At the very beginning of an important symphony,
while the rich and famous were settling into their quietly expensive boxes,
a man came crashing through the crowds,
carrying in his hand a cage in which
the rightful owner of the music sat,
yellow and tiny and very poor;
and taking onto the rostrum this rather timid bird
he turned up the microphones, and it sang.

'A very original beginning to the evening,' said the crowds,
quietly glancing at their programmes to find
the significance of the intrusion.

Meanwhile at the box office the organisers of the evening
were arranging for small and uniformed attendants
to evict, even forcefully, the intruders.
But as the attendants, poor and gathered from the nearby slums at little expense,
went rushing down the aisles to do their job
they heard, above the coughing and irritable rattle of jewels,
a sound that filled their heads with light,
and from somewhere inside them there bubbled up a stream,
and there came a breeze on which their youth was carried.
How sweetly the bird sang!

And though soon the fur-wrapped crowds
were leaving their boxes and in confusion were winding their way home
still the attendants sat in the aisles,
and some, so delighted at what they heard, rushed out to call
their families and friends.
And their children came,
sleepy for it was late in the evening,
very late in the evening,
and they hardly knew if they had done with dreaming
or had begun again.
In all the tenement blocks
the lights were clicking on,
and the rightful owner of the music,
tiny but no longer timid sang
for the rightful owners of the song.

All power, all domination and liberation started there, he seemed to be saying, in those claustrophobic rooms where each word counts, each slight utterance needs to be accounted for, is paid for in some secret currency of hope or suffering. You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

Two men waiting in a basement to kill somebody. An old tramp laying claim to a derelict room. A birthday celebration interrupted by intruders. A woman afraid of being evicted. A son who comes home to his dysfunctional family accompanied by an enigmatic wife. Primal scenes of betrayal that could be happening anywhere on our planet, embodiments of a vast and disquieting landscape of dread, the precarious condition inhabited by most of contemporary humanity, the neglected narrative of the 20th century.

So it was natural that I projected on to those stories born in England the disturbing shadows of my own Latin America. How many men like Davies [from The Caretaker] crossed our Santiago streets? How many killers took their time in the Buenos Aires cellars of yesterday? How many would await us in the São Paulo cellars of tomorrow? And how to tell those stories, respecting the uncertainty of those existences on the rim of extinction, mercilessly stripping the masks forged out of the lives we made for ourselves, and yet also be gentle, oh so tender, with these victims of their own delusions?

Pinter knew how.

To understand and hopefully undermine the mythical processes of capitalism, it must be remembered that although capitalism is not a rational system there is a method to its madness. Capitalism is a system of ritual magick, where power lies in the manipulation of symbols. The magick tools its initiates use are: the map, the flag, the clock, the ruler, the calendar, the coin, the name. It is a system of equivalence...

... it can be said that the continuing story of advanced capitalism has been in drawing power away from a physical centre into an abstract or virtual one. A centre that is out of reach having been located in quasi-mystical realms its priesthood have dreamt up. This pure place of equivalence - of greater reward - used to be called Heaven, now they call it Cyberspace.

CM: There's a line in White Goods: 'They became what they beheld' -- which obviously comes from a Romantic source - Blake, perhaps? And it's an expressive possibility that re-emerges again throughout your work; in Landor's Tower, the poet Tunstall experiences a feeling of 'joyous recognition' as he propels himself beyond a sense of the purely physical city, and becomes aware of its intrinsic transformative potential -- as a poetic form awaiting creative transcription. In this moment of self-realisation, 'light that is heat [came] from within, fused with the light of the world; in movement, definition. A riot, a ravishment; a chaos out of which he ... would retrieve or recognise order. And form. A unitive commingling with the pollen of the cosmos'.

IS: Yes, Blake. It's interesting you mention that, because I've just finished this book in which I follow John Clare's walk from Epping Forest to a village north of Peterborough, and there's a point in that where he and his wife Patty, when they're courting, both look at the same thing and become as one. By looking at a single, natural feature - a river, or whatever it is - in that gaze, you become one with each other, and one with the landscape. That too contains my sense of the sublime.

CM: Do you also encounter this sense of the sublime in relation to works of art - to paintings, sculpture, etc.?

IS: I don't know what you'd call it; it's a sort of Joycean epiphany (or prejudice). You see something -- a work of art, a film, a piece of junk on the street, any kind of experience that lifts you into another realm, a parallel existence -- and then, as you move about the streets, mired in the mundane, you can attempt to burn a hole in the membrane of the ordinary. Heavenly light can come glimmering through.

In order to demonstrate the potential which may be locked up in ordinary-looking towns and suburbs English Heritage carried out its own survey of Anfield and Breckfield. Looking at every street in the area, and collating documentary evidence of various kinds, we assembled an overview of historical evolution, identifying the main trends and highlighting the most important developments and individual buildings.

[Suburbs] change over time, but they also differ from place to place, conferring a badge of individuality or local character on an area. In fact careful scrutiny of any particular suburb will reveal that an environment which we have long felt to be familiar still has the capacity to surprise us and challenge our preconceptions.

So.
Farewell then
Capital of Culture year.

You started on the
eleventh of January

which seems a bit
odd

but not as odd
as putting Ringo Starr
in a box
on top of St George's Hall

letting him sing

and then
risking him
on Jonathan Ross.

Apart from that
it's all been
quite good.