This is a personal project of mine to design a cover for Aldous Huxley’s novel “Island”.
The novel, written in 1962, is a utopian counterpart to the author’s own dystopian “Brave New World”. It tells the story of a cynical journalist who is transformed when he arrives at the fictitious island of Pala and is embraced by a society based on eastern mysticism and what could be described by the modern reader as “new age” philosophy.
The edition of this book that I own has a cover that perfectly encapsulates its contents. We are looking up a spiral staircase toward a painted ceiling of heaven, or perhaps looking down the staircase, to the floor of a forgotten library. Maybe even we are looking at a mirrored floor, which reflects a staircase above us. We could be on a stairway to the heavens; we could be an infinite spiral of thought; we could be the universe itself – a grain of sand in a painted spiral shell. I love the cover of this book as much as I love the words inside, precisely because it ‘is’ the words inside, but in a visual form.
(I love the back of this book also. There is another spiral there, this time in biro, a scribble made by my partner. I’m unsure whether she was just trying to get the ink in the pen to flow and the book was the nearest thing to hand, or whether she was drawing a spiral on a piece of paper, and the pen tore through. But I like the symmetry with the cover, and the fact that it’s her).
I used to carry this book with me everywhere, and I don’t think I would have done if its contents weren’t so succinctly summarised by its cover – because though I rarely read its contents, I need to be reminded of them. I need to be reminded that there are other people who see the world as I do, and I need to be reminded sometimes to look.
Borges considers fact to be inseparable from fiction. He is attracted to the philosophies, theologies and sciences of this world for their aesthetic value, not for any notion of truth. He takes an idea and extrapolates it to its logical conclusion, highlighting the tenuous relationship with ‘truth’ that the original idea held, while simultaneously enriching the world with the idea’s poetic potential, its uncertainties, and its mystery.
He is compared to Valery and to Poe, though to my mind his work has as much in common with science fiction. I think of the short story by Isaac Asimov in which a robot finds a way of committing murder without breaking its programmed Laws of Robotics – laws that should make the act of murder impossible. The way in which this apparent impossibility is revealed as possibility through an entirely logical series of developments, could be the work of Borges – though Borges would have made it a story about that mythical slave the Golem destroying its Cabalist master. And I suspect that had Borges indulged in hallucinogenic drugs rather than dusty libraries, he could well have written tales like Philip K Dick’s ‘Roog’, in which we are told of the daily theft of metal urns by alien invaders only to discover that we are in fact a dog watching the dustmen collect the bins.
‘Labyrinths’ contains a selection of Borges short stories, and some related essays. The short stories take up the bulk of the book, and contain many of his best (though the omission of ‘El Aleph’ is noticeable). Here we find ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’, in which Borges considers that hermeneutical problem of deciding who actually creates the meaning of a piece of writing – the writer or reader. In the story a modern reader of ‘Don Quixote’ sets about re-writing the book by living Cervantes life to the last detail before he writes it – the result being that “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” (Notice, incidentally, the phrase ‘almost infinitely’ – Borges chooses his words carefully).
Elsewhere we have ‘The Circular Ruins’, which deals with the dream within a dream, the narrative itself an endless cycle, ending as it begins. We have ‘Tlon, Qbar, Orbus Tertius’, a mock essay on a fictitious society, which amongst other things references fictitious books in its footnotes. And we have ‘The Library of Babel’, the search for the Book of Books. I won’t elaborate on them, as they only really make sense in their entirety, so dependent is their meaning on their form.
But I will tell you more about the parables at the back of the book, written when he was old and growing blind. They are just a page or so in length, the necessity to dictate them encouraging him to be even more concise than usual. These I read often, as for me these are the most interesting of all – paradoxically he seems to see clearer than ever in his blindness. Take his description of classical gods in ‘Ragnarok’, an account of a dream, if it indeed it was a dream (it may be purely invented, though the distinction is ultimately unimportant). The gods appear one day in the library, evidently having lost their humanity through years of exile:
“…low foreheads, yellow teeth…. thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage. Suddenly we sensed they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.”
Borges can be dark, he can be playful, he can be pedantic. But he is always unmistakeably Borges. Or is he? My favourite piece in this book casts doubt even on that certainty, the author seeming to genuinely struggle to identify where Borges the person ends and Borges the writer begins:
“I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor…Years ago I tried to free myself of him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”
There are stories in ‘Labyrinths’ that I still have not yet read. I know some passages inside out while others remained undiscovered. And I like it this way – after all, once I’ve been through all the passages, I must by definition have left the labyrinth – and I don’t think I want to ever do that.
Because I too like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee… and most of all I like the prose of Borges.
This is a personal project to design a cover for the Tones on Tail album ‘Pop’.
Formed by ex-member of Bauhaus, Daniel Ash, Tones on Tail was a short-lived but creatively fertile project which resulted in a string of EPs and one terrific album. Combining many musical genres, ‘Pop’ plays like a weird dark bubble of psychedelic-electronic-goth. Idiosyncratic, inventive, and bursting with energy, it remains a highlight of Ash’s career.
There is an image reproduced at the beginning of this book. It looks at first glance to be a photocopy, so stark is its contrast and so unclear its details, though it is in fact an image taken with a pinhole camera. It shows the author John Berger standing beside the first of the many people he writes about in this book, an artist who lives alone in the countryside. Very little can be seen of their surroundings, just the hazy silhouettes of a tree and the artist’s house. The figures themselves are silhouetted also, their features and clothes indiscernible, their smiles unseen. And yet the tenderness that exists between the two people is clear. Her head leans towards his, his body supporting hers like a sturdy tree trunk. And you can just make out the unkemptness of the author’s hair, as though such trivialities as appearance have been thrown to the wind.
It is not only a wonderful portrait, but a carefully chosen one, it being the visual equivalent to the writing that follows. For the writing, like the photograph, conveys so much about its subjects with so little. There are around thirty ‘chapters’ here, each one just a few pages in length, and each one being about a person who touched Berger’s life in some way.
He writes about a particular memory of each person, a memory that in same way defines that person’s essence, in the way that a portrait can. It reminds me of the drawings of Rembrandt, or Maggi Hambling. Those artists capture the essence of their subjects often with just a few strokes of the pen, and Berger writes with a similar economy. There isn’t a single superfluous word in this book. Take one word out of any of these portraits and the likeness would be lost, yet if you were to add one word more, it would stick out like an ugly ink blot.
Take Berger’s description of a Parisian photographer, now begging in the Metro:
“His eyes are an intense pale blue, and from time to time they twitch, as a dog’s muzzle twitches when investigating a scent. Its hard to watch his eyes without feeling you’re being indelicate. They’re totally exposed – not through innocence, but through an addiction to observation. If eyes are windows on to the soul, his have neither panes nor curtains, and he stands in the window frame and you can’t see past his gaze.”
Or this, his description of a motorcyclist about to mount his bike during a race:
“[he] puts on his helmet and stands very still, waiting, small, a shearwater looking out to sea from a cliff edge.”
Berger’s own humanity shines through every page, as does his respect for those he writes about. One of the most moving of all these moments is the one in which he visits a prison and reads a story to one of the prisoners, a man he has never met before but whose predicament leaves a lifelong impression on the author:
“The aim of incarceration is to reduce all exchanges with the outside world to a minimum. And this has an effect on voices. Ours, as we read, were unlike prisoners’ voices. Our voices were volatile – like swallows in flight seen through a window. Maybe our voices were more interesting than the story we were reading.”
The book is full of such acutely observed insights. And of course, this being Berger, a lot of these insights are into the nature of Art, its relationship with the people he describes and also with himself.
“A wisp of grass is blown onto one drawing. Tiny fruit flies alight on another. A scrap of leaf, transparent like parchment, drifts from a nearby field of maize on to another sheet. If I did not see these things being wafted on to the paper I would have mistaken them for painted marks. I’m no longer at all sure where to draw the line between art and nature, Becoming and Origin. This is the mystery that keeps me peering even after the light has dimmed and the chickens have gone quiet.”
I like this passage particularly as it goes some way to describing his own writing. It is hard to draw the line between the people he describes and the nature that surrounds them. People are closer here to their animal cousins than in anything else I’ve read. The motorcyclist who is a shearwater on a cliff edge, the photographer whose eyes twitch like a dog’s muzzle, or the artist who learns about her nature through cuttlefish, octopus and molluscs. It feels like some kind of distilled astrology, but one based on observation and earthy truths rather than the muddled light of the stars above.
But above all, the collective whole of these portraits becomes a celebration of individuality, and of shared humanity. You feel you would love to meet every person in this book, and you’re left, invariably, with the feeling that you have had that pleasure. Insightful, tender and wise, it is one of the most life-affirming reads I can think of, and one to return to again and again.
“The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. While we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box.
‘It’ll be of us’, she said. And waited expectantly.”
This was a personal project of mine to design a cover for the JG Ballard novel ‘High Rise’.
First published in 1975, ‘High Rise’ is sharp, witty, but undeniably apocalyptic story of a high rise block of luxury apartments, whose inhabitants descend into violent tribal conflict. Its message is simple – that modern life and architecture suppress the basest human instincts in such a way that they bubble dangerously beneath the surface, waiting for a trigger to set them violently free.
I’m looking at what appears to be a photograph, of what appears to be a view outside of a window, taken from inside what appears to be a room. Yet there is something not quite ‘right’ about the photograph. The space is clearly impossible, yet it is impossible to pinpoint why (I’m reminded of Escher’s ‘Ascending and Descending’). Art is always a fiction of sorts, and this is an exhibition entitled ‘Magic Show’, so I should be expecting the visual sleight of hand. And yet I find my mind insisting on attempting to make sense of the space Sinta Werner has portrayed in front of me, refusing to accept its unreality. It is the trick of the conjuror, as played by an artist.
Parallels between magician and artist are highlighted throughout ‘Magic Show’, a Hayward Touring exhibition, currently showing at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. It is an impressively diverse exhbition, mixing actual magicians’ props and paraphenalia with artworks in many different media. Some work directly references the world of the illusionist, such as Juan Munoz’s photographs of the fingertip mirrors used by card sharks, whilst other work’s relationship to the theme is one more of technique and intent – such as Sinta Werner’s exquisitely perplexing space collages.
Sometimes the technique is intentionally exposed, such as in a series of films by Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, in which inanimate objects become animate – a rope becomes a snake, writhing viciously before two men, who cut it down with swords; boulders in a desert rumble slowly into life, rolling their way toward a shared destination. In all these films, no attempt is made to hide the artifice of the situation – the strings are quite literally visible. This honesty allows the viewer to engage with the work as a spectator, not an interrogator, and enjoy the touching, quaint absurdity of the actions unfolding before them.
The highlight for many will be Zoe Beloff’s “A Modern Case of Posession” – a film of a play about French psychologist Dr Pierre Janet. The play performed is interesting enough, but it is the way that it is presented that impresses the most. The film of the play is projected onto a small theatrical stage set. The film is shot in 3D, and with the aid of 3D glasses the viewer is treated to a wonderful experience, in which the miniature actors appear real enough to pick up off the stage and hold in the hand. The manipulation of scale and the viewer’s perceptions of it are both brilliant and playful.
‘Magic Show’ is an excellent exhibition, one which entertains, surprises, and occasionally perplexes – just like all good magic shows should.
‘Magic Show’ is on at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff until 12th September, after which it moves on to Pump House Gallery, London