ERIC MOTTRAM MEMORIAL CONFERENCE – INTRO
Please forgive me videoing for
myself. It’s not narcissism – well, not *just* narcissism. It’s for my dear
friend and Eric’s last new friend, John Kenny, who set to music part of the
Book of Herne and played at Eric’s memorial service. He’s devastated that he
couldn’t be here.
I’m amazed that this is
happening at all, and my hearty congratulations to Amy, Robert and Jeff. For
years I’d given up hope. When I Googled Eric’s name, almost the
only 21st century hit that I got was my own Thank You One and All website, where I had recordings of Eric’s
memorial service and the opening of his King’s archive. I’m looking forward to the next two days and
to learning a great deal. My favourite Eric quote is ““There’s nothing more
exciting than something you don’t know!”
Can it ever happen again? Our
universities being turned into corporate job centres and are fighting for their
intellectual lives. Eric Mottram conferences of the future may be organized in encrypted
text messages and held in deserted factories. And there’ll be a lot of those
available – just Google Der Spiegel+Detroit. If you’re likely to forget
that, write it down.
-0-
First,
let me assure you that you’re not going to be hearing much of me. It will be
mostly Eric. I hope that will explain the fact that I’m perhaps the only
speaker in this conference who isn’t an academic, or poet, or both. My excuse
is that I’m a sort of cultural archaeologist. (That’s a polite name for a
grave-robber. Lord Carnarvon – are you there?)
In
the past couple of years, during my many idle hours, I’ve digitized well over a
thousand audio and video tapes dating back as far as half a century. These have
included radio programs from KPFA in the 1950s, master tapes from my own
library, and ecological conferences held in the south of France by the
Institute of Ecotechnics in the 80s and 90s. There were talks by such eminently
listenable speakers as Thor Heyerdahl, William Burroughs and Buckminster
Fuller.
(Fuller,
then past 80, gave a fast-flowing extemporaneous three hour talk on the regular
tetrahedron as the basic solid shape in nature. (That’s a three-sided pyramid.)
After the talk, he was fascinated to learn that he had been recorded with an Ambisonic microphone with four capsules arranged
as – a regular tetrahedron!)
Many
of these were talks that I had recorded in situ. And now, in my declining
years, I am spending my time preserving my betters. Hopefully, this opening
presentation will be one of the happy results.
How
did all this come about? In 1967 I was on the American Embassy’s list of
available speakers on American cultural topics. Elizabeth Singleton in the
Cultural Affairs Office phoned me and asked if I could do a talk on the San
Francisco beat poets. I said I’d love to, and would like to do it like a radio
documentary, with lots of recorded examples and linking commentary in between,
but alas, I no longer had the tapes. “Let me introduce you to Eric Mottram,”
she replied. “I read American Lit with him at Kings. He has lots of recordings
and he’s always helpful. Come around to the embassy for lunch and I’ll
introduce you.”
Our
lunch stretched to a three-hour conversation, in the course of which he offered
me exactly the material I needed. Much of it was stuff I had long been familiar
with. Some of it I’d once had copies of. And so, over time, our mutual passions
ripened into friendship and Eric was my best man at Mary’s and my wedding the
following year.
Eric
knew more about American culture, past, present and even future, than anyone
I’d ever encountered on either side of the Atlantic. He became my mentor,
indeed my guru. (I hate this overused word, but it conveys the reality more succinctly
than any other.) Ultimately I enrolled in the Institute of United States
Studies to do an M.A. with him. It wasn’t a new career plan; I just wanted to
get my brain stretched.
Eric’s
seminar that year was called The American Imagination of Synthesis and it
brought together an unlikely juxtaposition of a very long list that included
Norman O. Brown, William Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Norman Mailer, Alfred
Korzybski, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Reich. (The latter’s The Function of the Orgasm was an
education in itself – a nobly romantic work whose seminal insights are useful
both in the classroom and in the bedroom.)
Having
gained Eric’s confidence, over the next two years I set out to record all of
his lectures and seminars, both at the Institute and at King’s College –
countless hours of unique revelations of how much happier and better the world
could be than the mess we had inherited. Without the Eric Mottram website I’ve
recently set up, what would have happened to all those tapes? I’d thought of
giving them to the Mottram Archive, but could they have afforded to digitize
them? Today, all over Europe and
America, universities are so broke that, except for recognized and lucrative
celebrities, they can no longer afford even to give storage space to large
private collections, let alone catalogue them and make their contents
accessible. For instance, a virtually complete private collection of mint
condition classical LPs covering well over half a century was recently disposed
of piecemeal through Oxfam because no institution was able to accommodate it!
And
so I decided to spend as long as it would take to digitize these seminars and
lectures and put them on a website. They were deeply embedded in my brain, but that
was becoming an increasingly unreliable and leaky receptacle. Could such mental and spiritual energy be
allowed to dissipate? The answer was a definite “No!”
Eric
survived his 70th birthday by less than three weeks, dying on January 16, 1995.
A week before, Mary and I had brought him together over dinner with my dear
friend and associate, the trombonist and composer John Kenny. (John later
performed at a couple of public Mottram events and also set several of the
poems in A Book of Herne, for which Eric had given permission over dinner.)
This was on January 9th, five days before my own 64th birthday. When Mary drove
Eric back to the tube station he exclaimed, "I've never met an
intellectual trombonist before!"
In
a tragic sense, Eric was lucky to have died when he did. The Institute of
United States Studies is no more, nor is the King’s College Department of
American Studies, both of which he had worked so hard to establish. They were
wiped out as part of Britain's dogma-driven austerity drive. Clive Bush wrote a
furious and brilliant diatribe which appeared on a No Cuts at Kings website. It seems to have
disappeared. I should have downloaded a copy.
This
is an age of soundbites but, listening again after almost half a century to some
of Eric’s seminars and lectures, I decided not to stitch together scraps from
here and there but to present, in its entirety, the opening session of Eric’s
1971 American Imagination of Synthesis
seminar. The previous few months had been eventful in Britain, and the Vietnam
War was in full swing. It was like a dry run for much of what’s going on right
now. Here are a few of the events that help to establish the context of Eric’s
1971seminar – and context is what synthesis is all about!
19 June 1970 – The General
Election results are announced and Edward Heath's Conservative Party wins with
a majority of 30 seats. This was a major surprise, inasmuch as most of the
opinion polls had shown that Harold Wilson's Labour were likely to stay in
power.
26 June – Riots
break out in Derry over the arrest of Mid-Ulster MP Bernadette Devlin for
participating in the Bogside protest against the provocative Apprentice Boys
parade.
3 July – British
Army soldiers battle with IRA troops in Belfast.
9 August – Police battle with
Blacks in Notting Hill.
9 September – BOAC
Flight 775 is hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Front after taking off from
Bahrain.
15 February 1971- Enoch Powell predicts an
"explosion" unless there is a massive immigrant repatriation scheme.
24 February – Home Secretary
Reginald Maudling announces the Immigration Bill, set to strip Commonwealth
immigrants of their right to remain in the United Kingdom. The bill is
supported by Enoch Powell, but the former shadow cabinet minister continues to
demand a massive voluntary repatriation scheme for the immigrants.
1 March – An estimated
120,000 to 250,000 "kill the bill" protesters go on strike against
the 1971 Industrial Relations Act in London.
19 April – Unemployment reaches a post-Second World War high
of nearly 815,000.
1 May A bomb planted by The Angry Brigade explodes in the Biba
Kensington store.
9 August – British
security forces in Northern Ireland detains hundreds of guerrilla suspects and
puts them into Long Kesh prison - the beginning of an internment without trial
policy. Twenty die in the riots that followed, including eleven in Ballymurphy Massacre.
7 September – The
death toll in The Troubles of Northern Ireland reaches a three-year total of
100.
It all sounds ominously familiar.
In
the first seminar session, the one we’re about to hear, Eric talks at length
about Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. The course, he says, is going to be about
methodology. “And if that scares you,” he says, “you’ve been badly taught!”
With about a dozen of us sitting around the seminar table, he is informal and
chatty. There are lots of pauses and personal and administrative asides as he
stops and looks around the table. This is bad pacing for listening blind, so
I've edited it down from an hour and a quarter to less than forty-five minutes.
But I haven’t lost a single word of the actual content. I closed it up by an irrelevant
minute here, a few seconds here, and many seconds here and there throughout.
Eric
could be a fast talker, so after the final editing, the pace seemed unnaturally
frenetic and sometimes difficult to follow. And so I slowed down the tempo
without changing the pitch, backing off when it started to sound artificial.
That put about three minutes back onto the length. All this editing and
processing took about a week. (Those of us who no longer have to work for a
living can afford to do things like that.) Hopefully it will turn out to be
craft that conceals craft.
Finally,
sound systems in halls are designed to distribute speech uniformly over the
entire space. But psychologically, your brain is most comfortable when your
ears and your eyes seem to be receiving information from the same place. Luciano
Berio took this into account when he specified that
the loudspeakers in his Sinfonia, which he wrote for a symphony orchestra plus
the Swingle Singers, should be placed immediately
next to the singers, not hanging from the flies.
And
so for this morning’s presentation I’ve brought along the miniature studio
monitors on which I edited and equalized this lecture to make this half-century
old recording sound as realistic as possible. Close your eyes and maybe you’ll see
him!
In
other words, I’ve set out to be, on a very small scale, a sort of 21st century
Victor Frankenstein. Fortunately, my task was rather less gruesome and it was
made possible by the fact that the life had not departed from Eric’s words or
from his voice – it was only a matter of freeing them, of setting them loose.
It may also open a Pandora's Box. May Eric’s timely and indispensable
admonitions fly far and fast!
RECORDED INSERT
As
you have just heard, what Eric shared with us was not only a methodology of
literary criticism, but of becoming and staying alive. As I worked with
performing musicians and composers, it became a methodology of adaptation and
invention that served me for a quarter century. The human race has now reached
the point where it must work out a methodology of survival. Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, tells us
that, beginning with the Mesopotamians – ironically, the ancient people who
lived in what is now Southern Iraq – one civilization after another has built
cities over its best agricultural land, depleted the rest, and allowed its
rulers and priests to seize all the wealth until, quoting Wright, “the ruler's
relationship with heaven is exposed as a delusion or a lie, the temples are
looted, the statues thrown down, the barbarians welcomed, and the emperor's
naked rump is last seen fleeing through a palace window. This time, Wright warns us, our self-threatening
world civilization encompasses the entire planet. If it destroys itself like
those that have gone before, there will be none waiting in the wings to take
its place.
There
is a definition of insanity that has been credited to everyone from Aristotle
to Einstein. It’s doing the same unsuccessful thing over and over and expecting
a different result. This ludicrous repetition is destroying our polity, our
economy and our ecology. If only Eric could come back to earth and convince our
bankers, our leaders and our corporate executives of the utter madness of their
behaviour, then our chances of collective survival would be immeasurably
improved.