Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2005-06-17 - 10:16 p.m.

Cinnamon loaf from Tescos . It seems the Gunnpowder Plotters met at Dunchurch - where I stopped for a drink yesterday evening. Wondered about chord and accord and cord. Can they illuminate dischord? Sent a CD of wmvs to Peter Chatterton.

I think the next Cabinet Secretary is a fan of the Grateful Dead - or at least used to be.

Tempted to push the Morrison-Nico exchange at the Castle further in the light of repeated watching of complete AV works of the Doors - includes interview between band and the music critic of Village Voice. Morrison clearly very interested in poetic states - the state in which the muse engages - and how this can be triggered / integrated with music. He builds shamanism in- which for us threatens to disrupt the relevance and historicise the phenomenon. Perhaps it can be rescued by seeing it against (say) the Dems of Avignon - a continuing desire to rescue consciousness by engaging with the primitive - or indeed why Hux included the savages in BNW. Doors clearly work on this scale eg in their adaptation of the song from Weill�s Mahoganny.

Within the KM one can extract the male-sublime - how that cluster surfaces in 67-8 I JM�s vision and practice - which is why the Nico/JM/Castle episode/encounter is so interesting . JM believed that society - near and far - should support him while he did advanced consciousness RnD and offered the results in performance. Nico quite simply challenges that and throws down the gauntlet - what is the purpose in behaving like that? - which is of course the new world being born and really begins to take shape in the early 1970s.

She takes all that she has learned from JM Dylan VU Jackson Browne etc and begins to process into her albums Chelsea Grl Marble Index Dersertshore - which Cale is working on when he meets Drake. So Cale is partner in a fundamental aesthetic shift at that crucial point - and he immediately recognizes another relevant item which he has to involve himself in. This is of course what ND and the Cambridge Poets says in the first bit in a much more rambling way.

I f the SP-ND post-Muse fem imago cluster is hard to handle then maybe the new world is the way that Hesse VFT and Drake inflect their existential concerns as they create work which both reaches back and point a way forward. I�ve used the model of FM-coding - you take the standard set of tools for creating a work with meaning and give them a twist - a modulation - and it�s the way that modulation works and what it represents or is metaphor/metonym to - that is the core of the relevance. This is why the works sustain their intensity.

Went to Marton on the way home. This is where a Coventry road crosses the upper Leam and it is the name of a Saxon Hundred too. I drove in a square around the lanes to the south east - the Leam valley gets more dramatic at this point - I think it�s the blue lias and limestone that�s doing it.

Looked up Coventry in the Domesday book . Coventry is in Marton Hundred which gives some idea of the relative importance of the two although Coventry then grows into a large wealthy medieval town. Coventry actually belongs to Lady Godiva who is expropriated at the Norman invasion. That estate includes a very big woodland - two leagues by two leagues - maybe 35 square miles.

I was interested to see that Brinklow is another Hundred nearby. Brinklow is on the Fosse Way not that far from the Watling St intersection at High Cross - Coleshill is another. The important point about Coleshill and Brinklow is that they are on relatively high ground which is a good indicator of antiquity. The Saxons came along the rivers and populated the lower lying areas - older Romano Celtic villages were on the high ground.

You can imagine the missionaries from the upper Nene valley putting up a cross at the Fosse Way - Watling St intersection. Indeed Fosse Way goes to Leicester which is an early Saxon bishopric. There is a village where Fosse Way and the Marton-Coventry road cross - but after that Fosse Way has few villages - they are all about a mile further north on the banks of the Leam - as the Fosse Way moves up onto much higher ground. That point f transition I mentioned yesterday - overlooking the upper Avon valley. You might imagine that the civilisation on the Jurassic high ground in Northampton (largest building in the country etc) looked across these forest lands and wondered and maybe even saw them as a challenge.

All of this makes me think that rather than coming up the Avon, the Saxon spread into the Forest of Arden may have been from the East. There are still a lot of cross shafts visible in the villages - possible evidence of saxon missionary activity from the east. Meriden - where the church was founded by Lady Godiva has the cross shaft which is the centre of England. If I was chosing a centre I might go for the hill close to the sources of the Leam, the Nene and the Cherwell - maybe somebody did at some stage.

previous - next