TUES 7 NOV

“Hello darkness my old friend. I ‘ve come to talk to you again…” (Simon and Garfunkel. Sound of Silence).

Walking through the night streets George asks me if you can hear silence. I say I think you can. Silence so loud it’s deafening. We’re prowling the neighbourhood with a camera trying to get shots of fireworks over terraced rooftops but although the sky is an ominous immersive soundscape we fail. An occasional flash just out of place and time.  I once had ambitions to be a lightning chasing meteorologist. As a young art student I attempted some kind of metaphysical translation - bringing the storm inside in a work called ‘What the Thunder Said.’ A grand hall was set up as if for a concert. Thunderous applause (torrential rain relayed in surround sound) greeted an audience. Spot lit music stands holding sheet music of sonograph scores (recorded weather sounds) faced a flickering TV screen - conducting this invisible ensemble with intermittent strobic light.

No record of this remains but the question of ‘What the Thunder Said’- a line from T S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ - reverberated. My sketchbooks were full of weather legend and experiment, copper and orchestral conductors - a quest to understand ideas around the event and happening in art as it links to the ‘constructive moment’ of the Situationists and the lightning flashes of illumination of Walter Benjamin. I was obsessed with gaps -  in meaning, in translation, in the city, in time. The rift between the event and its aftermath, the artwork and its documentation. The pace of reception of sound and image.  Thunder and lightning. Pyrotechnic crackle bang and boom.

One of the vestiges of the Gunpower Plot is the continued tradition of the Yeoman Warders (Royal bodyguards in fancy outfits) checking the cellars of Westminster for explosives before every State opening of Parliament. Today was that day. The first King’s Speech of 70 years.  Thinking of the film of the same name about King George VI I instantly imagine stuttering on words.  A struggle for disjointed language fuses with images of golden carriages and the canary yellow signs of ‘Not My King’. A gilded fairy tale following the same route as those calling desperately for peace.  

Words are put into the puppet monarch’s mouth to swallow and utter – speaking of tackling the cost of living crisis while precious stones and plundered jewels glisten on a wonky crown. Mostly bored by history as it was taught in school I was fascinated and unnerved by the theatre of this finery. I still have a postcard of that crown, illuminated against black, from an early, ambitious school trip from a primary school in Gloucestershire to the Tower of London. I ‘m presuming the Yeoman Ravenmaster is staying home at the Tower to look after the birds -  protecting against the superstitious prophecy "if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it." The dark is rising in precarious times.  

It's odd that the term for a group of Ravens is an ‘unkindness’, a ‘conspiracy’ or a ‘treachery’ when they are just getting on being intelligent, beautiful birds. A ‘treachery’ might best be applied to our current leaders as a King is required to mutter the dirty news of the ‘Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill’  - supporting the opening of new oil and gas fields to “enhance the UK’s energy security and help the country transition to net zero in 2050.” Bollocks. Every bill and pledge conspires to hide the actions behind it. ‘Strengthening Society and keeping people safe.’ Growth. Strength. Safety. All  words disguising harmful policies. A dark inversion story destroying a liveable future.  

Perhaps a raven did get away. Trickster and guardian flying free above the city. Crown and Government falling short of the people on the streets. Rising up in chorus – a worldwide murmuration calling out those complicit in genocide through what is said and conspicuously unsaid, heard and wilfully ignored.

Where do the birds of Gaza fly to? Fleeing high over the walls that cage. Curious, I look up the ornithology of Gaza and find love stories with birds and birdwatching, talk of the challenges of binoculars and telescopic lens being misconstrued, of nest building in bomb holes made by shrapnel from Israeli missiles – of the fact that children growing up in Gaza are more likely to know how to distinguish the sounds of missiles than birdsong. “Birds know no borders, they can go wherever they like. But we have no freedom,” Abdel Fattah Rabou, Professor of Environmental Studies at the Islamic University of Gaza. A University now reduced to a pile of rubble.

A flock of desperate children in Gaza gather for a press conference amid ruin, speaking in English in case it’s not already clear enough that they should not be killed. “We come now to shout and invite you to protect us: we want to live, we want peace, we want to live as other children live.”  Nothing can be lost in translation and yet still our leaders remain complicit in their murder.

A message comes into my inbox from Specsavers “trouble with your hearing?”

I see and hear all this in aching clarity.  

‘In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political

I must listen to the birds

And in order to hear the birds

The warplanes must be silent.’

Marwan Makhoul.

Cease Fire Now. Stop the slaughter.