Vernalisation / Bread and Roses
Is All Art Propaganda? Kipling, Orwell, Solnit, and Doughty
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses: “What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear— to others, sometimes even to oneself— trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.”
Last day of May and Brooklyn is full of children. I can’t tell why they’ve all been let out of school and pre-school at midday on a Wednesday.1 A Dad and a little girl come up the double decker stairs, so I shift out of the front seat. She is wearing a Minions-patterned skirt, and as they ride down the hill— looking mostly at each other, not the view2— they discuss which Minion they are and how they might go to the library.
The Dad’s shaven nape, the incurve at the base of the skull. Black hair like just-mown grass. Looking at the back of people’s heads on the bus always gives me a feeling of tenderness. The neck and the back of the head are vulnerable, intimate places. They are self-invisible, a piece of ourselves we hardly ever see, and never in real life.3
As we come to the bottom of Brooklyn Hill I glance to the right. A visual shock: the big magnolia tree in the gap between houses is in full bloom, huge pink flowers like birthday candles. This particular tree is always the first one to flower in early Spring,4 but now it’s confused by the unseasonably warm weather. It’s not Spring, it’s Winter! When I walk down Abel Smith Street, yes, the dwarf kōwhai are also flowering. (As Jarden once said: “It feels like Spring, but it’s just global warming.”)
I thought it was called vernalisation— Springing— when plants did this, got tricked by weather into flowering out of time. When I look into it, though, I find that vernalisation means a more specific thing: forcing seeds into sprouting by freezing them. Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko coined the term in 1928, a translation from his Russian neologism, яровизация (yarovizatsiya). All this seems familiar. When I try to think where I read about it, I remember it was in Rebecca Solnit’s amazing book Orwell’s Roses. The Lamarckist Lysenko colluding with Stalin’s unscientific ideas led to a famine that killed millions.
(Images I retain from the book: Stalin, wanting to grow lemons at his dacha. Orwell’s rapturous piece about the charm and beauty of toads, in the regular column he wrote for a Socialist magazine.5 Solnit on foot, looking at the cast-aside flints along the edge of a wheat field in England. Orwell, writing 1984 as he lay dying in his mid-40s, on the island of Jura, at the edge of everything.)
Orwell, from the 1946 essay on toads: “Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle?”
I bought a little hardcover book of Rudyard Kipling’s poems for a dollar at the Kilbirnie Red Cross. I bought it because I sing a song of Kipling’s, Oak and Ash and Thorn, set to music by English folk singer Peter Bellamy, who was obsessed with Kipling. (The folk link is that Kipling lived in Rottingdean in Sussex at the same time as the Copper Family; there’s also a theory that he composed his highly rhythmical poems to tunes in his head, as he was in the habit of humming or whistling as he wrote.) Anyway, I was hunting for obscure but cool songs.
Rudyard Kipling, along with Ewan MacColl, Herman Melville, Lucian Freud, Isak Dinesen,6 and others, falls into the category of my problematic faves,7 for reason of being— variously— bullying, racist, misogynist, colonial, etc.; but also being makers of transcendently beautiful work. (Is all art propaganda?) The thing is, their work IS masterfully well-crafted, and it genuinely moves me, which is what I’m always seeking in art. I’m not willing to throw that precious baby out with the ethically murky bathwater.
By highways and byways of the Internet, I then found this video— it’s Bellamy’s tune setting:
This song is from Barrack-Room Ballads. Kipling wrote it in 1890 at the age of 24: he said he was struck by the beauty of the women in Myanmar / Burma, whom he “love[d]… with the blind favouritism born of first impression.” He was taken by the way that they “look[ed] all the world between the eyes, in honesty and good fellowship.”
This poem— and the poet— went from being revered to being reviled. Even aside from the colonial flavour, there are things in it I dislike. He’s mean about the English girls, who can’t help their shit lives.8 But underneath there’s such beauty and longing in it,9 and specificity too, a flavour of realness that lets you know it’s young Kipling himself, in the mask of the ‘common man’— Cockney accent etc— who is speaking here.10 There ain’t no buses running from the Bank to Mandalay.
It was also in Myanmar / Burma that Orwell got politicised.11 He spent five years there (1922 - 1927) as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police. His first novel, Burmese Days, is based on his experiences. But rather than that prentice piece— we all have to start somewhere— I’m thinking of the first work of his I ever read, his essay Shooting an Elephant, which was included in an anthology I had as a kid. (It scared me, the way a lot of things in books scared me. The terrifying wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood book, slinking through a double-page forest of dark trees, that gave me nightmares for a solid decade. The picture of an allosaurus eating a brontosaurus that I stuck stickers over so as never to have to see it again.) Shooting an Elephant opens: “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”12
One reason I loved Orwell’s Roses was that Solnit loves Orwell as much as I do. Orwell is not a problematic fave, but he’s questionable. (Behaviour towards women. Case in point: shit’s complicated.) In spite of that, he’s definitely up there with most influential artists of all time for me.13 He signifies proof that rigorous mental labour and fearless expression can lead to independent thought— to truth.
The bit of Orwell’s Roses that I think about most often is the observation that happiness costs money, but joy is free. That’s the meaning of BREAD AND ROSES:14 political liberation is not just about economics— about food— but about beauty and pleasure— roses.15 Orwell lived in poverty and sickness for most of his life, but he took great joy in the natural world. Looking at toads doesn’t cost anything. Toads are gratis.
Solnit: “Orwell defended both the literal green spaces of the countryside and the garden in which he spent so much time and the metaphysics of free thought and unpoliced creation.”
The song that’s hard to sing for choking up— Bread and Roses is that song for me. It punches me in the heart every time. Again, it’s a poem set to a tune. Again, it’s dated enough to be considered problematic: some people switch out verses.16 Here’s a version with the last verse left out entirely, from the movie Pride—
I’m not arguing that artefacts of the past shouldn’t be revised, critiqued, or called out. But the current bent towards puritanical absolutism bothers me a lot. (THIS = BAD, always and forever. THAT = GOOD, always and forever.) After some simmering down in the brain-kitchen, I distilled my problem with it: it’s not only personally arrogant, but historically ignorant. The underlying premise is something like Everyone else throughout history was wrong, but now we are absolutely right about absolutely everything. It implies standing in a place of judgement— a place of certainty— that is the epitome of present-moment blinkeredness, and misunderstanding of history and how it moves.17
Maybe it’s also because I’m an artist rather than a consumer of art— I know what it takes to make something. I identify with the creator, the craft. An essay means an attempt, a try. The very word reveals the risk. Being visible in one’s imperfection and inadequacy is the naked place that the path of art leads to. Without that flawed nakedness, nothing can move. (How do poets screw their nerve up to do it, the full frontal? I used to, but I was young and dumb and often wearing a garment of smart-arsery. I made my song a funny t-shirt, wrought with in-jokes.)
There was a guy from Myanmar in my parents’ friendgroup: Bill Maung. He was a kind of intermediary between Black Power and the State, an honorary ambassador. I don’t know how that came about— he wasn’t a gangster himself. The one time I went to dinner at his house I remember him saying how funny it was that he came all the way here from Burma, and now his house looked out over the Burma Road. (It runs through Johnsonville18 and Khandallah.)
He also told me that in his language there are no numbers above one hundred, so if you want to say a larger number you just have to say “One hundred” louder. ONE HUNDRED. ONE HUNDRED!!!
…This may or may not be true.
I had bronchitis while I was in the Kipling-phase, and my brain wasn’t working. My head felt like a snow-globe full of porridge. When I came to my senses, I was like Really— you’re going to argue that Kipling was an OK dude? That’s what you want to talk about??19 Then— synchronistically— my friend Vanessa posted a whole album of photos of Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, an hour after Kev and I had been talking about it. Since it was such a massively long-shot coincidence, I decided The Universe was telling me to go ahead.
Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk – as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf’s face, and laughed.
“Is that a man’s cub?” said Mother Wolf. “I have never seen one. Bring it here.”
Rereading Mike Doughty’s memoir-in-bits, I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound. Great title! It’s a book so amazing it makes me want to immediately get ahold of his other book, ‘[Something something] Drugs.’ (This is exactly what happened the last time I read it, but I forgot to follow through.)20
In I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound, Doughty spends a great deal of time, money, and energy finding and gathering music. He’s a decade older than me, so this hunting takes place in the 80s, mostly in New York. Music was already like another full-time job for him before it became his actual job.21 The metaphor of a job isn’t quite correct though, because it costs him; it’s more like an infinite quest. One that can never be completed, because music proliferates faster than any one person can gather it; even more so because he’s a musical omnivore.22
In Doughty’s youth maybe it still seemed possible to listen to most of everything, if you dedicated all your time to it. You couldn’t do now what he did then, try to keep abreast of things musically: not only because of the sheer volume of allnewmusic but because of the methods of access. It’s a growth chart from our parents in the 60s waiting as one for the new Beatles LP to drop, to Doughty in the 80s hunting obscure cassettes, to whatever happened in the 2000s (see, I’m already out of the loop by then— Napster? Youtube? I’ve fallen by the wayside, I just don’t care enough about music),23 to now, when I so much don’t get anything pop-cultural that the kids seem like aliens. Good on them, like, but for instance if I look at photos of the Met Gala red carpet, I don’t know who half the people are— pop culture has mutated far beyond my knowledge or comprehension.
When I hear myself saying shit like the aforementioned I know I’m old. But that’s the weirdness of ageing, finding yourself wearing the shoes of different life-stages. This thing I do, talking about decades in the last century, when I were a youth, is the first instar of the ageing process that leaves us at age 80 or 90 talking at great length of naught else but the distant past. (I wore my blue dress with the sash. We danced all night. He lit my cigarette. I let him walk me home.) There’s no point in fighting it, the emboreification. Get too weary and just stop running to keep up, slow to a walk, sit down in the snow. It’s hard-wired into us from the time when Grandma was the only person in the tribe who remembers how they survived the great famine Winter when she was a girl.
Later I woke up in the middle of the night with two Kipling thoughts. Firstly, that an artist can be such a genius of their own time— such a perfect fit for their own historical place and moment— that when history moves, it leaves them behind. (One or two of their works might transcend this mass irrelevance-ifying, such as The Jungle Book in the case of Kipling.)
I have a theory about this. The opposite of this historical specificity would be something like Palaeolithic cave art: because it’s about a universal subject— here’s an animal— it speaks to us strongly across 35,000+ years, even though we have no way of knowing anything about who made it, or why.
The danger in trying for the culturally specific is built-in obsolescence. (The prize is a chance at people understanding what you’re on about.) The danger in trying for the universal is people not understanding what you’re on about. Sometimes never, or not until long after you’re dead.24 The Internet encourages people to make the first kind of work: one term for it is like art— eg. art for the likes. Thus do we trade away our shot at posthumous glory for small coins of dopamine. (And, it must be said, small coins of legal tender.)
The other small-hours revelation was that a cod accent always ruins a song. To my mind it’s one of the great sins of singing. Just so with Kipling and his cod Cockney: his work would have been stronger sung straight.
A wet black night. The city dark-shining. Clouds like octopus ink. Trees like coral. Plankton stars. Grey boulders like whale backs: that neoprene look. Aquarium apartments. Oak leaves in a puddle like goldfish in a pond. As we walk down Willis the rising moon pops out suddenly between two buildings, a radiant cloud-shrouded pearl.
(Orwell: “How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t.”)
Later, walking home round the Coast between showers, a strange dramatic effect: dark land and bright water. The ink-dark clouds billowing up from the horizon, and the black island— but spread underneath them like a sheet on a bed, the moonlit sea glowing like milk.
I take shelter from a rain-squall in the doorway of the Marine Science Lab— secular-church sanctuary— its window full of faded crab carapaces, shells, and corals. After many minutes of looking in at the exoskeletons, I notice there are black kelp flies clustered in clots on the window: to them, it’s a rock.
Apparently, teachers were holding a union meeting. Eating a kebab at cafe Laz I hear three older people gently prompting a young girl of maybe eight- a grandchild?- into discussion about the teacher’s industrial action: baby’s first politics. “Why do you think the teachers might be striking? What do you think they might want?”
Kids don’t care about views, because they’re too far away.
I remember Amos, his head bent over the piano.
The magnolia is my birthday flower, so I’m attentive to its timings.
Of these, Melville seems the least of an arsehole.
There are also artists I genuinely hate because they were bastards, such as Picasso, Dali, McCahon. Thinking about what the difference is, I guess I have to both hate the artist as a person AND not rate their work. If I love the work, it’s hard to entirely hate them. Of course, all this is entirely subjective.
Projection much?
It has to be noted that its also the beautiful, evidently long-running bromance of the two musicians that makes this performance moving.
In 2017, arch-toff Boris Johnson— in his capacity as foreign secretary— started reciting the poem whilst in Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, and was rightly told to shut up by the UK Ambassador to Myanmar.
Orwell and Kipling were both born in India: sons of Empire.
See also: Ursula Le Guin.
Slogan originating in the 1910s.
Or, as Emma Goldman put it in 1931: At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
The troublesome line is ‘The rising of the women means the rising of the race,’ which seems to me to refer to the human race.
You seriously think future people won’t critique you in turn? Believe me, even your own children will.
If you have a spare half-hour, this is a great essay unpacking cultural puritanism, by Marxist Druid Rhyd Wildermuth: A Plague of Gods: Cultural Appropriation and the Resurgent Left Sacred - Rhyd Wildermuth
In my teen poet obscurantist phase I had, on vinyl, Denis Glover reading his own poems, and whenever I see the word Johnsonville, the record starts playing in my head— this verse from Home Thoughts: I do not dream of Sussex Downs Or quaint old England's quaint old towns; I think of what will yet be seen In Johnsonville or Geraldine. (The punctuation may be wrong, as it's a poem that doesn't exist on the Internet. UNTIL NOW!)
My brain’s still not 100% online, so forgive me my trespasses.
Later in the book he mentions that his first book, The Book of Drugs, is named after the Magnetic Fields song, The Book of Love. The book of love is long and boring, no-one can lift the damn thing… I’ve ordered it from Unity.
Americans always have multiple jobs; it’s a quirk of their economic servitude, like having to pay thousands of dollars to go to the hospital.
Addendum on Doughty… As well as cassette-hunting, he watches MTV, he listens to pop radio. He puts in the hours on his craft, a labour which could be summarised as Try to make a song that makes people feel a thing.
Doughty, pretty much at random: “[1989, New Orleans] There was a sound system in the intersection: ridiculous low end. The bassline to “Tom’s Diner” —those two ominous notes— boomed over the street. A high, cold beam of synthesizer cut through it.
A friend called “Tom’s Diner” a novelty tune, which shocked me: it’s so scary. That bassline, the menacing strings, the vocal slowed down so slightly— you can just barely hear something strange in the texture. The way it slows down ever so slightly more for I am thinking of your voice; it’s like when you’re on acid and someone says something innocuous and a whole sinister world of suggestion emanates.
A spaceship cruised over the street, dragging a tail of fog. All the people in the intersection seemed to slow down, like they were pushing through water.
The world was absolutely new.”
I guess if we extrapolate backwards, we come to someone buying a broadside off a ballad-seller for a groat, or something.
I used to think about posterity to comfort myself. Then the end times dawned. Paradoxically though, nihilism is a catalyst. Whatever you have to say, better say it now!
On the subject of culturally specific v. universal subject matter- John Aubrey on William Shakespeare: "His Comoedies will remaine witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum [the ways of mankind]. Now our present writers reflect so much on particular persons and coxcombeities that twenty yeares hence they will not be understood."
Ah Rosie, I could read a case of you and still be on my feet. But, do I miss the point of the footnotes? They make it hard work scrolling up and down on a small phone, losing my place and dropping the train of thought and selecting a great chunk for a restack. (Good think Substack has given us the Cancel option there.)
But you're forgiven if its necessary.
Kind regards,
Alan