Victorian stamps were ostensibly modest in appearance but bore a wealth of graphic detail. To the untrained eye, one Penny Red looked much like another, but they existed in hundreds of variations of ink colour, paper, perforations, die, plate numbers, type fonts, watermarks — shades of meaning that constituted a potentially vast field of study, not to speak of the abiding interest of postmarks, each recording a date, a place, the instant when a stamp became a used stamp. Some collectors specialized in stamps on covers, noting place of origin and destination in the context of the railway network of Victorian Britain. It was detective work, and, like Sherlock Holmes, these philatelists had frequent recourse to Bradshaw’s railway guide. Kilpatrick was pleased to learn that in 1820 George Bradshaw, originator of the guide, had set up an engraver’s shop in Crown Entry in Belfast, before moving to Manchester two years later.
Kilpatrick had visited Manchester in December 1968 at the invitation of Danny Fisher, an old school friend who now worked as a library assistant in the Manchester City Library. It was Kilpatrick’s first time away from Ireland, and Manchester struck him as a Belfast constructed on a larger scale, with massive brick-built office blocks, hotels, derelict warehouses and factories some six or eight stories high, cavernous streets and black canals running between the buildings. It was three o’clock when he arrived at the centre, and dusk was already falling. As he walked down a sombre street, huge flocks of starlings wheeled above the glittering slate roofs, thousands of birds twisting, turning, swooping in perfect unison as if orchestrated by telepathy, and Kilpatrick imagined himself conducting them as he would an aerial symphony, waving his arms to synchronize their movements. He was unsure of his whereabouts. Many of the houses in the street were boarded up, and he was glad to come to the yellow light of a shop window where he got directions. He still remembered Fisher’s address: 27 Bloom Street. He had not been in touch with him for years.
As Kilpatrick turned a corner he bumped into a passer-by. He muttered an apology and glanced up at the blue and white street sign: Rue Daguerre. He was far from Rue Vivienne. Lost in the past, he had no memory of how he had got there. He went into a bar café. It was still morning. The bar was empty. He ordered a coffee. The sound system was playing Kind of Blue. He lifted the cup to his lips. The track came to an end. There was a lull before the next track. He recognized it immediately: Glenn Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV. As he listened, he became aware of a hum in the background. A woman was vacuuming, the sound growing louder as she approached his table, drowning out the music. As if oblivious to his presence, head lowered, intent on her task, she vacuumed around his feet before retreating into the darkness at the back of the bar. The music was still playing, and he recalled Glenn Gould’s anecdote of how, in his teens, he was learning Mozart’s Fugue in C Major when the housekeeper came in and began to vacuum round the piano; on purpose, according to Gould. Gould couldn’t quite hear himself, he said, but began to feel what he was doing, the tactile presence of the fugue as represented by finger positions, and also by the kind of sound you might hear if you stood in the shower and shook your head with water coming out of both ears. It was luminous, said Gould, the most glorious sound. It took off. He claimed that all of the things Mozart couldn’t quite do, he was doing for him. And he suddenly realized that the particular screen through which he was viewing this, which he had erected between Mozart and his fugue, was exactly what he needed. As he came to understand later, said Gould, a certain mechanical process needed to come between himself and the work of art he was involved with. It was one of the great moments of his life.
The vacuum cleaner stopped. Gould’s playing was nearing its end. Kilpatrick had closed his eyes, bracing himself for the impact of that gunshot of explosive silence, when he heard a voice beside him. Wonderful thing, don’t you think, said the voice. Music of the spheres. Kilpatrick turned round. It was the man he had met in the Irish bar, the James Joyce. Same red face. Black Hugo Boss overcoat. Black briefcase. It was the same man all right. If I may, said the man. He sat down beside Kilpatrick, and placed the briefcase on the floor at his feet where a moment ago the housekeeper had been vacuuming. Vacuum cleaner, what was the word? L’aspirateur.
Odd Man Out
It has only just occurred to me that Ben, my watchmaker’s moniker for me, John Kilfeather, is of course short for Benjamin; and the Flower Pot Man name, with all its associations with Flower Power and pot or dope or blow, Mary Jane, the Fragrant Weed, suddenly assumes, like a mantle, the scholarly aura of Walter Benjamin; I see that photograph of him, the hair rising from the high brow in a shock of convoluted waves shot with grey, one lens of the wire-rimmed spectacles catching the gleam of a contemplative or saddened eye, the thoughtful brow supported by the fingertips of the right hand, the strong nose above the drooping moustache, the lips half-hidden, his eyes of an inward cast not meeting the camera but entering an inner room where Walter Benjamin relives the memories of the man he has been and wanders again the boulevards of a foreign yet familiar city, lost and at home, or looks into the future; I admire the style of the dark jacket, the floppy-collared shirt, the dark tie with a thin diagonal stripe; and I see myself and John Harland looking at the photograph, which Harland had culled from a literary journal and pinned to a cork board together with a host of other images. It was Harland who had introduced me to Benjamin’s writing.
He also who introduced me to the work of J.S. Bach, of whom I knew nothing, but presumed he wrote symphonies. Symphonies? said Harland. Never wrote a symphony in his life. Preludes, toccatas, choral preludes, fugues, Masses, oratorios, yes, but symphonies? Never, said Harland. I remember the first time I heard Glenn Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV, except I didn’t know what it was then, I am still finding out, this opening statement followed by a recapitulation or development of what it bears in mind, a hesitant yet luminous exploring of the theme, which turns itself into itself by way of ever-branching variation, wistful sometimes, sometimes forceful, plangent, yearning. Harland had it on the Dansette record player in Exchange Place. All this time Harland was painting, jabbing or dragging or quavering his brush across the canvas in time to the music, leading the notes from the air to become the paint of the painting. As his body swayed to the music, I watched Harland become the conductor of things from one world to the other, I watched him become Hermes who negotiates the Underworld, Hermes the god of the crossroads, Hermes the god of chance, the angel who guides you to the page in the book you did not know you were looking for until you opened it, and looked into it.
Of course I didn’t know then how the piece ended, and when it did, with that shock that still goes through me when I hear Contrapunctus XIV, Harland held his brush aloft in a final conductor’s flourish, then threw it at the canvas. The hinges of form come about by chance, he said. Francis Bacon. He went over and perused the splatter the brush had made on the image. Interesting dendrites, he said. Nice axons. You know, the brain. I knew the terms vaguely. Clusters, branches, strings of nerve cells interconnected in some kind of fractal pattern, collecting and disseminating streams of information in the blink of an eye. I looked at Harland’s splatter anew, seeing things in it I hadn’t seen until then. But where exactly they were going, I couldn’t say.