On the edge of the labyrinth
Aerial by Kate Bush turned 18 late last year. It has a lot to tell us about how to live as a grown-up.
The tree isn’t even there anymore. I know because I checked on Street View. Regardless, the tree is how I picture the place. It fixes in my mind a moment and a feeling as both recede into memory, as life accelerates and forgets and moves on.
The place is the crossroads where Southwark Street meets Blackfriars Bridge Road. SE1, a few steps south of the river Thames.
I remember leaving work and walking down Stamford Street, more than ten years ago now, let’s say in the springtime, the sun behind me falling as it paints another Waterloo Sunset I won’t see, and as day became evening, the commuters’ shadows lengthened towards the crossroads, and my eye was drawn to the tree, right there, next to the mouth of Southwark Street, which was framed as it still today is by the railway bridge.
My memory won’t tell me precisely where it stood. I wouldn’t even be sure it had ever existed if I hadn’t written about it. That year, you see, I kept a diary of sorts. For the first six months of 2013, I posted every day to a Tumblr called Jukebox Diary, a little blog where I might fight against the background ubiquity of music by attempting simply to notice it, and to write about the song that resonated most that day. Often the song and the moment would fuse, and on April 18, a Thursday as it happens, as I walked towards that crossroads and saw the tree, I wondered why I’d never noticed it before, and felt transported by both the song, which was Genesis Hall by Fairport Convention, music made to reach backwards in time, and by the tree, which seemed to reach forward from the past. The two met in this moment, in this unlikely place, in this fleeting moment of wonder, the likes of which the ordinary world sometimes throws up sometimes.
I was thinking about that tree and that moment recently, when a friend and I went for a Friday afternoon walk on the decidedly greener outskirts of Bristol, where I now live. I was telling him about beginning to write this piece, which although it might not appear that way yet, is actually about Kate Bush, and her album, Aerial. We were walking in November. The sun was setting behind darkening trees as we got back in the car. It seemed impossible that just 15 minutes earlier, we’d seen trees across fields lit up the same way as that tree in SE1. Lit up as if from the inside, somehow more beautiful for how fleeting we knew it was. The SE1 tree had taught me to be alive to that phenomenon, and now I relish it whenever I see these living relics of the past, bathed in glowing light.
I mentioned this to my friend. That I’d heard this time of day was sometimes described as the ‘golden hour’. My friend had a better label. He quoted a line from e.e. cummings:
one winter afternoon
(at the magical hour
when is becomes if)
It seemed entirely fitting. That time of day is magical. The light seems ephemeral but full of possibility. What is fixed, loosens. It’s as if the coming darkness holds adventure as much as it warns of danger. In those fleeting moments, the world seems to reveal its secrets. You feel surrounded by portals to a magical, temporary world. At this point, I realised how well those cummings lines fit Aerial, too. The album is, after all, Kate Bush’s attempt to commemorate and in places actually conjure the sublime. The second half especially is filled with nature as the Romantic poets might have sensed and dramatised it: birdsong, panoramic skies, hair catching on stars, water flowing between legs. There are colours running, a painter painting, a song called Somewhere In Between, a song called Sunset. The wondrous and ordinary turn of a day and a night, that beautiful dance that plays out like clockwork yet feels alive with every cycle. It’s all there on Aerial’s front cover, of course, its honeyed hues an approximation of the magical hour. Any solidity to the horizon is by virtue of a soundwave, the sonic shape of blackbird song, its symmetry marking the boundary that’s otherwise blurred between sea and sky. The brightness of the golden light. In Aerial, nature opens up to us. Music is a bridge between worlds. In listening we become one with it all. The music captures not only a fleeting moment, but the possibility of our surroundings, our circadian rhythms, the ‘is becomes if’ of life.
It took time for me to get this. It took a few listens - maybe even a few years - for the mellifluous, magic-hour mood of the second half to come into focus, partly because my attention was drawn initially to its first half. How could it not? It had been 12 years since Kate had released any music. Only Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine and Bowie have ever pulled off comebacks after a silence as long as Kate’s, and in November 2005, her return was as unlikely as those last two. Here was new material, from a famously perfectionist auteur, who in her time ‘away’ had become a parent, had disappeared from view but had not, if we’re honest, been given her roses, and instead, almost inevitably, had her art (con-)fused with the life of the (female) artist, and our ears were trained on songs that seemed to embody the artist’s silence. In other words, songs about domestic solitude and retreat. The first half of Aerial was, to be fair, full of them. There was the delightful, joyous hymn to Kate’s own son, Bertie. There was Pi, the sadly snaking tale of a “sweet and sensitive man with a fascination for numbers”, Kate singing the number that never ends, tracing a life dwindling into ever smaller units. There were empathetic stories of the famous, the misunderstood, the reclusive. Like Joanni, who might well be Joan of Arc, who looks “beautiful in her armour” but is destined never to wear a ring on her fingers. The very first song, and lead single, was King Of The Mountain, a song about fame and its cost, about the emptiness that defines life away from and sometimes in the limelight. We see the world as Elvis might have seen it: from the stage, from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven car. We feel his loneliness. His is a curdled kind of celebrity, his arrival at the summit a pyrrhic one. He plays “in the snow with Rosebud,” as if he was Citizen Kane, another lonely man-child.
Aerial’s first half is disarmingly populated by recluses and obsessives. The songs pulse with smallness and sadness, with thwarted lives and loves. These are shores on which the tide has gone out. Take Mrs Bartolozzi, whose better days - busier days, more full of people, with a worthier purpose - are behind her. She cleans now. Dedicates herself to making floors sparkle. The closest she gets to intimacy is watching shirts and trousers tangle suggestively with dresses inside the washing machine. In A Coral Room, abandoned boats are covered in fisherman’s nets - the rope akin to a web that glistens, made by “the spider of time…climbing over the ruins.” There’s even a song called How To Be Invisible, in which Kate appears to cast a spell upon herself (“eye of Braille, hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat”). Like she’s found the formula for being forgotten.
It was easy to assume, back then, that Kate’s period of domesticity was the prompt for songs portraying such quiet lives. But then, I was primed for that. I was ready for music - perhaps even a model of creativity - that operated on a smaller, quieter scale - that was modelled around the home and family. Aerial came out in November 2005, and my first child was born just two months later. I first heard the record on the cusp of huge change and, appropriately enough, its terrain felt too vast felt to take in at first: a double album, with sub-titles for each half, lyrics and ideas and paintings spilling out all over the place. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the songs of the first half grabbed me first, with their shortened horizons and their quietness, with their chores and duties and rituals and belongings. The occasional hymn to joy too, of course. Was this what lay ahead? I must have thought about it. Certainly, whatever trepidation I felt about Kate Bush’s return was dwarfed by the doubt and sense of responsibility I felt on becoming a father. I was worried that flaws of mine I didn't even know existed would surface, that they might entangle or entrap my son, or me, and that they would do so without me being aware of it. Intent, I knew from Larkin, was irrelevant. The question was, how precisely would I fuck him up? My son would grow whether he liked it or not. The question was, could I? And could I grow in a way that would help him to grow up well, and happy?
Three weeks before he was born, I turned thirty. Three weeks later, I started a new stage in my career. My first job at an agency. It was in SE1, a few steps south of the river, just off that crossroads on Blackfriars Bridge Road. So much was about to change, and I had no reference points for any of it. Looking back, I can see I felt, in the words of How To Be Invisible, “on the edge of the labyrinth”. Ahead lay choices, fears, questions, isolation.
You stand in front of a million doors
And each one holds a million more
Corridors that lead to the world
Of the invisible
Corridors that twist and turn
Corridors that blister and burn
Don’t get me wrong. There was joy, there was fun. We were both thrilled. And any constraints to my life or my career options were nowhere near as limiting as those my wife experienced. But the prospect of parenthood was scary then, and it feels somehow scarier still, now I’m looking back - now I can see how little that guy knew about what he was doing, or what was to come. I’m still not sure he knows, to be honest, how to be all the things he’s supposed to be and still be good at them: a father, a husband, an employee, a friend, a writer, a son. Back then, at least, ignorance mitigated inhibition. What I didn’t know, I guess, couldn’t paralyse me, and of course I had some useful fictions to quantify success - the meaningless scale we all use when we’re young, of how well others thought of me. I looked for validation in work, in friendships, in the good taste I projected to the world. Yet at home, on the edge of the labyrinth, none of that matters, or counts. Didn’t then, doesn’t now. Your baby doesn’t care about the presentation that went well, or the exhibition you saw, or the club night you put on. He won’t affirm how clever you are. He just needs you. Just you and your energy and your time and your love. That’s all. That’s all you can give, but you have to give it all. The rest of the world gets left at the front door for a while. The tide goes out for a while on the other parts of yourself. You can’t do the job properly if it doesn’t.
Perhaps the prospect of that moment still feels scary to me today because I look back at that person and wonder, frankly, whether he has it in him. Not that he is selfish; the question that thirty year old is contemplating is not, ‘what’s in it for me?’. Rather it is, ‘will I be good enough? And since Aerial turned 18 in November, and since my son turned 18 three weeks ago, and the baby whose arrival represented such uncertainty and doubt for me is on the cusp of a labyrinth of his own, namely adulthood, then perhaps the question I am contemplating today is also a retrospective one. Not just ‘will I be’, but ‘was I’ good enough?
In both prospect and retrospect, the answer is a qualified ‘no’. But that is, given Kierkegaard’s idea that while life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards, probably the best any of us can hope for. The qualification is that you manage to understand something along the way, if only it is how little you understood back then. After all, parenthood is about helping someone else to become the best they can be, but in the process we might also become a better person ourselves. And what parenthood - along with growing older - has taught me over the years is the same lesson that Aerial imparts once you come to live inside it, let it take you over: a ‘smaller’ life is not sacrifice or hardship. A world shrunk to its essence is no constraint. It is, on the contrary, the key to fulfilment. The meaning of life is in the small and fleeting moments. The everyday. We find the greatest wonder and joy in the narrowest of worlds. The rest is just trappings. You can let it all go. All of it. Parenthood is like life, which is to say that both are at their most rewarding when you treat it like you’re holding your eye to a keyhole - when you see and live in close-up. This is so easy to miss as you make your way down life’s corridor, as you accelerate away from life’s small moments. But the closer you can get, the more a wondrous domain opens up.
The second half of Aerial captures, as well as any other music I can think of, the feeling, meaning and fleeting beauty we can only really sense when we live like this. It begins with birdsong, and with a child telling its parents that “the day is full of birds”, who sound “like they’re saying words”. It’s the kind of wide-eyed wonder a parent can hear in their child’s voice or see on their own child’s face and recognise the invitation it extends, to occupy the space that children love, at least while they’re young, a space somewhere in between misunderstanding and imagination, between learning and exploration, between immersion and discovery, and it’s a space that Kate Bush fills with light and colour, with writing and painting, with laughing and dancing, with sea and with sky, until it all merges into one mellifluous whole, a Romantic vision of the world suffused with beauty and joy, a state that exists as “some kind of magic, like the light in Italy lost its way across the sea”, where a painter’s hands go “curving and sweeping, rising and reaching” to recreate the light that’s always changing, until it rains and “all the colours run” to become a wonderful sunset, above a sea of “the most beautiful iridescent blue”, “where sands sing in crimson, red and rust”, and dusk eventually explodes into darkness as “the day writes the words right across the sky, they go all the way up to the top of the night” and so do we, “up to the top of the highest hill” where it is just so beautiful, that place “twixt the day and night”, between “the ticking and the tocking of the clock”, before we go driving into the moonlight and leave our clothes on the beach and our footprints too and we long for something more until finally “we stand in the Atlantic, we become panoramic” and the “stars are on our fingers, a veil of diamond dust”, the sky is above our hearts, the sea is around our legs and we are diving down and we are rising up until we are one with nature, and with ourselves, and we are up, up, up, high, high, high, and the birds are laughing and so are we, look, sings Kate, “look at my beautiful wings.” She sings with the birds and laughs with unadulterated joy.
Nocturn, the penultimate song, occurs explicitly on midsummer night, that pagan solstice, the time of fairies and temporary magic, things turned briefly upside down. It’s a celebration of nature and cycles, but it’s also a dance, the ceremony of a dervish. Aerial overall is about transformation, I think, specifically the kind that occurs when we give ourselves over to the beauty of the world. Accordingly, where the first half is small, narrow, detailed, the second half is expansive, imaginative and abstract. Precise, standalone songs give way to a non-stop symphony, washes of sound and a deep pulsing bass. In place of those very human stories of sadness and emptiness, Kate is in communion with nature. “What kind of language is this?” she demands, liberated and disoriented, as awake as she is dreaming.
And yet, despite this contrast, the first and second half of Aerial are more closely related than they have been given credit for. Listen closely and you hear poignant examples of reverie, sparked not by nature but by the mundane. There’s the “little brown jug" of A Coral Room, which used to belong to Kate’s mother: “it held her milk,” she sings, “and now it holds our memories.” Mrs Bartolozzi sees her absent husband in the flickering movement of the white shirt on the line. Perhaps that’s why she works so hard, to find the “sparkle” in the kitchen floor, to get the shirts so bright they can reflect her memories. It’s like she’s trying to find and open a portal into an imaginary world, one where she might be less alone. Like we all are.
In The Architect’s Dream, from Aerial’s second half, we hear the image of the painter’s smudge, a mistake that becomes so much more. “I could feel what he was feeling,” she sings, as if emotions can be transmitted by the application of oil and grease onto canvas. Which, of course, they can. It makes for a short leap back to the first half, where objects and actions and quiet domestic moments have the same effect. It’s there in Mrs Bartolozzi’s daydreaming, it’s there in the tide that runs in and out around her hips as she stands in the sea. It’s there in the fish that swim between her legs, a moment which echoes on in the underwater world of A Coral Room, and in the panoramic moment at the album’s end. Aerial’s first half is full of portals, of antidotes to domesticity. Wherever there is sadness, there is also memory and hope. When characters are trapped, imagination offers escape. The mundane is a passport to the sublime. A way to connect to something bigger than themselves. You can watch the clothes dance on the washing line and imagine them as lovers. You can “put your hand over the side of the boat”, as A Coral Room invites us to do, plunging your imagination into grief or dreams or joy.
Aerial is a thoroughly Blakean record, I think. Following Blake, the Romantic poets put emotion at the core of aesthetic experience. Nature generates emotion, they suggested, and emotion is where we find meaning. Sometimes, in life as in nature, that emotion can be overwhelming. We feel awe and fear and dread. At others, emotion connects us to one another, or to something - the connection makes us feel significant or safe. The journey we make through Aerial is, accordingly, an emotional transformation, from one state to another. We begin in enforced domesticity: cowed, covered and isolated. We navigate through apparently cramped and thwarted lives, their owners clutching at glimpses of something more meaningful. We give ourselves to nature and art and end the journey “up, up, on the roof,” eager to taste all life has to offer us, laughing in birdsong, at one with nature and the elements, the celestial even, part of the cycle and the meaning of life. It’s a journey not just of survival or resilience, but of fulfilment. Aerial shows us how we might connect to that transformation as part of our everyday life - how, in fact, the everyday is really at the heart of magic. The mundane provides a trigger for our imagination. Like Blake said:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
And ultimately, what you notice as you reach the end of this journey are the bookends. At either end, a free-standing structure. From King Of The Mountain, a hollow mansion, remote and high upon a hill, to Aerial - a source of transmission, a receiver of signals. An aerial is connected and alive. A beacon, which any of us can become, in a temporary state of the sublime. That state is beautiful, if fleeting. It makes of us a free-standing structure, bathed in glowing light, perhaps. Like we’re lit up from the inside. Lit up, perhaps, like a tree in SE1.