Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. Published by Simon & Schuster.

Dorothy Day was disdainful of the inertia of the Catholic Church in the U.S.A. in the face of mounting inequality and increasingly mechanised and unethical warfare. Such disdain led to a very antique solution. A Medieval House of Hospitality in New York for the exponentially increasingly impoverished and homeless population, influenced by the vision of Peter Maurin, a French vagabond who chanced into Dorothy. This House of Hospitality (which originated from the paper, Catholic Worker) was of its time; it helped to alleviate the worst excesses of the Great Depression. It also helped to provide a refuge for conscientious objectors, who were still sent away for their refusal to draft during World War II. It was part of a sustained vision for a humane world, in opposition to warfare and the idea that a military government could be expected to reliably alleviate poverty, which also included farming communes.

This story is well-known, and telling it risks cliché, or consigning this difficult struggle to the annals of grisly twentieth century (American) history. We needed Houses of Hospitality then: now, especially in the U.K., we have a benefits system which ensures that nobody needs Dorothy Day’s fiery and urban brand of voluntary poverty. Yet so much of the latest biography of Dorothy Day – written by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph – places her squarely in the maelstrom of the twenty-first century; in conflicts which have simply not been resolved yet. Her endless struggles for racial equality are skilfully and presciently highlighted in the book; she persistently and forcefully asked why there so few black Catholic priests, and was part of a committee lambasting anti-Semitism before World War II. She had a fierce dispute even with some in her House of Hospitality in New York City – one of her fellow residents and community members called her a ‘nigger-lover’ because of her profound and pioneering generosity to the black community in New York. On the question of racial discrimination, she was at odds with so many around her, even Catholic writers, like Hilaire Belloc, who influenced the Catholic Worker so profoundly.

That Dorothy Day’s life matters now, and her struggles are unfinished (she was also an anti-nuclear campaigner, and nuclear warheads emphatically persist), is made alive by this timely and meticulous biography. Nor is Day’s struggle solely “American”. We learn, in countless ways, that Dorothy was a committed Anglophile, and that her ideas and dynamism were charged with interactions with English writers. W.H. Auden, of all people, rescued the New York Catholic Worker from financial ruin, and Dorothy corresponded with Aldous Huxley, sharing his fear of a modern society in which true humanity is sanitised away. The relationship is one of the many surprising relationships that the two biographers draw attention to, informing us that Huxley and Day were in “full agreement about prayer as an act of mortification”.

Thus, for those in the U.K. energised by Day’s message, this biography brings Day’s vision across the Atlantic and pinpoints its enduring relevance to the conflicts of today. This is aided by the extensive research of the biographers, which leaves no stone unturned in Dorothy’s early life. A harrowed incident in Dorothy Day’s Greenwich Village days recalls an Augustine-like moment in her journey towards faith, one that Day rightly avoids in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, in which she witnesses the heroin-induced death of one of her accomplices. However, while the biography beautifully relates the full intellectual and political history of Day’s life, I do find it difficult to reconstruct what daily life at the New York Catholic Worker must have actually been like. Namely, we don’t get a sense of how Dorothy Day’s day took shape, and how New York Catholic Worker – at its less intense moments – was lived. This is slightly frustrating to someone with such an enduring commitment to a Catholic Worker community in London. Yet perhaps we must seek this elsewhere, and embrace how deeply pertinent this biography makes Dorothy Day.

Companion YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIvUZnAdXwk

A Spanish civil servant in Cadiz, Joaquin Garcia, was due to receive an award for his twenty years of ongoing service and commitment to the Municipal Water Board. Attempting to give him his well-deserved medal, however, it was suddenly perceived that his desk had been totally unoccupied for at least six years, despite receiving a salary. This incident was widely reported in the British media, and was perhaps used as a scapegoat for many key things in the UK’s Brexitty imaginations. It was also circulated in the market-dominated English speaking media, where it became a quaint story about something dark and sinister. That it is only in the idle and hyper-bureaucratic European Union, maybe, where this type of skiving tomfoolery would be tolerated and unrecognised for so long. That the Civil Service in many European countries is deeply inefficient, and this would never be tolerated in a utopian free market economy where lots of different types of water are sold to us by private contractors. He is a pantomime villain on a much more sinister website called HR Morning – where all the genuinely villainous HR professionals gather, like Macbeth’s witches – in which his work-shy attitude is scorned by these eldritch monsters from the deep. (For context, another article on the website is ‘5 times it’s ok to fire an employee on FMLA leave.) “He was – check this out – slated to receive an award for two decades of ‘loyal service’.” (https://www.hrmorning.com/now-this-is-what-youd-call-an-employee-engagement-problem/)

A man like Joaquin Garcia is indeed one of the greatest villains in a culture where work is not really a set of obviously productive and meaningful tasks any more – like digging holes, cutting furzes or escorting billionaires – it is a sacred duty, and pretty much the only sacred duty that is meaningfully universal. People who shirk this sacred duty are blights to be quashed by the Machine. Work might be boring or even obviously meaningless, particularly in the context of so-called white-collar jobs, but we must respect it as a sacred ritual that must still consume all the time that we have been assigned on this earth. Work is now usually conceived in terms of the hours it involves rather than the projects that it entails – the question I have always been asked at work in England is not “what are you planning to do today?” but “what time are you on ’til?” Work is a God to worship. When so many are looking for a cushy job, or have to claim unemployment benefits in which they are forced by the DWP to maintain an aggressive timetable of looking for work, a man like Joaquin – who apparently abuses the privilege he has been given and scorns his probably comfortable duties in the Civil Service – is unthinkable.

In ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber, we find a totally different take on this issue. Graeber points out that the case of Garcia is extremely common in the modern work-place: only that he went to different measures to most, but measures that were totally reasonable. Garcia was extremely good at his job, and when he started working for the Municipal Water Board he was an extremely effective and prolific civil servant. However, the people who supervised him were suspicious of his far-left politics – which, of course, had no bearing whatsoever on his work at the Municipal Water Board. For this and perhaps other reasons, they stopped delegating him any duties at all, despite his desire for duties and the fact that he specifically requested them on a number of occasions. Thus, he was forced into a situation that will be very familiar to a lot of ‘workers’. He had to sit at a desk all day, doing nothing but pretending to be busy, while people looked over his shoulder and expected him to inexplicably be doing things of importance. He might as well have read books or spent all that time planting a permaculture garden, but he was forced into a kind of active inertia which, in itself, is psychological turmoil. Perhaps as if Sisyphus was staring at the boulder, pretending to push it, as ancient Greek mythological bureaucrats stared for eternity. Instead of endure this obvious indignity, which he repeatedly protested, he decided to stop coming into work and spend his time working – for example, reading philosophy.

Graeber uses a large amount of qualitative and quantitative data to prove a very basic thesis: that many people have utterly pointless jobs, which he eloquently terms ‘bullshit jobs’. Detailing the example of a young man who works as the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor for the German military, Graeber gives the following account of what a so-called ‘Bullshit Job’ entails:

This I consider the defining feature of a bullshit job: one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing it. He might not be able to admit this to his coworkers—often there are very good reasons not to do so. But he is convinced the job is pointless nonetheless.

He spoke to people all over the world who claim to have totally pointless jobs that many of them had left due to the eventual realisation that they were utter bullshit. He spoke to people who claimed their job was to answer e-mails and receive telephone calls but that most days they did not have any to answer. He spoke to people who mentioned having to carry out totally pointless tasks that they knew they could write programs to carry out, but stay because it is the only way they can identify of having a respectable enough salary to buy things. He cited examples of people who work in a needlessly complicated chain that could be effortlessly simplified. For example, the kind of people discussed above who work for a contractor of a contractor of a contractor – and that none of these contractors have any reason to exist, they are merely self-perpetuating entities that create imaginary work out of thin air.

This is not just in the public sector. In fact, in the private sector, there is still a huge demand for individuals to sit around and do nothing, and it is ridiculous to deny this essential reality. He classifies different types of ‘bullshit jobs’, what they entail and the reasons they have for existing. Flunkies, for example, make their pay-masters look more powerful: they occupy desks to make an organisation look more threatening or serious by the amount of desks it has occupied. This happens a great deal, for example, in investment banks, where Graeber points out that a huge amount of the work supposedly carried out could be easily automated. He cites the assessment of a programmer employed to carry out the review of one particular bank, who estimated that 80% of a private bank’s 60,000 staff have jobs that could have been automated. This is a huge number of people – what are they all doing? Why do they all go to work, day in and day out? Before you suggest that they must all do something that is of direct benefit to society, bear in mind that there have been times when people have stopped banking en masse and things have been largely fine. As early as 1970, bankers in Ireland went on a six-month strike, and there was very little overall effect on the Irish economy. To put this into context, Graeber’s book includes an analysis of the net worth of certain professions as carried out by a 2017 study by several US economists. It was somehow discerned that for every precise $1 that bankers are given, they are decreasing $1.50 worth from the overall welfare of society.

Do they all realise they have completely pointless jobs? Keynes predicted mass technological unemployment in the 1930s as economies move to the point of being able to automate tasks at an unprecedented rate, and he predicted it soon. Technological unemployment, of course, is when all productive processes become so mechanised that the work-force decreases dramatically. As Graeber notes, we have been experiencing a kind of mass unemployment for nearly a century. We hear constant predictions about how robots will nab 47% of jobs by 2050 and what have you, and yet Graeber argues that we have reached the pinnacle of automation already:

Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.

It is the professional and managerial sector – rather than any other sector like retail and manufacturing – that has seen such an explosion of jobs in the Western world, and in which jobs have proliferated. It is unfair to say that many managers and finance workers don’t work – yet it is sure that many spend only half an hour or an hour a day on their actual duties. Graeber points out that we could very easily institute a three-day working week with absolutely zero effect on our dear and worshipful ‘economy’. Yet something has made the idea of ‘work’ last well past its sell-by date, and it is not our lust for respectable salaries. Graeber discusses how work emerged as a quasi-religious ideal in Western Europe.

Work—and specifically, paid labor under the eye of a master—had traditionally been the means by which such adolescents learned how to be proper, disciplined, self-contained adults.

In other words, the need for a ‘work ethic’ and a related ‘working week’ was an ingenious way in which everyone, including the middle class, were kept out of trouble. The aristocracy, of course, were free to hunt, write sonnets and engage in indulge demented sexual fantasies before their inevitable religious conversions. This is especially the case in the UK, where, particularly in the nineteenth century, the working week became more brutal and religion began to decline. Work became the only way in which people reliably interacted with each other after compulsory church attendance declined. Remember that Church’s function was not just the consumption of the body of the Anointed One but it was also the way in which people met each other, checked up on each other and gossiped about each other. Before the nineteenth century, people largely did not go to ‘workplaces’ – they worked from home as farmers or slaved over their particular craft. A huge majority of the population worked in agriculture, which does not involve the ritual of a frenetic commute on the Tube with a gingerbread latté. About a quarter of people in the UK worked in agriculture in 1801, according to data collected in An Industrial History of Modern Britain. Now, the World Bank estimates that about 1% of people in the UK work in agriculture.

I think it’s easy to speculate on what happened, and I think this is something Graeber only touches on, but it leads to an interpretation of my own. In the UK and much of the industrialised world, after the Industrial Revolution, work became the religion of society – the way in which you could make friends, formed social networks as well as the structure and discipline which kept one living an ordered life. In the UK, we do not have instituted religious holidays or carnivals – they began to peter out in the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution’s increasing demands on the populace. Rather than religious affiliation – there were Catholic villages and Quaker villages – a particular textile mill or factory became the religious glue (religio – I bind) which held a town together and gave it the permanence and ritual spaces to encourage people to actually talk to each other. It is a well-known fact that people will seldom talk to each other in a consistent way unless they are coerced. After rapid industrialisation and automation, there became less and less for anybody to do but still predominantly industrial institutions.

Work was such a religious and sacred duty – the creation of jobs became akin to the saving of souls, and the Conservative Party or Labour Party of whatever country you live in now tout how they will create jobs as their sacred mantra. Despite the fact that there is not enough to do any more, work is our religion, and perhaps a more difficult religion to wean ourselves off than Graeber realises. Without work, we have no reason for communion, no identity, no structure or discipline to our days, despite the fact that we don’t necessarily do anything there. I remember talking to a friend, a veritable anarchist, somebody who enjoys tinkering around with electronics and has a healthy disbelief in the credibility of the institutions of society. He said he was looking forward to work because he was incapable of managing his own time and he wanted somebody else to dictate that he had to be somewhere and do something.

Thus, despite widespread feelings of boredom, lassitude and alienation, we still feel some psychological need for ‘work’ as an ordering principle for our lives, separated of course from the more old-fashioned notion of doing useful things with our time. This is perhaps the chief limitation of Graeber’s analysis: it is going to be a big existential struggle to convince humanity of the folly of ‘work’. The policy that Graeber most suggests is a universal basic income, in which everyone is paid a basic amount of money without any obligation to find one of the entirely infernal bullshit jobs that are lamented by Graeber. This policy would rectify a situation in which one of the most meaningful things you can do is stay at home, yet first we need to rediscover ways to hold society together that aren’t going to ‘work’ every day. There could also be systematic support for those who choose to research, conduct artistic projects or study obstetric gymnaesology from home in a future economy in which work is at least no longer a permanent imperative.

Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. Rating: Axon

(Much of the incidental symbolism for this blog-post was suggested by Amadeus Harte and Jack Smithies)

About two weeks ago, in the pre-Coronavirus era, a very quiet and Stoic gentleman in Manchester hands me a leaflet proclaiming the new Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He seems too polite and graceful to be mad. I learn that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a nineteenth century Indian man who claimed to be an awaited prophet within Islam. Not only does he seem rather meek, but this particular Messiah claimant himself also seems rather nice. He proclaimed an Islam of absolute peace and protested against those who had used it for the ideals of warfare. He also genuinely believed in fostering understanding between different religious groups – particularly, dialogue between Hindus and Muslim. This was in the nineteenth century, which was the beginning of the sorts of strict religious identities that we see today. In his last book, A Message of Peace, he proclaims, “We are mutual neighbours. This requires that we become friends to each other, with purity of heart and sincerity of intentions.” Not only this, he was adept at recognising sins beyond the canon of sins that are usually recognised by the zealous clerics of different religious traditions.

In fact, as I read A Message Of Peace, I am struck by how coherent and rational it all sounds. Ghulam Ahmad offers a liberal and universalistic interpretation of the Qu’ran (of which I know nothing.) He states that the Qu’ran opens with the surah al-Fatihah, which protested against those who try to “monopolise” God’s love for themselves. Ghulam Ahmad’s essence and conception of himself as the Messiah is that the other Messiahs were insufficiently universalistic. “As it is also written in the Gospels that Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) observed that he had been sent only for the lost sheep of Israel.” Ghulam Ahmad believes that Jesus carried on living and eventually died a natural death, a sort of inversion of the death-and-resurrection idea. Far from being crazy, Ghulam Ahmad seems like an interesting thinker who is eminently worth listening to.

Why can’t we have a new Messiah? Yet imagine how wildly improbable it would be for a religious teacher to teach exclusively orally. It contradicts the very idea and essence of the mass media. Ghulam Ahmad’s idea seems to have been that he was a Messiah for all people, and a protest against cultism. He states that the Aryas maintained the idea of divine revelation only to their followers. In this case, I suppose I find myself defending our modern atomised religious traditions because the mass media distorts the subtlety and nuances of prophets. This is why we have a “Christian tradition”, an “Islamic tradition”, etc., because these traditions stem from a prophet who taught certain people thoroughly and individually. Yet I find myself hugely admiring Ghulam Ahmad’s writings, and I learn that people who claim to be the Messiah are not nearly as crazy as I imagined. Besides, Jesus – by today’s standards – was totally crazy.

Hotel, Joanna Walsh, Bloomsbury. Rating: Ink sac

The revolutionary inventor, Nikola Tesla, spent all of his life – practically – living in New York City hotel rooms. One of his inalienable routines was feeding pigeons and bringing them back to his differing domiciles. He left a string of unpaid bills, and was ‘moved on’ from lots of different hotel gaffs, which he would use to court investment opportunities for his frenzied electromagnetic research. He died in a hotel room, which was eventually actually paid for by a small stipend by the Yugoslav government. This is the fitting end for a strangely aloof and antisocial inventor; perhaps mirroring the quasi-humanity of the life that he himself lived.

My own experience of living in a hotel was not quite so anonymous. I lived in a B&B for a month-and-a-half, in York. Yet I supppose I did feel some of what Joanna Walsh describes in this volume, a book about a period she spent reviewing hotels and the sort of effect it had on her psychology and her current romantic relationship. Hotels – she essentially claims – are like temples, in which one must ritually purge and exorcise oneself and yet one must also somehow live, or adopt the pretence of living. In a hotel, one is not compelled to participate in menial labour, so much so that its evidence is almost hidden, as if it is a behind-the-curtains ritual that only the Initiated can have access to. “There are no spades in my hotel, no evidence of any home work, or any other kind of work, only of its results.” (Walsh.) No hotel guest would ever join in with the gardening, the cooking, or sometimes even making their own cup of tea. To do so would be sacrosanct, and the implication of staying in a hotel is that you have something else more important to get on with than these totally human and fundamental aspects of participating in humanity.

I was allowed to cook in the B&B, though in the mornings I mingled with the guests and those who participate in the hotel-temple. My life became a ritual of divine and sanitised exactitude, as I couldn’t act as I really was, or thought I was. My entire existence was a contribution to a TripAdvisor review. It was heart-warming to read about an account of hotels that understands this, or some imprint of it: how hotels are metaphors for what we have turned into life itself. That hotels are essentially home, given that home can only be conceived as institutional. Institutional is familiar, heimlich, and the homely becomes unheimlich. It is only living in a hotel, or accommodation institution, that one can understand this. Accommodation used to be a divine duty; now, it is something that only makes sense from the perspective of logos and sanitisation.

What is it about hotels that give refuge to someone like Nikola Tesla? Perhaps it is that genius is detachment: that someone who can easily transcend time and space must live a life of morbid anonymity. I am curious about hotels, about their origin, about what point paid hospitality became a genuine norm. Was it industrialisation? Protestantism? Joanna Walsh’s book is subjective enough to never answer any of these questions, but I suppose the book is intended as a starting point in thinking about them or doing our own research.

My poem ‘Preston Bus Station’ was shortlisted for the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Poetry Competition. This is me performing it on Sunday, 2nd February: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_lLhYX7JrM. I was a little drunk. The winner was a beautiful poem called ‘Cantabank’ by Jane Burn, ‘cantabank’ being an old-fashioned and exquisite term for an itinerant poet.

I had a delightful evening with a good friend, Ben, who was a stalwart and rakish companion during the whole ordeal. Our loyalties extend back to the University of York Poetry Society. After this award’s ceremony, we broke into the University of Wolverhampton and were lovingly harassed (or moved, by the Holy Spirit) to attend a Pentecostal service. After I didn’t manage to reserve a spot in the open mic, later, we watched it, largely out of earshot. Then we duetted lots of karaoke, unfortunately not managing to perfect the work of any Black Country karaoke stars.

Signet Classics. Front cover missing, found in Tesco’s in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: swollen gladius.

Scott’s Ivanhoe is supposed to be a revolutionary work of liberalism and empathy. John Henry Raleigh alleges that it is one of the first works to challenge the pantomime depiction of the Wandering Jew in English Literature, challenging the “simplistic portrait” that was afforded to Jews. Yet, when I subject myself to this battered, historical copy – feeling like Beaumanoir, the ascetic and austere Knights Templar Grand Master of the novel – I begin to understand how farcical it is, and how idiotic a literary culture must have been to venerate it as something radiating with compassion. When I began reading it – feeling like the Crusaders, loyal to Richard I, who are an endless force throughout the novel – I find one defence for it: at least Scott has done his research. Yet I later discover that, despite getting his hands on something called the Wardour Manuscript, and faithfully reading it on our behalf, he hasn’t, really. It is a novel about the twelfth century, yet you have lots of talk about friars and St. Francis. St. Francis didn’t start preaching and loitering around Italy until well after the events of the novel have occurred, in the thirteenth century, not to mention the time lag between St. Francis’ ideas coming to Italy. I knew that, but a simple search reveals countless other historial accuracies, which aren’t exactly like the kind of trivialities you find about modern films on an IMDB page. It isn’t just people having the wrong swords, it is that the kind of tournaments that he depicts post-date the events that are supposed to be occurring in the novel by about 200 years. Then there’s the improbability of the fact that the Knights Templar were about to burn Rebecca, a Jewish cabbalistic sorcerer and fitty, at the stake, before she was saved by the unproblematically heroic Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the hero of the novel. This would never have happened in the twelfth century, in which witches were simply not burned, and would not have happened until the mid-thirteenth century.

Surely if Scott had done minimal research he ought to have known that? Yet maybe we’re just laughing at Scott’s futile attempt to depict history from our quaint digital vantage point, and we should rejoice instead in the entertainment and rich dialogue of the novel. I am not really entertained by battles, especially when I know the Normans, despite their number and arrogance, are going to lose, just this once. (A huge theme of the novel is the supremacy of the Saxons as the indigenous English, although they are a little hard-headed and arrogant. Even Richard the Lionheart is traced in terms of Saxon genealogy, who was presumably very ‘Norman’.) Nor am I entertained by the dialogue. The characters all speak in this sort of hyper-racialised way, as if they are only aware of their own culture and the relevant cultural reference points, despite living in the same country and so presumably having to interact with each other a fair bit. One exception to this might be Rebecca, the Jewish lass who knows Latin and is one of the first non-anti-semitic portrayals of a Jew in English Literature, although I am sickened by the way that this point has to be made by Normans and Saxons alike finding her fit. At the end she finds Rowena (who Ivanhoe marries, despite being brought back to live by Rowena and continuing to find her fit until his dying days), and announces her departure. This is fortuitous because Ivanhoe can stop fantasising about her and get to the serious business of having a fiery Saxon wife (although it’s probably too unfair to Scott to expect him to put something as radical as intermarriage in a novel for the early-nineteenth century reading public.) Yet even Rebecca is effectively a synecdoche for the Jewish people, deprived callously of her own individual consciousness. Her speech includes the phrase, “Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by internal factions, can Israel hope to find rest during her wanderings.”

This is just to mention the most thoroughly amazing character in the novel. There is a totally ridiculous incident – which Scott acknowledges is ridiculous and defends by saying that he was simply asked to put it in – in which the pure-blood Saxon Athelstane is resurrected at the end of the novel. He was clearly killed earlier in the novel in a battle when Our Lovely Saxon Heroes attack Torquilstone, the Norman fortification in which the Saxons have been wantonly held captive by these pantomime Frenchies. Yet he appears – alive! – in this ludicruous and fatuous deus ex machina moment in which Richard I returns to England and Richard, Ivanhoe and Cedric (Cedric became an English name because Scott misspelled the older ‘Cerdic’) all meet in the Castle of Coningsburgh, a Saxon fortification. What follows is the usual ahistorical Saxon babble: “It is certain that Zernebok hath possessed himself of my castle in my absence.” Zernebock is an evil Slavic deity, which no Christianised twelfth-century Saxon nobleman is really going to invoke. But that’s the point: Scott carefully twists and manipulates the dialogue of every character as if their whole animus is bound up in their connection to their racial identity, even in a way that is totally anachronistic. He seems to have no gift, whatsoever, for emotion, psychology or anything else that we might selfishly expect from characters.

All of this is a shame because I wanted to like Scott, and I’m earnestly sad that nobody bothers to read him any more. Yet his crimes extend beyond this: Scott even makes Robin Hood into a Saxon nobleman, despite the fact that part of Robin Hood’s charm is that he is a yeoman (the class above a peasant; basically, an ordinary bloke.) So how can we work up a defence of Scott? Perhaps the only way is to say that historical authenticity is impossible, and so undesirable, and Scott has at least had a good go. Yet I cannot help but think of Scott as the perpetrator of the modern period drama. There is a great quote from Joyce (who was apparently influenced by Ivanhoe, John Henry Raleigh arguing that Blazes Boylan is based on the lusty Knights Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert) in which he says something like, “The past for some is just what hat you happen to wear”. I don’t remember the quote. I think we can thank Scott for the idea that historical dramas should be quaint little dramas in which people talk in a nice, old-world way and wear certain clothes. Of course people in the past don’t stutter, defecate, have thoughts and individuality, or even exist beyond their race. Yet, please, read Scott; you might learn something that you can at least take the pleasure in unlearning.

The reason Iain Sinclair chose the M25 as the motorway of choice to walk around in London Orbital is because it encompasses the sacred orbit of London. John Clare was exiled there, and the refuse of the city ends up circulating vertiginously around it. Sinclair’s psychogeographical project has led him to the gradual realisation that the whole city is dictated by invisible patterns of sacred geometry.

The M60 is the only actually orbital motorway in the UK. Like a planetary ring, it whirrs constantly around Manchester. As I begin my journey along its sacred orbit, I walk along Oldham Street, past the Chinese Arch, then endless developments, and a single hotel, The Sheridan. I walk past voluminous, unreadably discarded lager cans, which are more florid than dandelion leaves, and Central Park, a police station cosmeticised by its modernism.

I reach an abandoned church, which I decide to tour; the only point of entry is a door earmarked ‘toilet’. Instead of a toilet, flanked in stone are mysterious construction implements and plaster, an unfinished conversion into a bar or a nightclub. More probably, earmarked for demolition, but nobody can conjure the money to actually demolish it.

After a man informs me he’s had a call, I politely continue. There is an abandoned pub – The Weavers Arms – which taunts you with the allure of its preserved 80sness. I walk along Broadway, past the blackbird clarions and bogs of Moston Brook.

As I walk along Hollinwood Avenue, I begin to walk adjacent to the motorway. The sound of cars accelerates around my eardrums, and all I can smell is gasoline. The concrete is lined with bracken and birches. I remember I am on a prayer retreat and am supposed to do a contemplative prayer exercise now, so I perch beside a concrete pillar like a stylite. It is Ignatian visualisation. I begin but every sound is stolen by the parries of vans and lorries, and the Gospel is stolen by the morbid circularity:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdom of the world, and the glory of them

All I can hear is some quality in the rhythm of my motorway-voice. I am on somewhat of a hill at the moment so I begin to imagine Jesus’ whole ministry conducted thus. I imagine Jesus being tried and crucified on the M60, drivers unable to look at him.

I navigate a truly tree-infested path, which I ought to have had a scimitar to clear. I am surprised to find old-fashioned paths, which have lost their necessity. I discover beautiful landscapes that will be mostly unexplored: moss upon concrete where forests must have been cleared. I see a dead finch, and become habituated to the thrum of the motorway. I think of plans to build motorway burial corridors and reflect that these would be a charming spot for them; the dead buried under uncleared glades and will-o-the-wisp dells. Clerics would be unable to hear the prayers they made for the dead, but would be attentive only to the rhythms.

I reach Hollinwood. I take a quick tour of the locality. It strikes me as a fairly deprived place. The Hollinwood Branch Canal was scrapped and the town has been struggling ever since. The complete fall of Oldham – the great luminary of the Industrial Revolution – does not help matters, and I assume that many Hollinwooders commute to Manchester for work. Oldham was nothing before the Industrial Revolution, and is now nothing again: a cycle. Unemployment and deprivation in Hollinwood is one of the highest in the UK, with 15% of Hollinwood claiming unemployment benefits in 2019.

I find that Hollinwood has an extremely quiet section, with mock-Tudor houses and a beautiful cemetery. I listen to the birdsong, my lungs and ears gradually recovering from the unfortunate shock-treatment.

לַמְנַצֵּחַ, מַשְׂכִּיל לִבְנֵי-קֹרַח.

כְּאַיָּל, תַּעֲרֹג עַל-אֲפִיקֵי-מָיִם– כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים.

(For the leader, Maschil of the sons of Korah.) “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” – King James Bible.

The original Psalm is replete with ideas of breath, comparing men to plants and their souls to breathing essences. The King James Bible is translated as if the translators are looking forward to their next opportunity to hunt, or at least translating it in those terms so that it could be understood. I learn that the original ‘אַיָּל’ (ah-yawl) is a male deer – a ‘stag’ – and nothing as specific as a ‘hart’. A hart is a mature, male deer which was coveted by hunters, a term adapted from the Chase. It is a nice image, yet actually more specific than the original goes, almost as if the KJV translators are trying to inflate the image for some reason. Perhaps because the Psalms are supposed to be from King David – who could aptly be compared to a ‘hart’ – or perhaps because the recitation of the Psalms in Jacobean England is simply an old man’s game. Although it makes us blessed that, unlike now, the Jacobeans were sufficiently attentive to the natural world that they bothered to distinguish between different kinds of deer. Now, most translations render it as ‘deer’, which is a little more unspecific than it’s supposed to be.

Why are we supposed to imagine a ‘stag’ in the original, and why do most translators render this as ‘deer’? It might be that we are supposed to be imagining some essentially strong creature, yet one who pines for simple, innocent comforts like drinking water. It makes us curious about the recitation of Hebrew psalms, which I suppose remains shrouded in mystery. Yet such recitation must have been more grounded in ideas about the human situation within the living natural world and ecosystem, and a less clear theory of how one is separated from animals. This is evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew world for ‘soul’  – נַפְשִׁ  (nah-fesh) – merely means ‘that which breathes’. I am led into an insatiable curiosity about what the natural world was really like when the Psalms were composed and recited, which no film will ever satisfy.

“Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?”

I learn that all of these translations are based on the difficulty that English does not have a verb ‘to be wise’, a static verb (tit-hak-kam, תִּתְחַכַּ֖ם), in the original Hebrew that must have allowed a lot of very arrogant and assured phrases. “I wise”, “he wises”, “he was wising”. I think that it should be translated “don’t overwise yourself”, which makes enough sense in English to sound like a sufficiently weighted admonition you might yell at your uncle during a particularly heated argument.

I like the fact that, in this verse, Qoheleth negates ‘be wise’ and admonishes too much wisdom, in a piece of wisdom literature. There’s a great contradiction to this and it encompasses its paradox as a “Christian” text. This is the same Christ who was extremely righteous (sad-diq, צַדִּיק֙) and extremely wise, so much so that he famously effectively destroyed himself. Yet clearly the text has been chosen by centuries of scholars of all theological persuasions as fitting for the Christian canon. Maybe the text doesn’t refer to something as extreme as “destroying yourself” (תִּשּׁוֹמֵֽם, tis-so-w-mem) as “disorientating” yourself, “confusing” yourself? Apparently the original verb can mean “grow numb”: perhaps Qoheleth is referring to the sort of feeling you get from trying to milk your tired little human brain of all possible wisdom before sundown. Also, perhaps the Messiah – Christian or non-Christian – is exempt from anything that wisdom literature has to offer. Regardless, there’s a great apophatic beauty to Ecclesiastes, and I am left thirsty to actually learn Hebrew, although not too much that I feel like I’ve snorted bucketfuls of wisdom cocaine. I read about how Qoheleth is the only Hebrew Bible figure to literally address his heart, as if he’s given up on pathetic human beings and their inability to listen and turns to his own body instead.