Home Thoughts, From Abroad

This made me smile today. I have always had a penchant for pseudo-deep 1970s schmaltz (I could rave on for hours about Peter Sarstedt: I am a Cathedral in My Mind; My Father is the Pope you Know; etc) and can't believe I hadn't heard about Clifford T. Ward before.

He was a British singer-songwriter, big in the sixties and seventies (and onetime teacher of Trudie Styler - a lot to answer for). One of his most successful albums was Home Thoughts, with Home Thoughts from Abroad its title track. You can listen to it here (and I would suggest you do).

The lyrics alone make the song seem saccharine, and don't bear much interpretation (see below), but the song itself is sweet and heartfelt, catchy without being cheesy - and, above all, very very earnest. It equates lovesickness with homesickness, in a way we can all recognise, and the mention of Browning, Keats and Shelley lends it a very English charm (though perhaps not gravitas):

I could be a millionaire if I had the money

I could own a mansion, no I don't think I'd like that
But I might write a song that makes you laugh, now that would be funny
And you could tell your friends in England you'd like that
But now I've chosen aeroplanes and boats to come between us
And a line or two on paper wouldn't go amiss
How is Worcestershire? Is it still the same between us?
Do you still use television to send you fast asleep?
Can you last another week? Does the cistern still leak?
Or have you found a man to mend it?
Oh, and by the way, how's your broken heart?
Is that mended too? I miss you
I miss you, I really do.

I've been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth
And they all seem to be saying the same thing for me
Well I like the words they use, and I like the way they use them
You know, Home Thoughts From Abroad is such a beautiful poem
And I know how Robert Browning must have felt
'Cause I'm feeling the same way about you
Wondering what you're doing and if you need some help
Do I still occupy your mind? Am I being so unkind?
Do you find it very lonely, or have you found someone to laugh with?
Oh, and by the way, are you laughing now?
'Cause I'm not, I miss you
I miss you, I really do.

I fell for it the first time I heard it and I knew I really loved it when I heard the catch in Ward's throat at the thought of "aeroplanes and boats" coming "between us"... For some reason the mention of Worcestershire, and the general theme, make me think of Armistead Maupin's character from Tales of the City, Mona Ramsey - after the first few books doesn't she end up as a San Francsico émigré, somewhere in deepest, darkest Englandshire, probably with a faulty cistern, and with many aeroplanes and boats between her and Barbary Lane?

Kathleen Jamie: "not all primroses and otters"

I am a sucker for aura. Walter Benjamin was never wrong, and so it is that live music frequently moves me to tears while back home on the CD player the same music, played or sung by the same individuals, can sound utterly banal. There are of course many notable exceptions - but, nevertheless, my CD collection is littered with mediocre albums of bands and artists who have since vanished into a well-deserved obscurity, and yet whose concerts I can still recall with a vivid, palpable sense of the wonder and reverie into which their music sent me. 

And yet I never learn... I still buy the CDs of soon-to-be-forgotten artists - and sometimes, now, it as much as a memento of that reverie, as it is a statement of belief in the true talent of the performer. Book readings are the slightly more grown-up equivalent: I enjoy attending them; I always go determined not to buy anything and find myself two hours later with a buzzing mind, waiting in the queue to have my book signed by the author. And so it was tonight that I found myself sitting opposite Kathleen Jamie, telling her about my childhood immersion in Gavin Maxwell, and about Kathleen Raine and rowan trees (although I may have mistakenly referred to Raine as "Kathleen Jamie". Oh dear).

In explaining the falling away of the aura of a work of art in the process of its reproduction, Benjamin turned to nature, and to the "aura" of natural objects, writing of, "a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you," and the way in which we experience their "aura" simply by looking at them. For Benjamin, "aura" is tied up with our relation to objects - and with immediacy, and therefore authenticity. If an object is a reproduction, how to therefore know one's position to it: if I am looking at a mountain, I know I am looking at a mountain; I know how big or small I am in relation to it, and how near or far from it, and also that I am looking at it right now, ergo it exists. If, however, I am looking at a fibre-glass mountain, every certainty about my relation to that original object is thrown into flux: I don't know if the mountain even exists. 

For Benjamin, the desire to reproduce objects is rooted in the desire to "bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly"; i.e. to have and to hold - to own - these objects, even if only in replica. Benjamin was, of course focussing on the "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction", and not on the natural world, however, were he to have cast his gaze towards "relics of nature in the age of mechnanical reproduction", Kathleen Jamie would have been able to provide him with at least one significant example: the replacement of the famous whale jawbone on Berwick Law with a fibreglass replica.

Whales and their bones - latter day relics - appear throughout Jamie's most recent collection (and my most recent purchase): Sightlines. I have only dived in deep to a few pages here and there so far, but feel the same sense of excitement that I get when reading the opening pages of "Ring of Bright Water." Hearing Jamie talk was to be reminded of the magic of reading and writing about nature, the alchemic preservation it can enact, and the tingling sense of "closeness" to the natural world which it can enable - without recourse to any attempts at Benjamin's aura-killing replication.