Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

I recently bought a new camera for the team I head. A photo one, I mean. I was a bit fed up with our old optical device and its battery-operated mechanism. Taking advantage of a little underspending we had in our budget, I went for a brand-new, digital model.

Now, I'd be the first to admit that when it comes to modern gadgets I'm not the smartest of fellows. It takes me a while to get from A to B. But, get there I usually do. On this occasion I had the instructions in one hand and the camera in the other one and I was trying to work out the different buttons and functions. One of the latter was how to turn the photo operation into a video one. I pressed the relevant button and voilà!, I was able to make a three-second-long short clip. That's when the problem started.

After a while I wanted to reverse to the photo function but was unable to do it. I kept pressing the same button I'd pressed before and each time I was prompted to the main menu which, obviously contained all the operations associated with videos, but not with photos. I spent probably a good thirty minutes until my natural curiosity led me to press the shutter and... yes, you probably imagine the rest. The camera went back to its original and more important function: that of taking photographic images.

Later that evening on my way back home I had Bruce Springsteen's 'Wreck On the Highway' on my mp3 player. And it suddenly dawned on me how modern technology has come to complicate our lives so much, leaving a trail of anxiety behind it everywhere it goes. The earlier camera episode had put me in a foul mood as I couldn't quite figure out which button to press. A device that should have been a source of happiness - the photos taken by the team members would have a better quality henceforth - had instead given me cause for despair. Pretty much like I feel everytime I'm faced with a piece of furniture from Ikea, for instance.

The Boss's song, however, reminded me that not everything in life need be Daedalean. 'Wreck on the Highway', the coda of Springsteen's fifth album, 'The River', is a simple, short story made up of three characters, two of which never get to know each other and yet are intricately linked. The effect of both lyrics and music is chilling to say the least.

In its twenty verses there isn't one single metaphore or simile. What we have instead is a tale about misfortune and love told from the point of a man who goes home at the end of his working day. Whilst driving back to his house he comes across the eponymous accident on the motorway. According to him, 'There was blood and glass all over/And there was nobody there but me/As the rain tumbled down hard and cold/I seen a young man lying by the side of the road/He cried Mister, won’t you help me please.' We can only guess that the man stays with the dying fellow by his side because he later watches an ambulance driving him away. He then imagines a girlfriend or wife being woken up by 'state trooper knocking in the middle of the night/To say your baby died in a wreck on the highway'. The last stanza finds the man reflecting on the scene he was exposed to before he tells us how sometimes he sits in the dark to watch his 'baby as she sleeps/Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight/I just lay there awake in the middle of the night/Thinking ’bout the wreck on the highway'.

That a trope-free song like this has a such powerful hold on me is due in no small part to a combination of factors. First of all, two of Springsteen's cast of three are passive members in his tale. The victim of the car accident just utters one line, which is all about getting help. He probably realises that he is going to die anyway but another part of him thinks there might still be a way out. This approach renders the passage personal as we've probably met people in real life who have been involved in car accidents, maybe we're those people ourselves, scarred mentally and/or physically for life. Springsteen's working man's partner is the other passive character in this story. She is the recipient of the man's anxiety when he wakes up in the middle of the night, watches her sleep and thinks of how lucky he is to have her.

Because of the inaction of two of Bruce's trio of personages, we're left to create a narrative for them. That's the second element. It means in this case to ignore their foibles and concentrate on their virtues, or virtue rather, as this consists mainly of being pondered upon by the working man. The victim probably has a girlfriend or young wife, thus hinting at a blossoming life himself. But beyond that we're in the dark. What if he was a violent man who beat his partner up? What if they had a terrible altercation, he rushed out in his car and crashed it as a result? Any of these theories are soon relinquished as we're presented with the ominous knock on the door by the state trooper in the middle of the night. This line taps right into our basic instict. Some of us have some experience of being roused from a heavy sleep by the doorbell in the small hours. It's the harbinger of tragedy. The working man's 'baby' is the final link in this sequence. As he climbs in bed and holds her tight, he is probably thinking how fortunate he is, even if they might have had a terrible row the night before over whose turn it was to do the washing up.

The third reason why 'Wreckage on the Highway' has such a powerful effect on me is the music itself. The combination of organ and guitar add an ethereal atmosphere to the song, especially at the beginning, whereas the voice and drums adopt a more mundane and nonchalant tone. It's not strange to find the organ providing this otherwordly timbre. After all, it was the instrument of choice in many churches in centuries past. It was commonly found perched right up, near the top, the better to be closer to God, apparently. However in this instance it finds a formidable rival in Springsteen who sings in a casual way about what could be just another day in this working man's life. Together, organ, guitar and voice come up with a message delivered in the simplest of terms: live your life to the full, because you don't know if the next victim on the highway will be you.

On my walk back home that evening I imagined that the man who witnesses the wreck in the song, had probably had a tough day at work, maybe even struggling to work out a new gadget (not a digital camera, obviously, this track is from 1980, plus the man was most likely to be a blue-collar worker as that was the type of person Springsteen chiefly wrote and sang about). But I often thought that he'd had his share of problems and faced with that car accident on the way home, he suddenly realised that no matter how complicated life is, you can lose it in a second. That's how simple it is, too. About the same time this happened, I got an e-mail from an American poet who had been following my blog since earlier this year. He had travelled to Cuba some time ago and, in a tribute to his grandmother - also a poet -, had left some of her poetry books in the shelves of bookshops. Yes, I know, pretty subversive. But what I liked the most was that after an initial electronic exchange, he sent me his own work, "iPoems for the Dolphins to Click Home About". It contains one of the funnier and wittier introductions I've ever read:

"This is a book of poetry. If you are reading this right now, I
am surprised. I’m shocked. I am jolted that there is nothing
good on TV, that your Wii is not more tempting, or that you
would not instead enjoy managing Fantasy Football or
taking a walk. Sure you would not rather read the Twilight
saga? Face it, if you do not read the Twilight saga, you and
your prom date are going to have very little to talk about."

Sometimes we're so immersed in our little technological, modern, celebrity-filled world. A world that makes us angry and frustrated when we fail to grasp the importance of this or that function in our new gadget, that drives us mad with its coldness when we don't get a response from our brand-new, state-of-the-art, sophisticated devices because machines, unfortunately, are not very good at responding. It is at times like these, that I switch off and tune in to the Boss and like that man at the end of his working day, think of the 'wreck on the highway'.

© 2011

Next Post: “Let’s Talk About…”, to be published on Wednesday 2nd March at 11:59pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

The lights are down, the auditorium is in semi-darkness, nervous coughs can be heard here and there, the expectation mounts, anxiety kicks in. Someone rushes out of their seat, onto the aisle and up the corridor. A last-minute trip to the lavatory perhaps? Two presenters walk to the front of the stage carrying an envelope with them. They're both world-famous celebrities. They take turns in reading out the nominees' names. After some slight banter, they then proceed to open the envelope. The male presenter looks at the camera and out of his mouth the following words come out: "And the Oscar goes to..." The female presenter picks up from where he leaves off and finishes the sentence: "Hillary Mantel". Or is it Jonathan Franzen? Or how about Jacqueline Wilson? Maya Angelou? Margaret Atwood? Salman Rushdie?

The odds are that you won't hear any of those names this coming Sunday 27th February at the 83rd Academy Awards. And why should you, anyway? After all Rushdie et al are not actors, they didn't learn their craft in drama school but in front of a typewriter/keyboard. Leave acting to actors, I hear you say. Yet could there be something else to it? Should we not acknowledge writers' contribution to arts not just as fine écrivains but also as purveyors of drama, suspense and, above all, well-researched characters?

That an author's knack lies in his or her power of luring us into the thick forest of their narrative without caring one jot what dangerous creatures and plants we'll encounter in it, is beyond dispute. And I make no distinction between a novel, a short story or a poem. Whenever you come across well-written fiction, you are exposing yourself to somebody else's world. The writer will use his or her power of make-believe to unveil secrets that he or she might not even be aware of, and should they realise that they're sharing too much, they will be in a position to claim that all was done under the auspice of fiction. Meanwhile their work will - hopefully - affect you both consciously and unconsciously.

And yet, we would never think of labelling that kind of writing as acting. Maybe it's to do with the lack of physicality. Reading is - mostly - a passive activity, whereas acting, even when a performer is merely sitting on a chair, suggests movement. But to me there's no much difference between Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' with its fragmented storyline and a novel like 'Small Island' by the British writer Andrea Levy with its divided monologues.


'Small Island' tells the story of Queenie, Hortense, Gilbert and Bernard in the aftermath of the Second World War. Queenie is married to Bernard who is sent away to fight in the conflict. She has all but given up any hope of seeing him come back and decides to let out the rooms in her house to Gilbert and Hortense, a married couple who have just arrived from Jamaica. Through flashbacks we learn of the leading characters' previous circumstances.

However, the most significant element in the novel is the use of monologues to signal different points of view. To this one must add the use of various norms of spoken English, from Queenie's medley of Received Pronunciation and the vernacular to Gilbert's Jamaican patois.

Levy's chief achievement is to provide an individual platform for each of her four characters to develop. Except for Bernard, whose contribution is shorter (not strange given that he is more talked about than doing the actual talking), the other three are used deftly by Andrea to depict an important period in British history as accurately as possible. Like a thespian who is well-versed in the art of imbuing his or her characters with their own peculiar traits and quirks, Levy performs a similar trick by making the reader see the world through the eyes of just the one personage in each chapter.

Easy as it might sound, the perils of writing in different voices are various, but one stands out: credibility. The writer owes it to the readers to make his characters' points of view believable, nuanced and distinct, otherwise the charge of implausibility will rear its ugly head. Under normal circumstances in most works of fiction there are usually one or two weak characters that we, as readers, think could do with some tweaking here and there. When the point of view shifts to the first person singular, we feel that our responsibility has increased tenfold. Same with actors. A performer doing rep will probaly take part in a matinée production of 'Much Ado About Nothing' and later on will play Iago in a very different setting. It's not just the lines he will have to learn, but the gestures and mannerisms that set both characters apart.

This is the feat that Andrea Levy pulled off with 'Small Island'. In order to write as accurately as she did about an era that preceded her (she was born in 1956) she had to inhabit the role of each and every member of her dramatis personae. The result is an amazing novel whose views on class, gender and race are precious material for people like me, interested in the UK's rich history, even if this information arrives in the form of ficton. It's also further evidence that the drama techniques pioneered by the likes of Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud have escaped the narrow confines of theatre and affected the literary landscape, albeit unconsciously. I seriously doubt that Levy sat in front of her keyboard and thought of disturbing the reader's subconscious mind through a mix of light, sound and visual images which would take precedence over the written word. And yet in 'Small Island', I found myself sometimes focusing more on the visual stimulus than the accompanying text, as in this passage when Hortense arrives at Queenie's house for the first time:

"But when I pressed this doorbell I did not hear a ring. No ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. I pressed once more in case the doorbell was not operational. The house, I could see, was shabby. Mark you, shabby in a grand sort of a way. I was sure this house could once have been home to a doctor or a lawyer or perhaps a friend of a friend of the king's. Only the house of someone high-class would have pillars at the doorway. Ornate pillars that twisted with elaborate design. The glass stained with coloured pictures as a church would have. It was true that some were missing, replaced by cardboard and strips of white tape. But who knows what devilish deeds Mr Hitler's bombs carried out during the war?"

Of course, authors' natural shy disposition (the majority, that is, some others are unashamed publicity-seekers. Stop hiding, Rushdie! I'm talking to you!) makes them unlikely performing material. And they do get their just reward for occasionally researching and becoming their characters. The Bookers, Whitbreads and Oranges attest to that. However, with the amalgamation of many art forms (sculpture with dance, poetry with video) it's not too far-fetched to believe that at some point in the near future we'll see a world-famous celebrity saying: 'And the Oscar goes to... the author'.

© 2011

Next Post: ‘Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music’, to be published on Sunday 27th February at 10am (GMT)