Thoughts on Luke Jerram's Helios in Grimsby Minster (With other thoughts on Samuel and Samuel 'Magotty' Johnson)

Luke Jerram’s Helios art piece recently went to Grimsby Minster and I went along to have a look.

It consists of a large inflatable sun, positioned in the crosspiece of the church, just down from the high altar. It glows with light, has moving sunspots and textures projected on it and a soundtrack. The image of the Sun is made from photographs, put together to create a realistic image of how the Sun actually is. The promotional material claims that it will leave the visitor ‘completely speechless’… and it, sort of, did.

I’m a sucker for seeing something I’ve never seen before, especially if it is free and a short stroll from my house. I went through the doors of the minster and did indeed see something I have never seen before, a large, orange beachball suspended in the middle of a dim church. I read the little spiel and sat down and tried to think or feel.. something.

The first thing I thought was, ‘well, it’s something I’ve never seen before - and now I have’. Then I was confronted by my own lack of reaction. I tried to feel something about it. I was struck that the symbol for the project has a sun symbol in the word ‘helios’, and that the sun symbol has a crown of rays, the way we usually depict the Sun. It’s odd, to see the Sun as a ball. 

I went back to the spiel to see what I was missing. There was a painting of a previous Luke Jerram installation in the minster, this was a large inflatable moon. He’s also done one of the Earth and Mars. The dude really likes making inflatable celestial objects and putting them in unusual places.

Now, I love the Sun. It’s my favourite source of heat and light. I live in a country where it doesn’t (usually) scorch everything into dust and is a somewhat rare and welcome occurrence. This month has been a very sunny month and it’s been glorious (except for the fact I have to water my new turf for ages). I couldn’t connect the beachball with the Sun. Either as the metaphorical giver of light and life represented by its crown of rays, or as the literal thing my world revolves around. I just saw a beachball tethered to a ceiling. Perhaps I wasn’t in an imaginative mood, I’d painted a shed green that morning, a job which doesn’t really encourage celestial thoughts. 

So I took a silly photo of myself looking like a saint and went home.

Later on, I thought I’d turn to an old favourite, Johnson’s Dictionary to get his view on the Sun. Here’s what he had to say. 

1. The luminary that makes the day.

Doth beauty keep which never sun can burn,

Nor storms do turn?

Sidney. 

Bid her steal into the pleached bow’r,

Where honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun,

Forbid the sun to enter.

Shakespeare. 

Though there be but one sun existing in the world, yet the idea of it being abstracted, so that more substances might each agree in it, it is as much a sort as if there were as many suns as there are stars.

Locke. 

By night, by day, from pole to pole they run;

Or from the setting seek the rising sun.

Harte. 

Perhaps the lack of heat was the source of the problem. As ‘the luminary that makes the day’, Helios glows softly in the dim, old church - it doesn’t flood it with light and heat. It’s a realistic depiction of the Sun without the Sun’s raw power. It is a sun which doesn’t burn, which will never ripen a honeysuckle and which will neither rise nor set. I’m not really sure what Locke is saying in his quote, I feel he’s saying that the Sun can be abstracted and imagined, as every star is a sun. All I can say is that Helios abstracts the Sun till it becomes a sun, lowercase, not the impressive, named thing.

Weirdly, I was ultimately brought back to a piece of writing by a different Samuel Johnson, Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, the dancing master and household fool who wrote the play, Hurlothrumbo.

I’ve looked at the script before on this blog, but to recap, it had one of the most successful runs of the eighteenth century. Maggoty Johnson was an official fool and the published play was sold on the ridiculousness of the thing. That was what made it a success, with accounts of the truly peculiar way it was staged, but I always saw a glimpse of something else in it.

The story is about a king called Soaretherial, who is so carried away by his flights of imagination that he doesn’t notice the revolution stirring in his country and aided by the very earthy Dutch king, Lomperhomock. Hurlothrumbo is the defender of the realm and he’s torn between his duty to the impractical Soaretherial and a bribe to let the Lomperhomock in. There’s also Lord Flame, a character in love with love who often plays a scene on stilts.

How much Maggoty intended a serious reading of his play, I have no idea, but there is an unrestrained pleasure and joy in the writing that, while often reading as goofy, seems to try and reach something nebulous and wonderful through it’s sheer exuberance. The king, Soaretherial is described as this by Hurlothrumbo;

   “His high-born Soul is above the Sublunary World, he reigns, he rides in the Clouds, and keeps his Court in the Horizon; He’s Emperor of the superlative Heights, and lives in Pleasure among the Gods; he plays at Bowls with the Stars, and makes a Foot-ball of the Globe; he makes that to fly far, far out of the reach of Thought.” 

There are times when the play is trying to do exactly that, fly far beyond the reach of thought (and sense). The very plot pits the abstracted celestial characters against the earthy, with both the nation and Hurlothrumbo as the battlegrounds. 

The Sun is a constant presence in the play. It’s a metaphor, but not a very controlled one, sometimes referring to Soaretherial, sometimes to God, sometimes to Lord Flame - but there is one tension about the Sun that is consistent, its life-giving and life destroying properties. Two courtiers are talking about the nature of their king and have the following exchange;

Dar. A poor King is arrived at Court, and Dologodelmo Oratorys high Encomiums upon the mighty Soarethereal, declares he’s like the glorious Sun, extends his Beams to all and every part of the World; and as he rides along the Meridian Course, every feeble Plant beneath him is cherished, and rises up revived.

Urlan. The Simile is not good: The Sun gives Life to the Plants that reside far off, but those that grow under him are burn’d, and scorch’d to Ashes.

The very abstracted, high nature of King Soaretherial means that he’s damaging to those closest to him. At another point of the play, he gathers the power of the Sun to inspire his troops to life, vigour and victory. A place where the Sun has the power of good.

One plot point has Soaretherial’s ally, the Spanish Prince Theorbeo, taken to a dreadful execution facility, ‘the house of burning glass’. There, he is to be stifled in a greenhouse and die, or possibly be physically burnt up by the refracted light. The Sun is potentially a killer, the tension mounts (sort of) until a cloud covers the Sun and Theorbeo is saved. Here, the Sun has great power which is easily mitigated.

In Hurlothrumbo, a character says, “When I gaze upon the Sun, I sink into myself, full of Humility”, while this is questionable, gazing at the Sun is more likely to cause blindness than humility, it touches something about how unimaginable the Sun is and how it takes a leap to even try to imagine it. Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, for all his faults and idiosyncrasies, really seems to engage with the Sun as something incredibly powerful, both actually and mythically. This was something Helios didn’t do, only reducing it to a beachball tethered to a roof.

 

Video Review: The Great Garrick

It's been a good many years since I put on the silly hat and reviewed a film. I've been planning on doing a Tom Jones one for almost a decade, but it was this little know film that got me back to it.

The Great Garrick is a 1939 film directed by James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. It's a fantasy about David Garrick travelling to France and engaging in a farce driven by the Comedie Français. 

It's fun and silly and I enjoyed making one of these videos again, even if it took most of a day (now I remember why I don't do these very often).

 

On my Garden

 I’m having a little trouble with my blog. It’s something to do with cookies and means that I can’t add pictures. I managed to sort it out the other week but only by clearing all the cookies on my computer, which has made it harder to access other stuff I want. It’s a pain.

Normally, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem because this isn’t a very picture heavy blog. I like to use one picture at the beginning and my dandelion signature at the end, but my intention for today was to talk about my garden and show pictures of it. (I got it working.. is it for long? Will it stop again? Who knows).

When I bought and moved into this house, the garden consisted of a cracked concrete path going up to an outbuilding (probably of asbestos) and, where grass might be, a sea of stones and gravel. On further inspection, this gravel was on rows of plastic sheeting and underneath that was compacted mud and moss. As I’ve lived there, various plants, weeds and ‘things’ pierced through holes in the sheet and through the stones. As Jeff Goldblum once said, life will uh, find a way.

Having created a cosy, dry and pleasant space inside (bathroom and stairway excepted), it was time to have a go at the garden. I am not not a rich man. Even less having bought a house and done it up. So I’m trying to create a simple, pleasant first-timer’s garden out of what is there.

With the help of my intrepid parents, I’ve moved the plastic sheeting over the cracked concrete path and then scooped the stones onto it, so now I have a gravel path up to my outbuilding. Then I’ve broken up the surface mud with a strange tool that looks like a milking stool on a stick. Today we plan to rake the mud back and forth, removing as many stones as we can, and making it as flat as possible. We are laying turf tomorrow, leaving a gap to put in flowerbeds and bushes - I’m hoping for as many fragrant ones as possible, to encourage birds and bees. It won’t be any grand garden, but should be a pleasant place to sit and read in the summer.

The only one of my eighteenth century pals to mention a fondness for gardening is Christopher Smart, who enjoyed the activity when he lived in a private mad house. This is probably because he has access to a private green space, something less accessible to Johnson, Goldsmith and others. 

Johnson would have been able to walk the gardens owned by the Thrales in Streatham, and the eighteenth century was a big time for grand garden projects. There was an emphasis on creating a perfected nature, not the strict lines of a Tudor garden but bends, turns, vistas - and the odd allegorical temple or folly. It was not yet usual for houses to include a small domestic garden, that was an invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I won’t be able to create a grand eighteenth-century vista in my little patch of mud, nor do I have the money or expertise to create a luxurious cottage garden (though I fancy giving a hollyhock a go) but I’ll be able to create something better than concrete and gravel. I’ll even be able to show it off, if I can get this site to allow me pictures again.

Some Peculiarities of Grimsby

 It’s been just over a year since I moved into my Grimsby house, now much more homely than it was then. It’s also almost two years since I moved into this area, and I thought I’d write some impressions of it.

Before I moved away from Willesden Green in London, I wrote a piece about some of the oddities of that place and I thought I’d write about some of the oddities of this one.

Fire

I’ve never lived in a place where so many of the places had been set fire to. From my position on my cosy armchair, I could walk to a burnt down Methodist Church and two burnt down pubs. There are frequent house fires and the fire engine frequently comes to my local park to put out plastic wheely bins set on fire. 

I’m not sure why this is. It’s certainly true that people seem to enjoy smashing windows in up north - it’s something that’s always struck me, yet the element of fire seems particularly local. Perhaps its because so many buildings are simply left alone, perhaps it’s the Viking past, fiery boat burials and all that.

Rooftop “Seiges”

Even the local people note that it’s a peculiarly Grimsby thing for people being arrested to climb onto their roof and wait. They don’t have guns, this isn’t the US, they just go up there until they come down. In the time I’ve lived here, this has happened three times but it’s a bit of a feature. I’m not sure why they do it, I suppose it’s to be awkward.

Balaclavas on Head-rests

This could be a popular thing in other places, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else and I see it in at least one car or van on every road here. People put ski-masks, balaclavas, sometimes masks on the head-rests on the front seat of their cars. At a glance, it looks like dodgy people are sitting in the car.

I heard this was a security measure, but it’s quite an easy one to see through. It might look like someone threatening is sitting in the chair at a glance, but a second glance shows it to be what it is. It could be a prank, a joke, a way of personalising a car. 

On a related note, there are plaques on certain houses advertising that they are paid up to a number of different private security firms. The headquarters of one is a few roads up. They have a car that sort of looks like a police car, but a bit more heavy duty. I’ve not heard of what these companies actually do, or what they could prevent. I imagine they have no real authority to do very much. It’s something else I find quite perplexing. 

(Flags)

Since I’ve moved here, flags have become a thing throughout the country, with various losers tying English flags (and occasionally Danish) to lampposts and painting them on roundabouts. Before this was a general thing across the country, flags were already a big thing round here. Especially towards Cleethorpes, there are many houses with flagpoles. They fly the English and British flags, but many of them also fly the Lincolnshire flag. Again, in all the various places I’ve lived around the country, they’ve never flown their own flags.

This list looks pretty negative, it would imply a people fond of setting things on fire, climbing their roofs and paranoid of crime, yet I like it here. I feel at home walking the streets, I’ve found a brilliant community at the Caxton Theatre (where I’ll be going at the end of this week for a poetry night) and I’ve create a brilliant haven in this little house of mine. It’s the last place I thought I’d end up, but I’m happy I’ve washed up here. 

Why join Grub Street?

 There was an anecdote that Samuel Johnson used to tell of his early days in London where he visited a bookseller called Wilcox. When Wilcox asked him how he intended to earn money, Johnson said he’d earn it with his literary labours. Wilcox looked at the tall, muscled and (at this point, not-fat) Johnson and said he’d do better-off buying a porter’s knot. 

The anecdote seems to have been one that Johnson told in both a self-congratulatory and self-deprecating way. Look how far he’d come, how well his literary labours had served him but also how unlikely it had seemed at the beginning. But why didn’t Johnson become a porter? It was heavy work, but it was steady. All that physical work in the outdoors among the people of London may have been more beneficial to his mental health than the locked in struggles of writing - a task he never really enjoyed. Why did people join the denizens of Grub Street? 

It seems that Samuel Johnson didn’t particularly. When someone approached him and later life and told him he’d have been a feted lawyer, Johnson mourned how his financial and social situation had blocked that path from him, and that he would have enjoyed that life very much. He tried to get other jobs than hack writer, applying to work in schools and even setting up a school of his own. What’s more, after he’d been a writer for a few years, editing The Gentleman’s Magazine, he tried again to get a job at a school.

In many ways, he really wasn’t cut out to be a Grub Street writer. He was dreadful at meeting deadlines, bristled under any editorship or management and while he’d write prefaces and articles for other people, he was a dreadful collaborator. What’s more, he really does seem to have found the act of writing to be incredibly displeasurable. It’s very noticeable that most of what he wrote was commissioned and that his output fell after his pension meant he didn’t need to write for money. He was always coming up with ideas of things he could write and projects he could carry out - and he never saw any of those projects through.

It seems that Samuel Johnson joined Grub Street because he’d run out of any options. He could have bought a porter’s knot and carried items for other people, or perhaps have used the skills he learnt in his father’s bookshop and entered the printing trade - but he had more education than that, and seemed to think it his duty to use his education to educate others, even if he found it dull drudgery.

Oliver Goldsmith is a different story. While it seems Johnson had some clear ideas about the kind of figure he wanted to be, Goldsmith seems to have drifted. He drifted from Ireland to Scotland, from Scotland around Europe and from Europe to London. He claims to have obtained a medical degree in that time but it seems unlikely. What’s more, even if he had the skill (I mean, he did essentially kill himself through self-malpractice), he didn’t have the demeanour. People may have enjoyed his company but he didn’t give off the air of authority.

He also worked in a school, where he was an usher. There he was dreadfully offended when a pupil was surprised that he considered himself a gentleman. It seems he fell into Grub Street because he wanted to elevate himself and make himself known. His first book, An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe seems to be more about inflating his position as a learned man than any real inquiry. The way he chased trends in The Bee and The Citizen of the World seem to show a man who wanted fame an notoriety - which fits well with his complaint about readers going out there way to not know he had a new book out.

Unlike Johnson, he was good with a deadline and worked well with, and for, others. Most of his output consisted of compiling and retelling others work in readable ways. If he didn’t exactly love the task, Goldsmith does seem to find pleasure in doing something well. Although he describes the difficulties of writing, especially the absurdity of his walking about with a serious face, trying to write funny lines - he seems to enjoy writing. Eventually, of course, this brought him the fame and fortune he’d always wanted, for a time at least.

Then there’s George Psalmanazar, who worked steadily in Grub Street for the last half of his life. He wrote careful histories and parts of encyclopaedias, where he even taught himself Hebrew so he could fact-check. For him, Grub Street drudgery was the penance for putting all his ludicrous fantasies and misinformation about Formosa into the world.

Finally, I want to talk about Christopher Smart, who’s different from the others because he actively chose Grub Street, rather than fall or be pushed into it. He had a sweet deal in Cambridge, he’d gained a fellowship where he could live comfortably and convivially, gaining praise for winning the Seatonian Prize every year. Yet he gave this all up to move to London, write silly poems for daft magazines and run cabarets dressed as an old woman.

It could be that he gave it up for love, the reason he was eventually kicked out of Cambridge was his marriage to Anna-Maria Carnan, although he met her through his Grub Street connections, so it seems she was part of the package. Perhaps he saw it as freedom, but he signed such restrictive (and ludicrous) business contracts that he was rarely free. Perhaps he felt he could have more fun among the hack writers.

If anything, Christopher Smart seemed to really enjoy writing. When he was writing silly copy for daft magazines, it’s really enthusiastically silly copy. After he was incarcerated in a private asylum, he still wrote. Some of those texts were for publication, but much of it wasn’t - no one would publish Jubilate Agno. It seems that Smart was one of those people who needed to write.

All this leads to another question, why do people write now? There’s not even the camaraderie of Grub Street to keep us going, only the slow grind of words.