "Surrealism Is The Communism of Genius" but seeing this was Newcastle in the mid 1960s and not Paris in the 1930s it really wasn't going to make much headway.

Happenings, or rather at least some of them, were embraced although that didn't stop us taking the piss out of the hip American's Merce Cunningham's performance art and his supposed "free expression" dancers in some London venue (much to the annoyance of some of the audience particularly when hearing Yorkshire accents – confirming perhaps the loutishness - of the provocateurs?) and then a little while later, putting on a nonsensical piano rendition performed by Trevor Winkfield mocking John Cage and taking delight in the fact that some idiots took it seriously. In fact we were mocking ourselves too as we had taken Cage and Cornelius Cardew seriously just a year previously and had even interviewed Cage for Icteric! Silence and the transcendence of music did really impact upon us, even though we still left wondering about the process of its overcoming – and still are for that matter. Little did we realise how all half-negation can be capitalized – turned into its opposite - and how avant-garde sounds a la John Cage morphed into the music of Ennio Morricone as backdrop to the Spaghetti Westerns, that last gasp necessary ingredient that helped give the zing to the last consequent Westerns. We read with interest about the auto-destructive activities of Metzger and Latham's book burnings disliking the fact that the latter were turned into objet d'arte to be hung on walls. We also pointed out – initially to everybody's disbelief- that these acts of auto-destruction influenced The Who (the performance ritual of guitar smashing) smashing up your instruments as a substitute for a real smashing up. Being clued in, we also quoted Tzara's dictum from a half century ago "musicians smash your instruments, let blind men take the stage". As if to give a point to this we rather pointlessly repeated Tzara's ROAR which just meant inviting everybody you could to turn up in a Newcastle city car park and ROAR your head off. Maybe a couple of 100 or so did just that. Jean Jacques Lebel, the French happener, around the same time wrote a long article for Icteric which though tending to extol his happening nonsense at the time was somewhat lucid about Artaud and very anti-police. Unbeknown to us, about the same time Don Smith and Rene Vienet, after a night's drinking, went round to his apartment and thoroughly slagged him off for his confusions about art and general lack of coherent critique. Jean Jacques just stood there – more or less apologetically. Although years later Don felt rather bad about this, it obviously had a good effect on Jean Jacques, as he rapidly then developed a much more lucid and subversive take on society and of course was one of the French contingent who were to tear down the fences at the Isle of Wight pop festival in 1971. It would seem therefore that a bald attack could certainly be good at times in pulling people across who are hovering on the brink in any case. A final comment upon Icteric's contents reveals a complete though for the time, well-intentioned muddle. A quasi-scientific document on butterfly oddities and recollections of rapturous displays of these delightful insects was also published and in terms of the detritus of modernism, was one of the better things in the magazines. The same might be said of a text on the amazing activities of slugs, which fell between a kind of factograph and natural science. The fact is though if Icteric had appeared 20 years later it would have been instantly capitalised by the right wing Saatchi Brothers end of culture emporium; however we were much more authentic heading completely in the opposite direction.

We were also coming from jazz, the other corner-stone of our end of culture orientation, particularly a passion for be-bop and its aftermath. However, even on this front we were becoming perplexed. Something was happening to jazz – it was beginning to fall apart and as much as we really desired to go along with John Coltrane's final atonal-like developments we were flummoxed albeit, trying to pretend we weren't. We were in fact beginning to relate the trajectory of jazz to the crises besetting the totality of modern art.

As if to underline this in an Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry concert in Newcastle's then prestigious City Hall in 1966 we clambered on the stage and put up ICTERIC in big letters behind the performers. Interestingly, nobody objected and the jazzmen showed no interest whatsoever. Truth to tell, by then, we felt our statement (our advertisement perhaps?) was better than the free form jazz itself simply because we knew we'd become engaged on a free form quest ourselves perhaps far more searching than the end of free form jazz itself which we also dimly recognized was kind of heading in the same direction though without the same clarity. (Later, we equated the ghetto uprisings in the United States as its real creative outcome having surpassed the musical form).

Moreover only three years previously a bunch of us in Newcastle had sat in awe in front of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, opened mouth at its transcendental brilliance knowing full well we were listening to something fantastic though even then – with a kind of premonition and a sad feeling in the gut – knowing somehow it wasn't going to be repeated because real history was beginning to say something far more pertinent and which the last days of jazz was also straining to discover. (How one can have sense of such things in the offing perhaps we'll never know). There was though a very enjoyable conclusion to this earlier moment. We and our friends – as per usual – sat through Coltrane's rendition of God Save the Queen which was then an obligatory formality all entertainment paid lip service to. One of us, David Young, loudly proclaimed to the stage and audience alike: "that it was the best God Save the Queen" he'd ever sat through.

The times were a'changing fast and the activities around Icteric were more and more moving towards total subversion. In no way could the group hold together and tensions within became palpable the more that risks were taken. In any case the group even when playing with the art/anti-art dichotomy had provoked outright hostility from the cultural establishment in Newcastle who were so conservatively brain-dead they couldn't even see where their own cultural future lay. Instead of intelligently patronizing or co-opting or even simply realising there was nothing overtly anti the system here (it was too confused for that) they came down upon it forcibly and stupidly - none so much when an article was published in a rag called The Northerner in 1966. It's perhaps worth quoting a few extracts from it......

"It was becoming increasingly obvious to a few people that there was no longer any valid reason to make sculpture or paintings. Looking at the current art magazines revealed a uniform dullness: nothing seemed to shine anywhere. The real was so much more interesting than the simulated and offered so many more possibilities" which was how it kicked off. The brash article was meant to be intentionally provocative, encompassing a kind of put-on blatant philistinism The opening sentence was followed by an attack on all art from Rembrandt, through Degas to Rodin in the spirit of Dada – a movement which was praised - along with the most subversive anti-art aspects of Surrealism and Russian Constructivism using ample quotes which ironically belied the 'philistinism': "Painting is a pharmaceutical product for idiots" (Francis Picabia) "art is nonsense" (Jacques Vache) and "the high images have fallen"(Andre Breton) etc.

"......... what we did as a group (Icteric) was merely to recognise this and to notice that in the last 25 years there has been a shabby attempt at restoration. After the rejection of aesthetics by Constructivism and Surrealism, Cubism (which Picabia called a "cathedral of shit") was reaffirmed with Abstract Expressionism......................................"

"What artists do now is merely capitalise on a stage in development and not carry it off one quarter as well. For instance, Neo-Dada which is supposed to relate to Dada when it's patently obvious that, say, a painter like Roy Lichtenstein relates more to Matisse than say, Duchamp. There is the same saleable gallery product, the same lovely "well applied paint", and the same viewing distance from the "canvas" – even using a canvas! Incredibly conservative. Is Lichtenstein a salon painter – the 1960s Bougereau ? (a French academician in the late 19th century). Is he even as good?"

"Are not Rheinhardt's and Stella's paintings about the death of painting? Painting about Malevich's "deserts of vast eternity"? As Nietzsche said: "The desert grows woe to him that bears the desert unto himself". Malevich rejected the love of the desert and ended by making Suprematist designs for his coffin. Will Stella do likewise? It is distressing to see pictures that were done in an iconoclastic spirit now interpreted as how to make pictures."

"...If all there is in front of us is a future of style, style, style, we must still attempt to recreate this (fundamental fury) that motivated Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism – and that re-creation must not be a style neither. Perhaps we can start by burying Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism, by recognising that they were in turn second class revolutionary movements".

In a way this was all very pointed stuff for the ignorant times of the mid-1960s and, moreover, in a very backward country in comparison to France and though working in the dark without knowledge of the International Lettrists or Situationists, nonetheless we were on the right path towards liberation, preparing the ground, readying us as it were to hear and inwardly digest the more lucid grasp which had been taking place elsewhere, even though the same message was also not at all well known in its place of birth. In saying this though, this short text on Icteric was finally confused and inconsistent and these passages quoted above were the best parts.

Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, this brief piece of propaganda created a furore among Newcastle's cultural establishment. Some even called for legal sanctions particularly as it had come on the heels of a declamation proclaiming support for the floods in the Italian city of Florence in 1966, when the river Arno burst its banks and had devastated (or for us had "transformed") the art treasures of that Renaissance city. No one came to our support and there was a loud silence from those - to be oh so famous - Tyneside Poets emanating from the somewhat avant-gardism of Basil Bunting's writings – around Tom Picard and the Morden Tower Collective who'd proudly brought Allen Ginsberg to the cold Newcastle nights. They also really didn't like that assault on poetry. How dare we when surrounded by philistinism and straights in any case! In return we thought they were bollocks without a critique! Looking back perhaps one could say that such things were a kind of crude, even vulgar, though necessary provocation of traditional artistic values. Nowadays though, when we survive in a situation where the nihilism of post modernism in its bland reinterpretation cum ultra-commodification mania encompassing memories, wilfully trashing these self same Renaissance objets d'art and where "higher values" are seamlessly flattened out in the pure value of money to be made from anything and everything, our support for anti-aesthetic Arno floods simply wouldn't have the same meaningful impact where today everything becomes an equivalent and Damien Hirst is the aesthetic equal of Michelangelo, etc.

We were cutting through crap as well as floundering. We were real and very authentic at the same time as the media – in a general sense – was beginning to take us. Maybe here it's best to quote from a diary jotting of 1972 as it also recounts something of which we were feeling at the time. "The overt recuperation of the Happening though was already well underway as it headed towards the mainstream as portrayed in - HELP - the first film by the Beatles. They also laughed at Neo-Dada art objects - wire sculptures etc. New media techniques of montage and quick splicing were developed as a form of hip youth cum-class-aggression against an ossified English ruling elite – but all set firmly within the on-going capitalist order." At the same time, around 1966, re-reading Harold Rosenberg's, The Tradition of the New - a book mainly about American Abstract Expressionism - suddenly the best of his comments came into focus as we noted an undertow which Rosenberg didn't dare clearly express. This implied that The Tradition of the New was better than the art commodities described – in particular beginning to note that Neo-Dadaist products were, "the relics of subversion" nothing more than "a ritualised vanguardism". This was just what we wanted to hear though by then we had acquired the wit to distance ourselves from his ultimately laudatory appraisal of Abstract Expressionism. A little later, in the same diary – looking at it again after all these years (!) - there follows something else and which still doesn't make complete sense – though getting somewhere: " The gestural, post abstract expressionist activity, wasn't enough without a better comprehension of the breakdown of everyday life. Taken as one-dimensional, post artistic, it also couldn't immediately comprehend the sheer totality of present day nihilism which does demand a greater comprehension of the vacuity at the heart of work, sex, personal relationships and the family, as well as the mirage of all important consumer identifications".

Around this time, Ron Hunt arranged an exhibition in Newcastle called Descent into the Street which despite the contradiction between the title and the situation – street and art gallery - and which we were aware of, clarified things further for us as it was a compilation of past acts in the first 40 or so years of the 20th century where art was pushed historically behind us, preparing the way for a greater general, communal creativity. It contained pointers towards the negation and supercession of art, although we were still fuzzy about where the path of supercession lay. In a sense the exhibition was the explanation of that history, if a little confused at times like bringing in examples of Maoist calisthenics etc. A little later Ron heard about the activities (from some marginal art magazine) of Black Mask in New York who'd made an intervention at some cultural meeting in a plush art gallery shouting "burn the museums baby", "art is dead", "Museum closed" etc. Exhilarated, he told us and none too soon, as we were all in trouble! One of us (Johnny Myers) had just padlocked and chained up the entrance to the university art school preventing any student or teacher from entering and on which was placed a notice in big black letters: "Art School Closed Forever". Moreover, just before that, he'd sprinkled gunpowder in a long trail down the interior steps and through the corridors of the sculpture school and was going to light it before getting stopped by horrified students who grassed him up. Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: "brothers/sisters come and join us"! So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle To New York and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask2 (one which resulted in being held up by the police at an H. Rap Brown meeting) and / or simply enjoying their company and writing one or two things, particularly a completely OTT bloodthirsty manifesto on which was placed the names of some of those who'd gathered around the now defunct Icteric. Having by then heard of the Situationists in New York, Ben Morea gave us the personal addresses and telephone numbers of those individuals who resided in London whom we duly contacted on our return to England.

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The following paragraphs and much later In the Hidden History of King Mob also relate to Newcastle.

There was much overlap between on-going activity in London and what was happening in Newcastle. At this point, it's probably worth going into a few details about subsequent events in Newcastle simply because nobody has done so and some of what took place was quite remarkable. The Icteric period had waned and a more direct response was called for. After "closing the Art School forever", Johnny Myers had erupted in a meeting of leftists against the Vietnam war shouting out, "We've got to make a Ho Chi Minh Trail out of Northumberland St" (the main drag in Newcastle). It wasn't that the guy was a leftist; he merely wanted to experience a crazy and exhilarating mayhem of unexpected eruption down the city's main thoroughfare. True, in his shouting it would have been better if Johnny had been more ironic about references to Ho Chi Minh, perhaps bringing in something of Bunuel's L'Age D'Or, as that was his intended effect. It never materialised as a mass event but a little later, on a hot sunny midday, Johnny took all his clothes off and walked down Northumberland St. He was arrested, banged up in Durham jail and later sectioned.

In response to this new mood, by 1967 many of us were quite willing to throw away many treasured possessions like art books, even ones you regularly looked at like Goya's etchings, jazz records – even a revered collection of Charlie Parker among which was Bird Symbols, basic craftsman's tools etc. It was a case of giving them to anybody who might want them. It was an attitude of "let everything slip from your grasp" and a slogan from the Peasants' millennium which possibly might smell of private property. It was however, taking place before a general historical time had been seized when it would be possible for everybody to let go of commodities precisely because commodity relations, the wages system and money would be in the process of self-liquidation. However, coming out with such common sense objections at the time wouldn't have met with much of a response as truly a force was rising within us and within so many other dispersed and disparate individuals that it was impossible to resist. We knew we were calling the shots and things must crumble before us...

First though it's worth making a few points here about that process which ultimately leads towards the abolition of money. In the late 19th century and some of the early years of the 20th century, it was reasonably common among a minority of workers, perhaps as a naive afterthought, to nod in the direction of the abolition of wage labour. Eventually, it was inscribed on some of the logos of the various union outfits (e.g. the National Union of Railwaymen and in the statutes of say, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, etc.). That didn't mean the object was pursued – quite to the contrary - but it had to be mentioned occasionally as a kind of litany. If anything most of the impetus went into a form of nationalisation, whereby many things would then become free particularly bus and train travel and the health services. Many millions of workers in Britain around the time of the second inter-Imperialist world war subscribed to these illusions about nationalisation, so in that sense the notion of a world free from monetary exchange remained a powerful living force, if a very misguided one on how it could be achieved. After twenty years of nationalisation by the mid-1960s, most people knew this hadn't worked out they way the scriptures had suggested cynically shrugging off the hopes they might have had in following such a path, though such a lacunae though, almost like nature, abhorred a vacuum. As the shades of darkness fell, the owl of Minerva took another course as it again flew towards a moneyless future. The momentum transposed itself as it became more personal though nonetheless still collective at the same time often presenting itself as just who was into money and who wasn't. Of course the latter individuals were really rated! If you'd come from the well-off, it was a matter of spending money generously on others and not saving it, or else using it to fund projects. Essentially just get rid of! On a more general level there was the street hippy lingo directed against "bread heads" within their own ranks, which was powerful and scathing. Though the abolition of money and wage labour wasn't proclaimed as such as a revolutionary banner, it was palpably there in the atmosphere. Some individuals even refused to touch money for a number of years. Disdaining to sign on the dole, remarkably, they often succeeded. Many people had respect for them and though always in a tiny minority they nonetheless were admired for their ideological persistence, even though the emphasis here has to be placed on ideological and in that sense not too dissimilar to the old slogans. All of this had virtually disappeared by the mid-1970s merely lingering on here and there. A true monetary hell then set in when the only need and even eternal verity in society became money itself. True we all know about this but we didn't sufficiently grasp just how out of kilter this 'new' mood was with the changing but incessant undertow of the previous 130 years or so. Truly, a concerted reaction was trying harder than ever to abolish the becoming of history. Today, we have the abolition of money alright but in the sense of vast teeming millions on the outskirts of Mexico Cities everywhere plunged into the capitalist nightmare of commodity relations without a peso ever passing through their hands. Certainly, we do need more perceptive, in depth, theorizing about the abolition of money – of just how do we get from the here and now of money to the there of the post money economy where value in all its implications has been abolished?

Other things weren't so dramatic but there was a drift here too. The Alfred Street theatre project was set up by Ron Hunt and some friends (shades of Alfred Jarry?) together with the paraphernalia of exaggerated costumes that had characterised this form from Futurism through Dada to the days of agit prop after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Alfred Street theatre figured fairly prominently in a quite ferocious on-going rent strike in Elswick, a run down suburb flanking river bank heavy industry in the west end of Newcastle which later, in 1992 became the focus of bitter rioting between youths and police. The Alfred Street theatre like all other street theatre didn't leave the terrain of art behind nor did it encapsulate a much more lucid trajectory – the shock tactic – inherited from the best traditions of modern art. Even though taking place in the streets with non professional actors, it relied upon the passive spectator / performer dichotomy - a dichotomy that had to be vanquished. Later in the 1970s, a film company, Z Films, based in Newcastle and following on from this somewhat Meyerhold axis produced some docu-fiction social realist films with a mixture of actors and non-actors on aspects of Tyneside life (Launch etc) which were completely without any consequence. Ron Hunt though in the late 1960s was strung out between street theatre and active intervention. He somehow acquired a copy of a super 8 home movie of the Motherfuckers garbage for garbage protest when, during a New York street cleaners' strike, they collected together rubbish from the streets of the Lower East Side and dumped it on the high culture Rockefeller Plaza. Ron really liked this intervention. It was certainly one of the best actions of the Motherfuckers and considerably more to the point than their super-militant histrionics which always invited jail and a far too arbitrary media attention which they hoped would produce a copy-cat effect or would add recruits to their small but fancied, Durutti-like, guerrilla image.

Some of the same people though who were engaged with Alfred Street theatre also simultaneously took part in some excellent interventions. A Surrealist weekend conference with various speakers held in Durham during the heady year of 1968 was wrecked. One of us pissed all over the stage at the same time wildly proclaiming to a 220 plus audience the failures of Surrealism. Obviously the harangue relied heavily on Situationist critique. In response, Patrick Hughes, the Surrealist painter, exploded in outrage, later claiming we'd destroyed the Surrealist movement in Britain. If only! A few years later and Patrick Hughes continued on his way, only this time via a TV series that was painful for its dull conformity and no different from the typical English Surrealist product found regularly in the cultural market place from the 1930s onwards. Ron Hunt objected to this disruption saying you had to give people the chance of finding out about Surrealism, particularly as now, in the shape of the magazine, Transformation a greater emphasis was being placed on its revolutionary kernel. OK but the mag only went as far as praising Cohn-Bendit ("Cohn-Bendit we need you here"), neglecting any deeper critique and was retarded in comparison to Maurice Brinton's fairly commendable effort for Solidarity in reviving the ultra-leftist critique. In any case, as it transpired even this emphasis on the revolutionary kernel of Surrealism in England would be rapidly abandoned.

Surrealism in these islands had always been a very tepid affair, eschewing the real nitty-gritty of the movement – the disruptions, (the Saint Pol Roux banquet et al) the manifestoes, the wild experiment - despite the fact that Surrealism even in France always tended to re-instate art after engaging in provocative acts. Under the conservative guidance of Roland Penrose, Surrealism in England remained a precious arty movement producing nothing significant. It never remotely broke the hold of a dominating artistic culture powered essentially by an Eng Lit ideology firmly cast within a long gone and once glorious past which could never be repeated. It never questioned the boundaries of art and its politics never made any imaginative leap, basically inclining towards leftist social democratic and Communist party sympathies. They stood on the same platform as Clement Atlee, the future post second world war, Labour Party PM extolling Picasso's Guernica and Ceri Richard's Surrealist poster campaign supporting the Spanish revolution that never went beyond a No Pasaran popular front stance. Surrealism in England was, unfortunately, merely a means of displaying a wearisome juxtaposition of images – coming from some kind of delving into the subconscious – in order to change a little the subject matter of traditional and outmoded categories like painting, sculpture, novels and poetry. It tended to reinforce a tradition of benign whimsy which was all too common, basically unable to shock anything apart from some right wing daily newspapers which even then, were avidly looking for copy. In a way, Surrealism made no impact on Britain precisely because it was already its greatest success story. We mean by this, that cornball and popular concept which sees Surrealism as really nothing more than placing disparate objects side by side to create some kind of frisson, a technique which was about to be taken up with increasing alacrity by advertising. Nowadays, these same techniques are accelerating ever faster with computer generated digitalised images. Although English Surrealists met and often struck up on-going friendships with some of the best French Surrealists, you are constantly amazed at how little – if any – of the real meat of Surrealist drift rubbed off on them. Some, like Nancy Cunard, even had close personal and sexual relationships. What on earth did they talk about – merely dreams and art? Surely though it proves the profound grip reaction in England had over even its more tempestuous personalities? Even that slightly more interesting part of English Surrealism – say the collaboration between the psychoanalyst Grace Pailthorpe and the painter, Rueben Mednikoff – lent itself towards the reformist impulse at the Portman Clinic and that notion of civilising the criminal or the insane through changed therapy. It certainly turned out to be instrumental in the now ubiquitous art therapy treatment cum tranquilizers which now fills you with so many predictable groans. Vaneigem's comment in his book on Surrealism is pertinent, "The contempt which the Surrealists heaped on torturers in white coats did not inoculate them against a temptation to co-opt attitudes usually treated clinically for purely artistic purposes". In fact, John Lyle launched the 1960s English Surrealist magazine Transformation with an exhibition of the "art" of the mad in an Exeter art gallery. For those later who were to fall foul of the psychiatric police and who'd developed a critique of art to be forced to paint and draw in the loony bin was quite an insult!

Like English Surrealism, English whimsy – of which it was a part – could also never embrace revolutionary violence against culture, ossified rituals, or some aspects of politics like Surrealism had done in France. In England it tended to fit in too neatly with its well-known eccentric image – e.g. the "wild nature crank" picked out for vicious ridicule in Blast – the Vorticist paper around 1913. Although English absurdity and whimsy had brought forth very penetrating and remarkable things, particularly in the late 19th century in the humour and profound fantasy of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, it rapidly lost its real cutting edge. Even so, both were liked by Queen Victoria who wasn't quite as reactionary as one may think having also once asked a lady in waiting if she could point out Karl Marx to her in some crowded theatre! However it could be said the French surrealists liked Lewis Carrol precisely because it went against the stifling dominant though limited 'rationalism' of post-1789 French ideology, but in England it conformed well with the dominant anti-rationalism of the ruling ideology. Since then, the same vein has kept resurfacing in more and more popular forms from the Goons radio shows to the Monty Python prime time TV shows. Indeed, the leftover English Surrealists in the 1950s commented – perhaps with a certain jealousy upon the mass appeal of the Goons – obviously impressed and wanting similar fame themselves. On a broader level, English Surrealism was more an expression of a current which produced those Heath Robinson whimsical sketches of fantastic machines than any pushing through of artistic negation like happened with the origins of Surrealism in France. At a later date, towards the end of the 1960s, Monty Python was able to divert and spectacularise the serious and subversive intent behind a revitalised and more all-rounded concept of play as a weapon against capitalism and the state into an up-dated comic relief fit for purpose and peak TV viewing times. It was clever recuperation. For all its pitching at English foibles – the piss takes on the upper class accent, the army (often the breeding ground for mad cap pranks anyway and where The Goons were spawned) etc, English absurdity always ends up supporting the status quo and the revolutionary transformation of everyday life is the last thing within its ken. In a sense though some of the British trad jazz scene had prepared the opening via the blues singer George Melly plus the mass market, surrealist packaging of Dick Lester's films. No wonder Melly, Spike Milligan and John Lennon have been called; "the unofficial trinity of British surrealism".

More than this though -and the real point - which should have been emphasised in the Durham intervention against Surrealism was that the annals of English Surrealism in the 1930s reads like a litany of almost everybody who was to become part of the mainstay of the cultural establishment by the late 1960s – from Henry Moore, to (Sir) Herbert Read, to William Coldstream etc. Those, who like Read, became academic cultural critics added nothing of value even though in the 1930s Read's motto had been: "To hell with culture". It's the usual familiar tale of modern times. Latter-day Surrealist influenced individuals in France who became academics like Georges Bataille and Henri Lefebvre really did contribute something in that ever widening momentum of a theory of negative becoming more total in scope. Where would the notion of potlatch be without Bataille; a notion emphasising riotous, festive destruction and where would the anti-specialism of everyday life – the terrain of total revolution - be without Lefebvre? Instead, we had Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art. A joke indeed if the implications weren't to be so dismal. It meant in this climate always coming up against a solid brick wall of incomprehension. Nothing much has changed since in that respect.........If only some of this had been communicated in a more enduring form at Durham. Interestingly, a guy called Anthony Earnshaw tried to be conciliatory during the bust-up. Indeed we still feel some affection towards him because he was a misfit not working at the time in some cultural capacity, but variously employed as crane driver, engineering fitter and lathe turner. He'd evolved his own kind of Surrealist walks in West Yorkshire boarding trains, descending at will and roaming thus for hours. Alas, only to abandon his negativity as slowly but surely he became an Art School lecturer allowing him finally to devote himself full time to art.

Other interventions took place. At the time there was this spate of right wing lecturers who seemed to enjoy giving talks at various university venues throughout the country knowing they were going to get disrupted by left wing Dave Sparts (a Private Eye, lock–jawed, spoof Trotskyist invention) who were going to call them racist, anti-working class etc, which of course they were but that was hardly the real point. In Newcastle, the Sparts were shoved out of the heckling limelight against Patrick Wall by a vociferous cabal hollering "beans, beans, beans" at the top of their voices, (see previous comments earlier on this intervention). In short, it was a playful detourning of an advertising jingle; if you like, it was nonsense for nonsense and a rather more appropriate way of dealing with right wing ideologues. At least it was enjoyable and a rather more infectious way of sparking off the beginnings of some real communication.

Perhaps the most significant intervention though was that against The Mothers of Invention at the City Hall, Newcastle when a bunch of protagonists got up from the audience and shouted "Up against the wall Mothers" to which Frank Zappa replied, "Surely you mean Up Against the Wall Motherfucker". The response was quickly shouted back, "No, no, no, we mean up against the wall, Mothers". Both big audience and performing band were perplexed and neither knew what was going on, and what exactly was being said in this intervention? There was also the in-joke side too, despite the seriousness of intent. Just who in Newcastle City Hall in this relatively out of the way place, in this, if you like, brusquely un-hip town in the boondocks would have heard of the Motherfuckers apart from Frank Zappa, his band and the protagonists? Most likely nobody. Those who stood up and shouted from the audience knew Zappa was one of the hippest dudes of the pop spectacle and "Up against the wall, Mothers" would probably fall on the audiences deaf, unknowing ears. They were right. Zappa did, after all, have some notion of a crazy negation if probably not much more. Remember, through his commercial power and influence, Zappa was able to fix it so that Wild Man Fisher, the very amusing paranoid schizophrenic anti-music musician who couldn't play a note on that guitar permanently glued to his hand, was given a recording session. Some of this complexity could have been suggested in a leaflet. Often there's nothing like some simple, packed with fact explanation to help the bigger picture on its way, and the leaflet could have been scattered throughout the audience in the old time-honoured way. Explanations like this are needed also because people otherwise are left in the dark, most likely considering the protagonists to be nothing more than malcontents with some personal grief against a particular celebrity or pop group. This just wasn't the case, but a little later it was just such damaged responses which were to become more common, spilling over into some kind of psychotic identification like Mark Chapman's killing of John Lennon in New York City in 1980. In fact as early as 1972, a "yob" - according to the media - called Billy Howells really hurt Zappa when he was performing at the Finsbury Park Empire in London. The alternative / libertarian leftist press still very active at that time, never commented upon the event, even though Howells got six months in jail. The attack wasn't probably too enlightened but some kind of explanation might have been revealing. You never know it might have contrasted nicely with a coherent leaflet from the Newcastle intervention and given it an extra dimension in terms of lucid contrast. Though most people don't understand such leaflets, one or two do and seeding starts from there and maybe in this dry desert one day, after rain, flowers will bloom. Moreover, such subversive challenges have to be clearly delineated – simply so they don't get confused with the prevalent, often eroto-maniacal, obsessive assaults on stars - in that combination of adoration-cum-hate. For sure, the latter maybe demonstrates some damaged kind of praxis, but it lacks the necessary ingredient of real enlightenment.

Obviously what was basically being contested here, like in other nonsense interventions, was the passive audience / performer relationship particularly as the pop concerts in the 1960s were moving on from club venue and City Halls to the giant pop festival and were in this respect, spectacles of gigantic reification we often compared with Chinese Maoist calisthenics. Some of us at the time even felt them to be some what akin to fundamentalist religious revivalist meetings in their role as pacification of rebel activity. Whilst undoubtedly true, it also did mean that we'd unwittingly blocked our ears to the last moments of great popular music from the Doobie Brothers to the sheer magnificence of Jimi Hendrix, who as a musician trying to escape the boundaries of music was quite the equal of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell or Django Rheinhardt.

A little later though and we had no real simpatico with the trouble which began to erupt at the huge rock festivals. Sure we thought it was OK, but recognised that it failed to address the real problem of spectacular separation. Though welcoming the tearing down of security fences at the Isle of Wight rock festival, we had serious reservations knowing that even if they made the concert a completely free event, the formal focus, the essential reification, had to be the real core of contestation which the Zappa intervention had hit fair and square. The pop musicians were meant to disintegrate, to commit suicide, to end the music. In essence we preferred that photo from an American Life mag from the riots in Detroit in 1967 where a black guy with his back to the camera is seen walking out of a looted store carrying a double bass. Scribbled underneath, Debord had commented, "Negro carrying a musical instrument after assassinating Mozart".

To be sure, the transcendence of art was particularly central to the developing revolutionary critique in Newcastle and had always been given a sharp focus. However a couple of years later and a lot of hard headed and by then excellent historical knowledge about its unfolding trajectory, particularly throughout the 20th century, had been added as further 'censored' pieces of the jig saw were revealed. The university art school became a beacon of anti-art ferment in response to this call to arms coming from the outside. Finally, sometime during early 1969 persons unknown firebombed part of the art school at night and most of the Art History dept was gutted. It took some time for firefighters to put out the blaze. Although Newcastle university art school never experienced the sit-ins like Guildford or Hornsey College of Art in London, it did more than partake in the most radical critiques-in-action; in fact it was way in front of everybody. In short and to put it bluntly, why occupy a place making mealy-mouthed reformist demands about different course content or inter-disciplinary studies – which always produces some variant of the same old crap – when you can burn the place down? Though nobody was ever arrested for this exemplary act, we were basically accused of being the instigators. To this of course we still proudly plead guilty! Perhaps more importantly a greater decision had been forcibly imposed on us because of this action, meaning there was now little hope of crawling back into safety shot employment on the fringes of the art scene (i.e. art academia) or even to become if you like, "independent scholars." But it went further than that; the Special Branch had names and blacklists threatened and this didn't just concern employment of a professional nature. One of us was even denied employment cleaning out blast furnaces at a steel mill in Rowley Regis in the west Midlands 'Black Country', the manager seconded for hiring new hands saying he'd received a report listing trouble making at the London School of Economics! It was no more than what many experienced at the time as both the blacklists and the official denial of their existence mushroomed. As the years went by, you could have groveled to the powers that be and asked for forgiveness - as many did – but think of the self-inflicted humiliation! In any case, you'd never be really forgiven so why give them the pleasure of capitulation in the first place? We have only to recount the case on a more spectacular level of the Hornsey College of Art agitator, Kim Howells, himself influenced by King Mob, who cravenly some years later crawled up the Labour party hierarchy, became a Welsh MP and an ardent adherent of Blairism and free market ideologies yet got nowhere as his past continued to haunt him through periodic tabloid exposure. In his present position as Minister of Culture, Howells plays on his provocative past though by now his critique has lost all semblance of coherence and comes across like some cantankerous fuddy-duddy.

If we'd had any hesitancy as to where we were headed, there's nothing like the political police to finally focus negative theory clearly for you. As the radical German playwright, George Buchner said in the 1840s; "The Darmstadt police were my muses"! Any immediate hope of making any kind of living in the cultural /educational field had been sealed off in any immediate sense - a survival venue you had messed around with, now and again, on a desultory few hours a week basis. Rarely though are things ever fixed immutably like that. Finally though it was nothing to bleat about as you really didn't want their fuck-crazy, mind-abusing jobs compromising clear thought in any case. For sure you could have been obsequious but unless you were prepared to eat shit, denying everything you'd experienced with the truth of capitulation ringing in your ears for ever more, then yes, baby, you were on the outside. If you'd done what was demanded, asked for forgiveness, ameliorated your words, scrambled your brain, then the world of lies and secure monetary compensation lay at your feet. There's always a choice to be made. Perhaps there was too much pride, perhaps past insults had been too much but there was finally some irreducible voice inside which said: NO.

What happened in Newcastle though sent shock waves throughout the city but like everywhere else where a revolutionary theory was posited, recuperation was its closest admirer. Two architectural students showed quite an interest only to use a few ill-digested ideas to update the crises in architecture as they cynically shaped a new architectural style leading up to the ghastly formal plagiarisms of post modernism. To be sure we'd applauded plagiarism , (Lautreamont's "Ideas improve, Plagiarism is necessary") but not in the sense of aesthetic additions and updating the role of architect! Their names were Nick Grimshaw and Terry Farrell and there's no need here to say more about these couple of twerps though Farrell subsequently was to receive a knighthood! Sufficient to point out that Farrell two decades later designed the monstrous new M15 secret service building in Vauxhall, London and Grimshaw designed the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station. The mini plethora of cartoon hand-outs in Newcastle with new bubble-speak lines and captions also became a marketing idea for a new cartoon comic in the shape of VIS with its now well-known notorious characters and launching very lucrative careers for its illustrators and producers.

Again what is most interesting is something that's really unknown. Some aspects of the Situationist critique, particularly the provocative interventions captured the imaginative of young workers, particularly apprentices in the Tyneside shipyards. In the early 1970s, wildcat strikes mushroomed on the Tyne and the situation became barely controllable both for the bosses and union officials alike. Caught up with the notion of a "Strasbourg of the factories" then current at the time some rather more clued-in individuals decided to concentrate on the waterfront, but whether this had any effect or not isn't clear as general knowledge of their activities remain obscure. (What the "Strasbourg of the factories" refers to is the famous anti-student scandal at Strasbourg in 1966 which had such a massive impact in May '68 in France. In essence it was hoped there could be an even more profound follow-up with some kind of radical intervention in a big factory which would act as a beacon for others to follow) Somehow or another leaflets written, it seems, by Tyneside apprentices, appeared in wildcat strikes suggesting that foremen should be clobbered, local union officials ignored, and extolled wrecking machinery, suggesting furthermore that your lathe bench could be turned into a comfortable bed complete with extra tips on how to permanently dodge work while still getting paid etc. Indeed according to Dave Dunbar of the 1970s Infantile Disorders based in Leeds - though hailing from Newcastle - on one of the ships being built there, there was a secret section with beds where workers slept out of sight of the foremen. Such provocations finally resulted in Jimmy Murray, area boss of the Boilermakers or Transport union, exploding on local TyneTees television condemning "irresponsible Slituationlist (sic) leaflets" and waving a selection of them at the cameras whilst reading out choice phrases. Shock horror! In a way though, the Tyneside engineers had a long tradition of such libertarian subversion. Jack Common had come from their ranks and his account of The Right to Get Drunk Strike in about 1912 was in a similar vein. Common was a member of the Independent Labour Party - one of the best of the old organisations – and, which had quite a presence in County Durham around that time and among its members were many free-thinking libertarian workers who we remember with great affection from our childhood there. Initially Common had come from an engineering family background on the Tyne and was employed as a clerk. He was made redundant and experienced the harsh realities of the means tested dole in 1930s Newcastle. He then went south and ever after took more menial employment like unskilled assembly line work or caretaker jobs partially because he even felt some shame about white collar work he'd previously relied on for survival. Surprisingly, he even refused to become an engineering worker like his father.

In a way though revolt was returning to its roots. Had not Jack Common suggested in those excellent scraps of broad theoretical comment before he succumbed to the role of novelist that the best thing to do in a cinema was to go behind the curtains and look at the audience? Whilst not quite possessing the cutting edge of Vache's revolver pointed at the actors, it's not bad all the same. You cannot help but speculate that there was a subterranean continuity between notions like The Grand National Holiday (as the early form of the General Strike was once called on Tyneside), Jack Common and the events of the very early 1970s in the shipyards. It wasn't only the engineering apprentices but young miners from the west Durham coalfield who began to turn up at the broad, informal Solidarity/Situationist axis in Newcastle, no doubt attracted by the local publicity some of the interventions inevitably acquired and you wonder just what was this relationship between this and the thoughtful early writings of Dave Douglass, who was later, unfortunately, to become such a wooden anarcho-syndicalist and TV hogging demagogue? The concrete backdrop to this were the first shop floor led wildcat strikes beginning to break out in the nearby coalfield. Whatever. It was a fruitful pot-pourri of good old time and modern influences that was also marked by a heavy class bitterness. Miners would turn up in Newcastle on a Saturday night hoping to bed some radical middle-class young women and not averse to employing a bit of simplistic class demagoguery in order to achieve their ends. During 1969 we took a visit to the local Ashington Miners' Gala. It was a boiling hot day and Don Smith started shouting "revolution" over and over again. Responding to this and also shouting "revolution", Chris Gay jumped into the River Wansbeck where a number of young miners were already gambling in the water. Not at all put off by this - indeed kind of joining in – the lads playfully replied in their local pitmatic Geordie dialect which none of us 'outsiders' really understood, yet there was subliminal communication alright.

The bug of the social apartheid still dogs Jack Common in relation to George Orwell just like it does that other forgotten, brilliant engineer, Alfred Russell Wallace, the cofounder with Charles Darwin of natural selection. Although we critically commented upon Orwell in the late 1960s, the fact is, even those of us who'd hailed from Newcastle hadn't even heard of Jack Common. Colin Hutchinson, a guy around the Newcastle agitation, was the first to put together a selection of Common's critical writings in a well-produced booklet called Revolt in an Age of Plenty. Sure we'd made some acid comments about Orwell especially his dumb take on Surrealism though liking many of his essays and thoroughly respecting the excellent Homage to Catalunya, though noting his insistence on being termed a writer and his lack of comprehension regarding the decline of artistic form. As Don N Smith acutely said at the time it was just as well Orwell died when he did as his inadequacies would have meant he'd probably have ended up becoming a pathetic TV hack like Malcolm Muggeridge. If we'd known about Common in 1967-8 it would have been quite a revelation as his attempt to grasp the essence of rising modernity was far in advance of Orwell's and you can sense in some of his often convoluted expression that he's trying to get into shape a theory which was nigh on Situationist. Be that as it may, in passing we note their dissimilar deaths. Orwell died in a University College Hospital bed surrounded by so-called literary lions like Stephen Spender, Muggeridge, Anthony Powell and BBC journalists, Common died as a labourer on a building site in Newport Pagnell, Bucks.

Jack Common was a different kettle of fish as he defied categorisation and couldn't be fitted into some neat specialist place on the bookshelves. He wasn't a Surrealist nor was he a Social Realist, though both left some kind of mark upon him. If he had been a Social Realist, he would have been much more acceptable to the polyglot mix of the Establishment here particularly as social realism is acceptable to British leftist conservatism. Social realism was there well before the "Angry Young Men" writers, which the early Situationists derided in the mid to late 1950s precisely because they were writers and historically ignorant of the revolt against literary form (and which Jack Common had been more than vaguely aware of). Although social realism in the thirties had produced some haunting moments in the films say of Humphrey Jennings etc, as an increasingly denuded style, it was to remain a constant thereafter and to be much embraced by the new medium of television. In no way though did it disturb all those many time-honoured faceted and funded cultural roles beloved of the hierarchy here. Moreover, it was to serve as educator to all those aspiring cadres with high hopes of position in the new frontier posts of the state, whether as councillors, stress managers, social workers or even newly-fashioned crafty Leninists with their aspirations of leading the working classes. Social realism buttressed the emerging palliative concept of a basically PC community politics which nonetheless originally had its origins in the Empire pacification programmes of the old British Colonial Office. In Newcastle, it found an expression in "Z Films", a hip local outfit and previously mentioned, led by a cineaste creep called Murray Martin whose later claim to fame was a film based on the Meadow Well estate, which exploded in riot in the early 1990s. He tried to capitalise on the riot in order to further his career nationally though nothing really came of it. Moreover, the underlying slant of all these films - itself also indicative of social realism - is within a leftist social democratic framework with the state as enlightened facilitator. The state, the state, always the state!

In a sense Jack Common was the epitome and most clearly articulated expression of an open-minded probing which was not un-common on Tyneside and parts of Co Durham. This subversive tendency lurked behind a quite pervasive official cultural yearning it was plainly at odds with. Although it could be said Newcastle upon Tyne was an out of the way place the city nonetheless strived to achieve a major cultural image. City boss, T. Dan Smith in the 1960s banally wanted the city to be, "A Florence of the north". To even think you could build a "Florence" just like that and set aside from its essential historical time and place was a priceless piece of philistine and bureaucratic absurdity, though with the demise of that nonsense Newcastle was to achieve a massive post-modernist impact by ironically ditching its grandiose Renaissance project by recuperating that late 1960s life-enhancing experiment and more than embryonic subversion and turning it into its opposite. The city drew its sting forcing most of the instigators into exile, proceeding to pave the way for a bankrupt modernity by massively promoting 'end of culture' culture in the forms of gigantic displays from the sculptor Antony Gormley's moronic "Angel of the North" to the new waterfront Baltic Exchange Flour Mill, the veritable temple of Saatchi & Saatchi vacuity.

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Below: Photomontages by Stuart Wise (Newcastle, late 1960s) on the Surrealist suggestions for the transformation of Paris, "On the Irrational Embellishments of a City" in the 1933 issue Le surrealisme au service de la revolution.

These were interesting proposals for their time although today they have lost their cutting edge as we are seeing more banal approximations of these schemes in the process of construction seemingly everywhere whilst actual social and environmental conditions are in free-fall.

"Should one preserve, move, modify the following" (No 1) The statue of Jeanne D'Arc no longer riding horse but pig. (No 2) The Obelisk to be removed to the entrance of an Abbotoir where it will be held by a woman's immense gloved hand.

(No 3) The Arc de Triomphe to be turned into a toilet for both sexes. (No 4) Notre Dame. The towers to be replaced by an enormous glass cruet, one of the bottles filled with blood and the other with sperm. The building will become a sexual school for virgins.

(No 6) The Saint-Jacques Tower. / (No 7) / (No 8) Replace it by a factory chimney being climbed by a nude woman.

Written: 2003-4

For other articles on King Mob see the following:

A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)

A Critical Hidden History of King Mob

On Georges Bataille:

On Bryan Ferry: "Ferry Across The Tyne"

On Ralph Rumney: Hidden Connections, Ruminations and Rambling Parentheses

Alex Trocchi's Hour Upon the Stage

BM BIS, BM BLOB, Riot and Post-Modernist Recuperation

Comparisons: From Mass Observation to King Mob

A Drift on Germaine Greer, Feminism and Modern-Day Shameless Ranterism

For Vicki: On What Happened at Selfridges in 1968

Nietzsche, Revolutionary Subversion and the Contemporary Attack on Music

New Introduction for a Spanish Book on Black Mask & the Motherfuckers

New Introduction to Spanish King Mob

Lost Ones Around King Mob

Land Art, Icteric and William Wordsworth

King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s

New Afterword to The End of Music for La Felguera in Spain

THE ORIGINAL: The End of Music (1978)

• 1Libcom note: Ron Hunt's recollections of Icteric can be found here and here.
• 2Libcom note: more on this visit in Introduction for a book in Spanish on Black Mask & The Motherfuckers

In the Icteric years between 1965-67 in Newcastle upon Tyne we had a daft already threadbare notion of 'living sculpture' and all that can be said about it is that it did represent a revolt, albeit a confused one, against gallery art. Cringing though we now do at any mention of our youthful follies, 'living sculpture' was an anticipation of the Land Art movement that was yet to come And when it did it would go big time, earning mega bucks for its practitioners, particularly in America. The scale of some of these land art monuments are such that we are entitled to view them as a form of real estate, little different in their ecological impact to the unchecked expansion of cities like Phoenix in Arizona into threatened desert habitats. This urban sprawl is frequently the object of arson attacks though we know of no instance of land art coming under such sustained assault - more's the pity.

In fact the starting point of this development was an exhibition held in the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968, that significant year of massive global revolt. Though a recuperative reflection of this genuine revolt from those below without name and celebrity, this exhibition had nothing to do with the ambience of total revolution, which was to be the glorious promise at the centre of that amazing year and a promise still awaiting fulfilment. Called 'Earthworks', the Dwan Gallery show and name came from a novel about ecological catastrophe, and the art works were vaguely eco with mounds of 'pungent' soil, some contaminated, some sweet, rooms filled with earth and photographs of scarred wheat fields. Its aims were then modest, though pointless, providing the eco critiques of Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin, and Alan Hoffman (of Black Mask/Motherfuckers) etc with an 'artistic' inflection the latter two would, most likely have dismissed contemptuously. However mice, labour and bring forth mountains and many of these Dwan Gallery alumni are now responsible for Land Art constructions on the scale of, and even bigger, than Mayan Pyramids and with egos to match.

One of them is Michael Heizer who has carved a brutal, enormous incision across a valley in Nevada that involved the abstraction of 240,000 tons of blasted rock. Living in a vast Nevada ranch this paranoid Howard Hughes of Land Art is protected by guards and is funded by the Dia Foundation in New York that curates land artists and their projects of Himalayan proportions. Another Dwan Gallery alumnus is Charles Ross and his 'Star Axis' has been partially funded by a post cold war NASA that has had to become PR conscious and media savvy (e.g. stimulating interest in the search for extra terrestrial life) in order to get Congress to stump up more cash. (This also goes hand in hand with the increased privatisation of NASA and its decline in its military prowess, which is probably only temporary). Another is James Turrell who has sculpted an entire mountain in the Painted Desert. Turrell was also commissioned by New Labour to contribute a piece ('Night Rain') to that expensive white elephant and financial disaster, the Millennium Dome in Greenwich .

These mega projects are becoming the subject of criticism by an increasingly rattled American public, fed up with yet another avant-garde Mount Rushmore. However there is no chance such projects will catch on in the UK. Charles Newington's 'White Horse' (2003) cut in to the down above Folkestone is the closest this country has ever come. This ridiculous imitation of such magnificent monuments as the Uffingham Horse on the Wiltshire downs is meant to somehow compensate for the destruction caused by the building of the Channel Tunnel rail link. However it has aroused the fury of environmental campaigners who rightly say it has caused irreparable damage to a rare and very threatened landscape.

For that reason it is unlikely a similar monstrous excrescence will ever be commissioned and the days when over 150 years ago a landowner could carve out a huge white horse on the Hambleton Hills in North Yorks are long gone. So land artists in the UK like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy have had to be more discreet and 'humble'. Even so when Long won the Turner Prize and was complimented for his 'contribution to English landscape' he encountered nothing but popular derision. As a building worker friend said: 'A frog makes a contribution to the English landscape. But you don't then bung it 20 grand'. Though in the name of conservation, money ensures all shall be well with eco destruction; these artists now have to tread very carefully. And when they start to think big they are obliged to look for the wide-open spaces abroad. Russia could well be next......

The latest nonsense in the mid-noughties is 'Cape Farewell', an environmental project funded by the Arts Council in the frozen north. Turner Prize stalwarts like Gormley and Whiteread, old masters at the art of deception, have been invited to the Arctic to do their environmental worst, for 'Cape Farewell' is dedicated to raising awareness of climate change. Gormley (him again!) has sculpted a 'Snowman' rather than an 'Angel of the North'. And we are seriously meant to think far more highly of his abominable snowman than anything kids could do. Hallowed by the avant-gardist cult of the personality, or rather celebrity, it is a born again snowman, an angel of a snowman, the quintessence of all snowmen because it is made by Gormley who is famous, rich, talked about, invited here, there and everywhere, sits on the Arts Council, is a director of the Sage Music Centre in Gateshead-on-Tyne, has plenty of media exposure and must therefore be a genius. See!

We can wail along with that old saw, a waste of the tax payers' money, and smile at 'The Times' cartoon which has a modern day Titus Oates leaving to see this polar art exhibition with the words 'I may be gone some time', but it does miss the point. Gormley's 'Snowman' can never capture the thrill of seeing a police van during the miners' strike of 1984-5 charge a snowman made by local kids who had just been taunting and pelting them with snowballs. However malice had its just reward that day, for the snowman had been packed around a concrete post. Now that really does add a zing to life and we can begin to experience snow afresh because of it.

As an indication of how times have changed since the mid 1960s and Icteric, a biologist, Tom Wakeford, from Newcastle University has been employed by the 'Cape Farewell' project to 'advise artists on contemporary thinking about the environment'. This involvement by scientists with art is set to increase and will only thicken the smoke screen of delusion surrounding the contemporary avant-garde. A renewable energy power station in the from of a slug or sea worm has been projected for East Anglia and is the 'brainchild' of environmental scientists from the University of East Anglia. Digital artists and digital techniques have been employed in its design, which simulates organic forms.

Should the slug ever be built it is also intended to act as a regional symbol and brand like 'the Angel of the North' or the 'Eden Project' in Cornwall . But there are others, which have been short-listed by the East of England Development Association like the 'Fields of Vision', a landscape art installation using plant stems that generate sound and 'North Sea Train', a train covered in sand, which will tour Northern Europe via Scandinavia. In 1966 we would have been attracted by the idea but the funding would then never possibly have been made available. During that year we were especially fascinated by trains an amalgamation - if you like - of our railway background which had enmeshed with post Russian revolution agit-prop trains and the rinky-dink engines and coal trucks which plied the pit spoil heaps (see photo). None the less our train, apart from the illustrated model, remained a ghost train something that travelled in the imagination unlike this slick intercity/intercontinental business express with yards of avant-garde sandpaper and hype stuck to its carriages.

Finally, in 2008 we have been presented with the biggest monstrosity of all: the proposed 'Angel of the South' to be constructed on a chalk pit at Ebbsfleet, Kent marking Ashford's international railway station and heralding a major development of homes and commercial space on adjacent land. Throwing his hat in the ring and hoping to win the competition there is Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger, specialising in cloned subversion removing protest from its vital place in the streets in order to make a pretty penny. So what will the creep come up with: An enormous caterpillar?

A related avenue of enquiry suggests itself but which cannot be gone into in any depth here. And that is, how much slack does this sculptural mega engineering take up as regards an underemployed engineering trade, now that traditional engineering has been increasingly transferred to the new workshop of the world, China? Would we not be better off seeing this new art/engineering not in traditional manufacturing terms but as a high value added service industry, an 'ideas' economy trading in style and styling, image, brand and logo that has supplanted traditional manufacturing. And are not the contradictions of the 'invisible economy' most visible here with the construction workers fuming at the inequalities in pay, with the lions share going to the likes of Gormley etc. who merely dream up the shit in the first place, leaving it to others to get their hands dirty, constructing it. Far more skilled at publicity than in the use of materials, they invite comparison with the university trained engineers that arose to dominance in the 20th Century and who likewise rarely set foot in a workshop.

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A few insights based on Wordsworth's 1810 Guide to the Lake District

Wordsworth, thankfully unable to escape his childhood and 'his baby dreams' remained stuck like glue in the life of the local people of the Cumbrian fells and being one of the first anti poet poets, revelled in the artless creativity of these people; of the 'silent poet' as he so beautifully put it, set in a landscape still largely cut-off from a burgeoning cash nexus and wage labour and where primitive forms of barter were the main medium of exchange. If Wordsworth saw poverty (he rightly condemned abject want) he tended to see it as the 'happy poverty' of a plain though richly fulfilled way of life. His insights and appreciation are thus enormously prescient, if put in the right light - maybe that 'celestial light' - of a possible world without money reaching for the stars. All that is then needed is for Wordsworth, his mission accomplished, to disappear along with the transcendence of the role of poet.

For Wordsworth the buildings dotted throughout the Lake District were an emanation of the life of the inhabitants where there was no such thing as style and where architectural criticism was a meaningless term as meaningless as literary criticism with both the poet and architect having no place in this society. Wordsworth saw the buildings of the Lake dwellers as an organic part of nature, affected and even augmented by its inhabitants. These lakes and inner valleys were also 'unadorned by any remains of ancient grandeur castles or monastic edifice. And to begin with the cottages' without any intrusion of more assuming buildings' which is then backed-up quoting with approval the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spencer:

'In whose enclosed shadow there was pight

A fair pavilion, scarcely to be seen'

For in this environment in the late 18th and early 19th century, housing and outhouses 'are in many instances the colour of native rocks' rough cast and whitewash - and - being proprietor at liberty to follow their own fancy, so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to be have been erected; - to have arisen by an instinct of their own out of the native rock - so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty'.

The Chimneys: 'the singular beauty of the chimney' and of a quadrangular shape rising one or two feet above the roof; which low square is often surmounted by a tall cylinder giving to the cottage chimney the most beautiful shape in which it is ever seen'.

The Buildings: made of rough unhewn slates -'so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens mosses ferns and flowers. Hence buildings which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature do thus clothed in part with a vegetable garb appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields'.combine these incidents and images together, and you have the representation the representative idea of a mountain cottage in this country so beautifully formed in itself and so richly adorned by the band of Nature.'

The Bridges: 'the great number of bridges' over the brooks and torrents connecting these cottages and 'the daring and graceful neglect of danger and accommodation' the rudeness of the forms of some and their endless variety'I must at the same time add that many of these structures are in themselves models of elegance as if they had been formed upon principles of the most thoughtful architecture' that happy instinct by which consummate beauty was produced are disappearing fast'.

Wordsworth then goes on to unfavourably compare the cottages and bridges with stately homes and the houses of middle rank as he descends from the mountain hillsides into the valleys emphasising the beginnings of horticulture in contrast with the previous descriptions of the cottage garden, especially the topiary 'those elaborate displays of pretty art' which cause one to smile 'while the house does not deign to look upon the natural beauty or the sublimity which its situation almost unavoidably commands'. This is then compared with 'the little garden with its shed for beehives, its small bed of pot-herbs and its borders of flowers for Sunday poesies' etc. At the head of these dales was found 'a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturalists' - 'this pure commonwealth' which only by sleight and apparent ownership can be connected to the mighty empire beyond'. Having adverted to the feelings that justify the introduction of a few exotic plants, provided they be confined almost to the doors of the house, we may add that a transition should be contrived, without abruptness, from these foreigners to the rest of the shrubs which ought to be of the kinds scattered by nature through the woods - holly broom wild rose, elder, dogberry white and blackthorn etc either these only or such as are carefully selected in consequence of their being united in form and harmonising in colour with them, especially with respect to colour when the tints are most diversified as in autumn and spring.'

The Hatred of the Larch: Because it is 'for those who plant for profit'. Larch and fir plantations have been spread, merely with a view to profit, but in many instances for the sake of ornament' reminding you of the behaviour of the Forestry Commission even twenty years ago. None the less Wordsworth comes out with a beautiful description of the larch's 'pink tassels in blossom'. 'The process by which she (nature) forms woods and forests is as follows; seeds are scattered indiscriminately by winds, brought by waters and dropped by birds' i.e. shat out. The seedling is sheltered by bramble or other prickly shrubs - a protective device of nature not chance ' nature as art and providential design. 'Let the images of nature be your guide and the whole secret lurks in a few words; thickets or underwoods ' single trees - tree clustered or in groups - groves - unbroken woods, but with varied masses of foliage, glades - invisible or winding boundaries' trees climbing up to the horizon and in some places - the whole body of the tree appearing to stand in the clear sky'.

The Walls and Pathways: Wordsworth was against 'the modern system of gardening which is now, I hope, on the decline' and which was so far from the truth. What comes across too is a dislike of garden walls something which Wordsworth was to abjure and even practise himself with the garden at the back of Dove Cottage in Grasmere disappearing without demarcation into the slope of the mountain'. Natural pathways as conducive to heightened emotion like that of speech (as in the 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads') 'laying out grounds'.is to assist nature in moving the affections'. Wordsworth objects to the relaying of pathways into 'manufactured walks' brushed neatly without a blade of grass or weed upon them, or anything that bore traces of a human footstep, more indeed of human hands but wear and tear of foot was none'. He remembers 'the most beautiful specimen of a forest footpath ever seen by human eyes this path winds with ' the subtlety of a spirit, contracting or enlarging itself, visible or invisible as it likes' and the fields are like a 'large piece of lawless patchwork'.

'That peaceful harmony of form and colour, which had been through a long lapse of ages most happily preserved'.. Objects that are divided from each other by strong lines of demarcation'. A new habit of pleasure will be formed arising out of the fine gradations by which in nature one thing passes into another and the boundaries that constitute individuality disappear ' the hill overgrown with self-planted wood.'

The New Settlers: The urbanization of the countryside: 'I mean a warping of the natural mind occasioned by the consciousness that this country being an object of general admiration every new house would be looked upon and commented on either for approbation or censure'. The craving for prospect also which is immoderate in new settlers' with their houses deliberately not organic but 'ornamental to the landscape.'

'The rule is simple; with respect to grounds - work, where you can in the spirit of Nature, with an invisible hand of art' Antiquity who may be styled the co-partner and sister of nature be not denied the respect to which she is entitled' Wordsworth laments: 'If the thirst for prospect were mitigated by those considerations of comfort shelter and convenience which used to be chiefly sought after.'

The Palladianism of mansion and estate which removed the village in the manner of Capability Brown plus an objection to the formal architectural style of the age and although Wordsworth doesn't deploy the then fashionable architectural term, you know what is meant. He even envisages houses the colour of iron ore and coal on the Cumbrian plain in the area where coal and iron ore was plentiful only to reject them' He does approve that 'the glare of whitewash has been subdued by time and enriched by weather-stains'. The builder of taste' (in the Lake District ) respecting the surrounding geological base utilising 'the pure blue gravel from the bed of the river' as a 'masonry rough cast to protect from the weather.' 'On the sides of bleak and desolate moors, we are indeed thankful for the sight of white cottages. I have certainly seen such buildings glittering in sunrise, and in wandering lights, with no common pleasure.'

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Ominously Wordsworth ends with recognition of the collapse of domestic industry particularly weaving through manufacture. And also how farms become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and the cottages knocked down as new mansions are built 'out of the ruins of the ancient cottages; whose little enclosures, with all the wild graces that grew out of them, disappears'.Wordsworth's final sentence looks towards a day when the Lake District will be nationalised and protected by something like a very enlightened National Trust which would eschew the primacy of money and business. Such is the man's naivety about the nation state. In this sense Wordsworth's heir truly was John Ruskin's enlightened despotism under a cabal of statist uber-intellectuals who understood what was best for the people and the general good answerable to nobody but themselves. On the other hand, that 'levelling muse' that was at the heart of Wordsworth's perceptions and counterposed to a Ruskin style elite couldn't see beyond the nation state to anything like a vision of an eco-oriented, wageless and moneyless peoples' collectivity the world over and which we have no choice but to search for now.

Here we have another problem. Most of the egomaniacs that make up the school of present day land artists would adore these sympathies and descriptions penned by Wordsworth so long ago; even perhaps desirous of some kind of re-vamped National Trust this time having real teeth. They could perhaps even add to Wordsworth's thoughts in a not entirely insensitive way which is why the present grotesque phase of capitalism needs the services of land artists so badly. Wordsworth had originally put these observations down responding to the fact that the Lake District was on the cusp of one of the first immanent suburbanite invasion that could destroy its character in a 'rash and ignorant assault' and he hoped the new colonisers would respect the ambience he had skilfully outlined, even perhaps listening to him. It was alas a forlorn hope and you cannot help but be pissed off with the guy's naivety if only because it's given rise ever since to so many well-intentioned individuals completely underestimating how brutal capitalism's expanded reproduction must be. Thus Richard Mabey's beguiling niceties - and so enjoyed by a woolly-minded anarchism when put on bookshelf display at eco-camps - is marked by a very eloquent English style, even somewhat Wordsworthian in tone, which perpetually baulks at hitting the nail on the head; a Mabey who in his youth had some of his articles reprinted in Rebel Worker that combative counterpart to Black Mask in New York in the late 1960s!

In the same manner the land artists admire what's there both in terms of natural features and what may have happened since in, for example, the decaying legacy of industrial features - for industrial sites once they also fall into ruin enter into an organic life of their own also becoming part of nature - but then they go one step further than the unwanted incomers into the Lake District during the Romantic era, tearing up what's there in order to impose their own crock of shit where a morphing different kind of beauty was evolving by itself alone. That's an imposition that Wordsworth would hardly have had the gall to even contemplate though in his poem on Yorkshire's Malham Cove he does suggest the awesome sheer limestone cliffs could be moulded into an amphitheatre and ironically, in this instance, prescient of what the land artists 200 years hence could have the technical means and dosh to outrageously impose. Wordsworth notes in The Guide that before his time, mountains and precipices never received any poetical accolade in the verse of Gray, Goldsmith or even more recently, Robbie Burns who, lamenting the thistle cut down by his plough, never really looked up from his work in the field to marvel at the splendid summit of Scafell just across the Solway Firth. (To this we would add Daniel Defoe who viewed with horror the bare-backed Yorkshire mountains of Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent together with their inhabitants).

Today few take account of the beauties inherent in industrial dereliction an experience which should be brought into an expanded Kantian reinterpretation regarding the superiority of nature's terrain over that of art; a terrain whereby the evolving character of a formerly commodified object loses its original use value undergoing a natural redefinition preyed on by the natural world which also today picks up on the memory of a Duchampian ready made having lost the stifling mantle of the art gallery object or, indeed, art itself. Regarding industrial dereliction a further quote from Wordsworth is apposite: 'Let Nature be all in all, taking care that everything done by man shall be in the way of being adopted by her'.

For a brief moment, Icteric played with transforming the landscape - especially the landscape of dereliction - as individual artistic intervention only to definitively reject such a cul-de-sac as we encompassed the praxis of total social revolutionary upheaval and the artless 'silent' poetry made by all and not by one and going farther into this process than Wordsworth would ever dared envisage or could have contemplated at the time. Nonetheless we honour him for becoming one of the first to set out - and remain despite his overtures to conformity cultivating the more enlightened aristocracy as formal Poet Laureate in later life - on this 'unhewn' path.

As for unhewn paths, it wasn't just architecture without architects Wordsworth desired but buildings without builders, or rather, builders without style that went hand in glove with the architects' plan like those required by the neo-classical mansions and Georgian crescents of the time. In reality Wordsworth's sympathy was for the builder who wasn't a 'proper' builder as such, though knowing his structural onions and as practised in the Lake District, the peasant builder in tune and harmony with local nature who'd learned ways of doing and making things alongside husbandry of the land, the animals and haymaking. In its broad outlines this can still be a practical vision of the future now that ecological, and economic, collapse is immanent. We have only to think about the 'Hobbit' houses winkling their way into grounds of National Trust land and flouting the dry as dust and brutally stupid edicts of the planners and in many other temporary dwellings like the 'scratch cities' of the displaced inhabitants of floods and havoc which is likely to be the immediate future of our warmer and much wetter islands; of a flooded Robin Hood Inn in the vale of Wentbridge in South Yorkshire in the summer of 2007 giving off a new inflection to the emancipatory myth of the 'merry men' as temporary lakes stretched far away to the horizon surrounding the decaying industrial infrastructure around a once vibrant Doncaster.

Not forgetting the delight of Derek Jarman's dispersed garden around Prospect Cottage on the shingle beach of Dungeness where found objects - seafarers chains and the like - are semi-disguised with a mass of indigenous sea plants and the only work of merit Jarman ever did. Rather better too than Asger Jorn's seemingly natural Jardin D'Albisola cluttered and ruined by the many rubbishy artistic objects of his own making he placed there and the sad but lucrative backdrop to the guy's superb early theorising. Interestingly too in Wordsworth's Guide mention is made of a garden in Lord Lowther's grounds near Penrith whereby the wild garden had been punctuated by a clued-in gardener 'in twining pathways along the banks of the river, making little cells and bowers with inscriptions of his own writings' which, in retrospect you cannot help but compare and see as something of a precursor of the piece of municipal hillside in Scotland Ian Hamilton Findlay was to turn into a concrete poetry affair nearly two centuries later. However, because the latter's effort quickly became an art event and thus intensively capitalised as artistic real estate, it doesn't point the way to the eco-emancipation of those buildings and their surrounds that might be put in place if humanity is to have a future.

Wordsworth's contribution to the original Guide was initially published anonymously harking back a few years to the original anonymity of the Lyrical Ballads, and an anonymity suggestive of the silent, no profile creativity of the people once they are allowed to be so and an act which never needs to be named. And yet A Guide to the Lake District was the first (and best) tourist brochure ever produced written at the moment when the tourist industry wasn't even a ghost on the horizon merely a gleam in the eyes of the rich. Now that the horror story which is contemporary mass, democratised tourism reveals its brutal characteristics culpable of assisting in the final plundering of the planet's sentient life, Wordsworth's perceptions have poignancy together with a deadly sting in the tale. No longer is environmental sensitivity at the heart of the matter even in the promotion of eco-tourism, rather it is the total packaged deal where travel is enervation with Easy Jet catering for the billions of people themselves 'prisoners of a flattened universe'. Better to refuse most travel if at all possible. Better to look under the stones merely a few feet away from you and from there the last hopes of a new world might spring. Even perhaps as Wordsworth put it: 'We have too much hurrying about in these islands, much for idle pleasure and more from our activity in the pursuit of wealth'. Moreover, even in this early moment of environmental devastation in the first decades of the 19th century, there are times when Wordsworth calls for something of an ecological apocalypse or, at least, the revenge of nature against technological cum industrial/urban assault.

'Weighing the mischief with the promised gain

Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you

To share the passion of just disdain'

Wordsworth emphasised the perceptions inherent in the activity of the walking traveller and in this he was right. We have no choice but to more or less return to this. When Wordsworth revisited the Simplon pass in the Alps in the 1840s after many years absence he fulminates against the new military road (predecessor of the traffic packed super highway in place today) having displaced 'the old muleteer track with its primitive simplicities' which had so inspired him in his youth above which rose steep-sided: 'woods decaying, never to be decayed' and 'the black drizzling crags that spake' knowing they were overwhelming him sensing too they were bringing about the disintegration of all literature as the heightened presence of nature was breaking through all formal artistic representation including that of painting, music and sculpture though without Wordsworth having the concepts in his head to clearly grasp this. Nevertheless, his remarks in Appendix 11: the Kendal and Windermere Railway written in December 1844 for a local newspaper are remarkable when outlining his objections to speed and development containing lines worthy of a more contemporary situationist denunciation in the manner perhaps of the Encyclopaedia des Nuisances intelligent diatribe against the TGV super train or indeed some well chosen words by Rene Riesel.... 'and instead of travellers proceeding with leisure to observe and feel, mere pilgrims of fashion hurried along in their carriages, not a few of them perhaps discussing the merits of 'the last new Novel' or poring over their Guide-books, or fast asleep' a process whereby: 'Art interfered with and takes the lead of Nature' meaning, takes the lead over nature and thus a step backwards.

In BM Blob's 'A Summer with a Thousand Julys' there's a montaged comment on the riot which hit Keswick when 1,000 motorcyclists went on the rampage during the glorious uprisings of 1981. Underneath a photo of a steep rising mountain side, Lewis Carroll's 'Upon the Lonely Moor' - a parody of Wordsworth's romantic nature poems - is quoted:

'His accents mild took up the tale,

I set it in a blaze'

This was just the kind of contradictory clash and frisson that we had been mulling over quietly, and not so quietly, for many a year. In the days of King Mob in the late 1960s a number of us suggested - as is well known - a blowing up of Wordsworth. Back then we didn't have sufficient all-rounded knowledge to put the case in a clearer manner helping unblock retarded, half-baked notions, freeing Wordsworth from the legions of boring, usually academic Eng Lit types with a set in aspic notion of poetry. Here we attempt to restore such a deficit. How about for starters somebody sawing a leg off that giant table and chair on Hampstead Heath?

Some Thoughts: 2006-8. D and S Wise
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For further recent commentary related to the above read the following in the "Wreckage & bric-a-brac" series:

A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)

A Critical Hidden History of King Mob

On Georges Bataille:

On Bryan Ferry: "Ferry Across The Tyne"

On Ralph Rumney: Hidden Connections, Ruminations and Rambling Parentheses

Alex Trocchi's Hour Upon the Stage

BM BIS, BM BLOB, Riot and Post-Modernist Recuperation

Comparisons: From Mass Observation to King Mob

A Drift on Germaine Greer, Feminism and Modern-Day Shameless Ranterism

For Vicki: On What Happened at Selfridges in 1968

Nietzsche, Revolutionary Subversion and the Contemporary Attack on Music

New Introduction for a Spanish Book on Black Mask & the Motherfuckers

New Introduction to Spanish King Mob

Lost Ones Around King Mob

Land Art, Icteric and William Wordsworth

King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s

New Afterword to The End of Music for La Felguera in Spain

THE ORIGINAL: The End of Music (1978)

Bataille's most important work The Accursed Share was originally published in its complete form as Le Part Maudit by Editions Minuit in 1967 though many sub-sections had escaped in passages published here and there in magazine form years previously going back to the early 1950s. It must have seemed the predictions in the book were coming true a year later in the French uprising of May 1968 when Bataille's discussion of surplus potlatch morphed into the revolutionary festival of the oppressed. However by then far more coherent developments based initially on the theory of what to do with the surplus were available and it is somewhat unfortunate Bataille's major work was to be eclipsed by events. If by 1967 the work of The Accursed Share was already done, thereafter and post '68 it is the book's vagaries that become influential, Bataille in general having a huge influence on post-modernist nothingness. The worst of Bataille - and their was much - became the endless, evasive tedium garnishing the hip ideology of counter revolution which followed though this depended more on other aspects of Bataille's oeuvre which will be discussed here shortly.

The Accursed Share is prefixed with a quotation from Blake 'Exuberance is Beauty' but really much of the book is taking up with a discussion of energy and so a further aphorism from Blake would have been exactly right: 'Energy is Eternal Delight'. Rereading the book carefully this time I was forcibly struck by the fact there is a lot of science in it, not quite 'hard' science but not soft either and that his discussion of energy and of the biosphere anticipates Lovelock because he treats energy, which he says ultimately derives from light (and which in a manner of speaking includes gravity), as a constant of the organic and inorganic. It's what happens to it, how it evolves, changes, transformed and is consumed, whether in a good or bad form, that is the critical factor. So it would not surprise me if The Accursed Share begins to attract a readership once more, a different sort of readership to that of ex-artists (who were the first to grasp the revolutionary significance of Bataille's ideas) composed of economists, ecologists, geologists and scientists particularly physicists like Freeman Dyson who as we know is spellbound by Blake's dictum. (And so much of Blake is spellbinding and The Accursed Share was the push that I needed to finally acknowledge that Blake was the greatest, the most consistently revolutionary, the most experimentally minded of all the Romantics. The closest to the nascent industrial proletariat and to industry, he was the last social visionary known and published who genuinely did 'see' things, (there were many others whom alas had no profile) that part of him disappearing underground to reappear for example amongst the miners like in my elderly uncles and aunts as it vanished amongst 'the poets' except as affectation, but without that brilliantly scary capacity among individuals liberally ensconced among the industrial working class to 'see' adding to social critique as it so palpably did in Blake. And what was true of Blake was also true of many individuals among the dispossessed of the English revolution of the 1640s). Moreover it was also a vision of wildness encompassing sexual and social longings and liberation as an indivisible whole that was common to a scorned "irregular Methodism".

Bataille had also been in consultation with a scientist George Ambrosini, a research director at the X-ray laboratory. Bataille explicitly says that without Ambrosini "I could not have constructed this book". In fact France played a crucial role in the discovery of X-rays (Madame Curie) and in the build up to understanding how nuclear fission works (Louise Meintner) and Bataille and Ambrosini must have discussed the finer points of atomic theory with Bataille acting as the junior partner. As a generous and remarkable footnote of relevance to the present by Bataille concedes "This book is in large part the work of Ambrosini. I personally regret that the atomic research in which he participates has removed him, for a time, from research in general economy. I must express the hope that he will resume in particular the study he has begun with me of the movements of energy on the surface of the globe" (my emphasis) The collaboration between Bataille and Ambrosini doesn't quite come off. But what should have been a portent of things to come and something to be taken to a much higher level, is now as far away as ever and it is as though this fruitful collaboration never existed, a mere one off and never to be even remotely countenanced when contemporary conditions are crying out for a cooperation of the best there is. No single individual is capable of uniting all knowledge into a coherent revolutionary whole and we are condemned to trying as best as we can.

The sense of apocalypse that pervades the book, of a sudden and catastrophic release of energy, is that of the atomic bomb. Bataille must have known of the first and second law of thermodynamics and their universal relevance though never mentions them specifically. And yet the entire book is about energy as an overlooked category of political economy, indeed the basic category implying energy as work by which he largely means the work of the industrial proletariat, and what is then done with the surplus, surplus energy rather than surplus value (Bataille appears to avoid the concept as too limiting). And yet there are significant glimpses of other forms of energy, that of light, of photosynthesis, the energy of the biosphere including its geology, all of which comes as a revelation to modern sensibilities now attuned to the immanence of another form of apocalypse, nature's apocalypse arising from the capitalised burning of fossil energy the most essential qualification of all regarding the burning of fossil fuels and the one that can never be accurately discussed.

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In a biography of Bataille by Nick Land entitled The Thirst for Annihilation Land wrote that the crucial themes traversing Bataille work were laughter, excrement and death exhibiting themselves as all encompassing, irreconcilable and irreducible as Bataille himself. The trouble is Bataille was also something of an exhibitionist and though never a pre-celebrity, liked to shock for the sake of it. Nonetheless it meant he became a very easy target for the vast extent of post modernist recuperation.

In 1928 Bataille pseudonymously published a porno novel The Story of the Eye. Around this time or in response to the book, Breton called him an obsessive and an excremental philosopher. For certain the conflict between these two was quite something. But ever since the late 1960s and early 1970s the greater lucidity of Andre Breton in comparison to Georges Bataille has melted into the background and a shift utterly related to the reactionary nature of these abysmal times. Bataille came to constantly deploy the notion of 'transgression' especially transgression against any form of sexual morality at the same time as he fought shy of discussing anything to do with 'transcendence' more particularly transcendence of the fundamental basics of a society increasingly rotten to the core. It is a necessary distinction to make because the last decades of the 20th century - and since - transgression in terms of changed behaviour in everyday life has become something which capitalism has quite happily been able to take on board, indeed becoming its very lifeblood. The shock value of transgression has thus become greatly weakened even helping the money-making machine on its apocalyptic way as it careers headlong towards the brink of the greatest precipice in human history. Transcendence, especially social revolutionary transcendence was fundamental to Breton and even as he got older - though in a highly contradictory manner - he at one and the same time became more ridiculously mystically artistic (e.g. nervous of the shamanic objet d'art he'd collected in his apartment thinking they had profound powers) and more lucid (e.g. his contribution to the short but to the point surrealist text on the 1956 Hungarian revolution which strongly supported the sovereignty of the workers councils). Bataille, though always interesting and often very sharp indeed lacked that fundamental clarity. However his writing always breathes life eschewing the academism (and academic role) that destroyed Foucault and the even more miserable plethora of post modernists that were to follow e.g. Bataille's first wife married Lacan and Derrida also was deeply influenced by Bataille. As for Foucault he never even dared go as far as Bataille and Foucault's notion of "limit experience" was merely a dilution of transgression. For Foucault, "limit experience" was the derring-do of an acid trip driving out into the Arizona desert listening to Schoenberg! (Wow, the audacity of such a thing). As for us "limit experience" we could perhaps say was the day we ended up working on an IRA building site where some of the guys openly talked of soldiers they'd shot from Belfast's Divis Flats thinking we were from N. Ireland and as meek northern English specimens shaking and keeping our damned mouths shut. Well, if not "limit experience" it was also 10 times more hairy than chance encounter!

Nonetheless today in comparison to Andre Breton, Georges Bataille's much mitigated influence is seemingly everywhere especially in that whole slew of installation artists and safe marketable seeming provocations that never really question the artistic paradigms, roles and other representations of the old order. For certain it sits comfortably in an art gallery and well before the 1997 major exhibition in the Pompidou centre in Paris called Formless devoted to a rereading of Bataille ideas as explanation and adjunct to a diverse range of post-war art. This exhibit though was finally to artistically canonise Bataille.

It's not as if the professional pundits aren't completely unawares of some of this; it's just that they haven't got to mention these essential truths too much, for if they did they'd be out of their professional dissimulators jobs pretty darned quick. Nonetheless occasionally they have to insert a few telling lines as you have to keep on board a certain veracity but it is a tightrope they walk. Consider some of the following in relation to the exhibition: 'Undercover Surrealism: Miro, Masson, and the vision of George Bataille' put on at London's Hayward Gallery and elaborated by that snaked-tongued cultural journalist Adrian Searle in The Guardian (11/5/06)

The exhibition was basically centred around Documents edited by Bataille along with Michel Leiris running to 15 issues between 1929/30. They dreamed of setting up editorial office in a particularly decrepit Paris brothel the prostitutes being enlisted in the editorial teem.

If Bataille is known today to a general audience, it is as a pornographer. Undercover surrealism celebrates the perverse, the contrary, the deliberately incongruous, and the arcane. The show was a cabinet of curiosities and at times a chamber of horrors. Catholic kitsch passion bottles were displayed in the same section as Picasso's 'Three Dancers'.

The exhibition was the brain child of art historian Dawn Ades and part of the team that created the 1978 'Dada and Surrealism Reviewed' in the Hey-word gallery and included a small section devoted to Bataille. Picasso had an entire issue of Documents devoted to him. Bataille remarked Picasso was a man "who could love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe". According to Searle it was surprising how little remains genuinely shocking. Mostly the frisson of transgression has died away, if only because we have seen so much. As with so much that was once deemed beyond the pale, the thrill has gone, or at least has found its market niche gone mainstream---. The most abject pornography imaginable is but few clicks away on the internet, while surrealism has been thoroughly co-opted by the advertising game. "One final point: it is the photographs rather than the conventional art that still provokes recoil like those taken in a slaughterhouse". (Adrian Searle, the Guardian 11/5/06)

And then we have others adding their ten penneth cultivating the Bataille legend of sheer mystique.

Consider Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent January 2007 writing on the Chapman Bros' exhibition at Tate Liverpool:

'There were lots about Bataille and Deleuze etc. But no mention of the commercial enterprises that exist to satisfy all teenagers appetite for the gross and morbid. I was reminded - of - the horror comic constructions kits that were popular when I was young. Is Bataille really a bigger influence? Great chunks of aesthetic DNA had been excluded from the essays about their work.'

Consider journalist Johann Hari 5/2/2007 on The Art of Subverting the Enlightenment

'If a single work of modern art has penetrated our distracted consciousness in the past decade it is the penis-nosed, vagina mouthed child-mannequins designed by Dinos and Jake Chapman ---The Chapman brothers offer a kind of punk art that spits in your face punches you in the stomach and nicks your wallet while you are puking on the floor'.

Hari describes himself as 'staggering around their retrospective in Tate Liverpool'. Hari sees them as anti-Enlightenment even equating them with fascism and definitely exemplifying the irrationality of the times. However, the reality is far more banal. They are the perfect expression of capitalism - emptily provocative, shallow, pseudo-profound and animated by the all consuming desire for money and fame no different from the Gallagher brothers. Jake Chapman has declared 'The Enlightenment project ' virulently infects the earth'. He says this not because he believes it or that he agrees with Horkheimer's denunciation of the Enlightenment but because it pointlessly shocks - just like his reply to the question: 'Does Bataille's formulation of the conception of transgression relate to the way that work like your own is sometimes suggested as being part of a necessary force' to which he replied: 'Yes - a good social service like the children who killed Jamie Bulger'. The only possible result: - An increase in the personality price rating of this enfante horrible of art whose sole concern is the amassing of wealth through the media savvy milking of the shallowest notoriety. Hari points out 'foolish critics' (i.e. duped critics unable to see the obvious) have praised the 'moral anger' in the Chapman's work but to Hari this is immoral anger, celebrating injustice and cruelty as 'transgression' and remember a favourite concept of Bataille's who is the 'the Chapman's intellectual hero'. Bataille more than anyone else has been responsible for the latter day cult of De Sade as pornographer, post-modern shock jock and tasteless advertiser and which is designed for one purpose only - to mask the fact De Sade was at times a genuine revolutionary. Despite Bataille's pretending to be more De Sade than De Sade was himself, the only achievement of the 20th cult of De Sade has been to take him out of the Bastille and lock him up instead in the myriad bastions of museums of modern art. Hari obviously hates De Sade just as any English moral philosopher would be honour bound to (shades of Bertrand Russell here), simplistically accepting without question the conventional wisdom that De Sade was - well - no more than a sadist enjoying killing and torture for its own sake, forgetting he courageously spoke out against the death sentence at the height of the terror as well as describing the totality of all forms of sexuality, the 'nice' ones and the 'nasty' ones. Now both stances took courage - enormous courage.

Hari however is right to hate that other disciple of Bataille, Michael Foucault: 'In a telling parable about post modernism, Foucault went to Iran in 1978 to witness the incipient revolution---. He was searching for a new intellectual project. He found it in Ayatollah Khomeini! As Hari says had Foucault stayed on in Tehran he would have been eventually hanged for his homosexuality. Jake Chapman had objected to the opposition to the blowing up of ancient Buddhist sculptures by the Taliban - and which the Chapman Bros' supported - as 'strange' describing it as 'live, vital religious opposition to something that has a direct and local meaning to them'. To which we would reply why not blow up all of the Chapman brothers works, Dinos and Jake included for they are their 'art'. Without them it is meaningless junk because the artist today is the art. Now that would have more than a local meaning for its truth would resonate across the globe and would be a blow for universal freedom.

They also made a mint at the Frieze art fair, perhaps around £250.000 for a few hours crap work and that's is by the by merely a day's trading and a price far above your average seller of vegetables in disappearing trad style markets.

Consider also Louise Jury, arts correspondent to The Independent 1st August 2006 on the ICA exhibition of Juvenilia: August 2006. Dinos Chapman exhibited a papier-mache money-box pig made when he was eight. 'The Chapman Brothers' principle capacity in recent years has been to shock, whether through sexually mutated child mannequins or the doctoring of an edition of Goya's etchings'. Need we go on ad nauseum?

Regarding Bataille and his huge influence, let's deal in particular with Genesis P-Orridge and his partner, Lady Jane Breyer (now deceased) seeing they obviously come to mind. Indeed the very title 'Lady' is hardly ironic because they really did/do worship the established hierarchy and both fairly recently performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London. This very life style orientation bears all the hallmarks of Bataille's influence - realised in the flesh as it were - especially the afore mentioned 1920s novel, The History of the Eye which in itself is also Lautreamont without somehow his name never in the frame. The latter's presence is there in the dismembered self of body parts, the recombinant recombined DNA human being, the chromosome reconstructed human being and the bizarre reflection on Darwinism and natural selection. (The original Songs of Maldoror appeared two years after The Origins of the Species and in the same year as Mendel's discoveries which ultimately would lead to the analysis of DNA and its aesthetic, spectacularised equivalent which Porridge is part of. And perhaps too it's worth remembering that Breton hated the fact Isodore Ducasse had deployed the aristocratic non-de-plume Comte de Lautreamont though this was possibly an ironic wave in the direction of Lord Byron). However, it only needed Orridge and deceased partner to take Bataille's aestheticisation of De Sade and Lautremont a step further - a seemingly but only seemingly - more radical step for it to become 'real' as each swapped living tissue which the couple epithetically styled 'pandrogyny'. Essentially Orridge and deceased partner are about making a fashion statement out of body parts and always and despite the social workery tinge of helping poorly children is always with an eye to potential money making by keeping the whole reconstruction/deconstruction within the safe orbit of the gallery system exactly on the lines of creeps like the Chapman Bros, Stewart Home etc. Orridge's is no longer about clothes promo but promoing flesh leaving behind their older vanguardisms like industrial music - because industry is now passé - and body parts, concomitant essentially with a growing absence of feeling, is now the thing.

However, the living death of market appeal is nothing as linear and clear-cut as this because like so much else nostalgically pointing to the demise of creativity especially emphasised on the pop circuit who constantly reform their pop groups for yet another in memoriam final act and curtain repeated ad infinitum. Obviously such post festums are preludes to accruing more dosh so Porridge put together industrial music's Throbbing Gristle for a 'final' concert in 2004. The reunion - the pointless reunions - clearly mark the utter deadness of the age whether in the pop milieu or a lot more sadly - as we really cannot expect much else from a pop world on its last legs - the last Rebel Worker, the last King Mob, a revamped situationist group get together - and so on. The sentimentality of all this is truly astounding, especially as the latter examples involve no crude money making beyond ridiculously imitating the style of those who do.

After the failure of his hedge funds in the late 1990s, Michael Milken saw new money making prospects in the emerging bio-economy as a source of futures trading. A decade later and Orridge and Co are the artistic counterpart of Craig Venter's publicity mad machine purveying the potentiality of life forms as pure capitalism and stock market quotation. Doubtless there will be many more followers: I cyborg as a fashion statement.

However, rather than go into Craig Venter here and quite what a monster the guy is dwarfing any Dr Frankenstein in his grotesque billionairing it is best to refer to the next section on the bio-economy and not its pale Orridge-like reflection. One further point, the bio-engineering text deals with Das Kapital. Bataille's take on Marx and social revolution was very limited, even verging on the appalling. Unlike the deeper reflections around Breton which tentatively pointed towards the greater coherence of Lettrism, International Lettrism and the Situationists regarding the central questions of our age, Bataille was largely to equate Marx with the state, especially the Stalinist state as filtered through the crap the French Communist party put out which he half supported or thought of as an inevitable next step throughout the whole of Europe. Yes, sadly it was all this despite Bataille's slight incursions into Trotskyism in the late 1920s which from then on he was unable to develop. It was to prove a fatal limitation and Bataille's downfall in terms of a future worth remembering.

Above: A Portuguese Remembrance (Lembrando) of Stuart Wise in a 2022 edition of Flauta da Luz (The Enlightened Flute)