Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, by Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside ("since all is o'er," he saith,
"And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;")

While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among "The Band" - to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed
Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now--should I be fit?

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.

So, on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers - as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove.

No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See
Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly,
"It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free."

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards - the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest men should dare (he said) he durst.
Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which, while I forded, - good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage--

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

And more than that - a furlong on - why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood--
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains - with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me, - solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.

Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when--
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den!

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

Not see? because of night perhaps? - why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,--
"Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!"

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

New York City

The New York show was good, the first time I felt we managed to captivate the entire audience. But people with the wrong sort of qualities come to our shows now and hammer on the backstage door, expecting to be allowed in just because they bought a t-shirt. And there are a lot of them, an unnatural light burning in their eyes, spit spraying as they lecture us on the musicanship of Phish. I wanted to concentrate on saying goodbye to Annie and her band... and when I do it's heatbreaking, every muscle and bone in my body aches, aches, aches. My mind finally closes down into a trance of dog-tiredness, a tunnel from which I will emerge in London, waving goodbye from the other side of the Atlantic. If the plane doesn't crash, of course. Au revoir America (and Canada), it's been a blast.

THE END

Danville, PA to NYC

Another snowstorm stops us making it all the way from Cleveland to Brookyln, so we have one last night in a hotel. In Danville PA, we find a Days Inn with an enormous bar, a musician howling Neil Young songs at three dazed punters and a strange deadening ambience that hovers around the oversized foyer and corridors, basketball court-sized and completely empty. One last eerie night in rural Pennsylvania before our final bow in New York, the day before Thanksgiving. With pitchers of beer at $1 each, it's not long before everyone is screaming requests for Johnny Cash. 'I'm here next Tuesday too' the singer tells us, more in sorrow than hope.

Today is our last day, I am in between the mental process of turning this into a memory, distant colours recalled from posters and pamphlets carelessly stuffed into bags in hotel foyers (rediscovered years later in a hurried spring clean, held for three seconds of recollection then tidied away again) and the feeling that these things actually happened days back, that Stein's Ghost Town or the lights of El Paso, or the cold of Lake Erie are just down the road, existing as part of the immediate world. Today I'm stranded in between the two; self conscious of this fading away, (the curse of reading Proust) even as we drive through New Jersey under a bright winter sun, colouring the drab birches and scrub grass a Pre-Raphaelite auburn. Soon, all this will be gone, eaten by the drone of a flight deck, the flicker of other people's movies. The strange abstraction of playing music night after night after night after night will become a memory.

I have this bizarre reluctance to end the tour, which I have often found utterly miserable, longing for home, feeling ill and restless. The winter is really coming in. Maybe I will just miss being abroad and the intense tenor of life on the road, hope, disappointment, uncertainty, romance. The end of an era in my life. The major feeling now is weariness and the usual faint tinge of foolishness.

Michigan and Ohio

Are drab and sullen at this time of year, dirty grey. Detroit was a good show for a lovely audience, but the amount of shit we take from pan handlers loading in and out defies belief. Today the sky is like varnish aged by smoke. The tour is winding down now, just two more dates and no more long drives, everyone is weary to the bone, just keeping on. I am full of worries about home, gazing out at these colourless stretches of trees, fields and farmhouses, too grey and flat and for even me to romanticise.

At a service station 20 miles west of Cleveland, I hear a conversation between 2 Burger King staff about 'a haunted castle' in Ireland which one of them is planning to visit, 'With sharks and alligators in the moat... and... and... and... lobsters with their pincers too'. We drive 4 more miles and I see a small lake to the left of the freeway that in every way resembles an ordinary natural lake, except for the 3 foot spume of water rising from the centre, clearly artifical and serving no apparent purpose. Last night someone asked if my name was really Alasdair Maclean. 'It just sounds so Art Nouveau'.

Heather's parents live right on the edge of lake Erie, which we visit after the Cleveland show and just before the onset of a filthy snowstorm. We take the dogs, Billy and Sadie, out to the lake shore, where the white horses are rolling in, driven by the bitterest wind I've felt since living in Edinburgh. The light is pale grey, dim with moisture, a few flakes of snow dancing in the air. The cold is incredible, but bracing. We are really winding down now, getting ready for the last hours and minutes in this country, the very end, the finale to an 8 week tour, perhaps the end of making music together at all. It's all so unreal and I feel beaten down and sad, somehow unrecognisable to myself. Dry, thick lines of snow snake over the highway like little tracks of polystrene beads, driven side to side by the wind. What a dismal day. At last, I have finished the first trilogy of Remembrance of Things Past.

The snow is coating the side of the freeway now, the light dimming by 4pm into a charcoal twilight, sad snowy woods and telegraph lines glimpsed through clearings that recede and fade. They look as grim as some Polish forest, interspersed endlessly with car parks and vast ugly motorpart stores like gulags. I really get a sense of the isolation of this country, the loneliness: scratching out a mark on these endless fields of snow, whose message to us can only be that we should leave as fast as possible, and go as far as we can.

Minneapolis - Chicago

We play a version of 'Graven Wood', an old Clientele song written by Innes Phillips, on Minneapolis Public Radio, and listening to it today as we wearily drive down to Chicago, it sounds magical, perfectly echoing the drab, grey copses and snow-littered fields passing by the window. We also played it live at the show, and I enjoyed explaining the origins of the song; four of us in a wood clearing as dusk fell, coming down off a heavy dose of er.. illegals, the world was a beautiful and frigid autumn red, the rhoddodendrons sheltering us from distantly passing cars, a sense of dread just barely creeping into the scene. Innes later told me this was not what he wrote the song about at all, I misunderstood, but for me it still spells out this moment perfectly, the peak of a magical and unreal phase of my life, a group of adolescents in the countryside, each beginning to face the fact that people aren't safe after all.

The skies are so big here that it's been comparatively easy to tell the time and the direction we are travelling in just from the movement of the sun. I've also been watching the moon rise and fall, move left and right, as we travelled further and the days went by; it gives more of a sense of the complex orbits and rotations of the earth. It's the first time in my life I've thought about this. As we travel East, back across the country, I can estimate how many hours of daylight we have left as the sun sinks across to the West, and how enthusiastically I should attack the Proust I've brought with me, before darkness silences his magisterial voice.

Beginning the Drive Back East: Seattle to Little Bighorn

Driving East towards Ritzville, the first snow we've seen in weeks, coating the mountain peaks down to the freeway edge. As we cross the Idaho/Montana pass in darkness, an icy, impenetrable fog hits us like a wall, it's impossible to see beyond a few feet, snow coats the road, and we slither down the Bitterroots with our hazard lights on, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of frozen pine trees. The Radar Brothers tell me, with a twinkle in their eyes, that in Montana it's illegal not to stop for a broken down motorist - if you break down, the chances are you'll freeze to death. Our Chrysler seems to be doing OK. The fog abruptly lifts as we lose altitude, and we drive on through the pass between gigantic moonlit mountains, fields of snow and dimly-seen pine forests. I realise, looking at a map of the area in a service station, that we are very close to tracing the route of Lewis and Clark, discoverers of the North West passage.

Missoula, the hometown of David Lynch appears and disappears in the darkness, ringed by oppressive mountains, orbited by monster trucks. The snow is falling all around us, I gaze out at these streets and houses traced by lamps, before long it's all gone and we are back in the wilderness again.

The next day is very bright, snow reflecting the sun and presenting us with an alternating vista of mountains and plains, as wild and inhospitable as the desert. We eat breakfast, grudgingly, in a Denny's that has an amazing 360 degree Alpine view through bay windows. I am now so tired and upset and pissed off I can hardly think straight. A 12 hour drive ahead of us just to make it half way to Minneapolis.

We stop at Custer, MT around 4pm Mountain Time, a mile west from the site of Custer's last stand, Little Bighorn. Mark walks past a little house between the petrol station and a 'Hunter's Pub' offering 'broasted' chicken, and is accosted by two dogs and a goat that run free onto the road. The goat is friendly but the dogs are not. He retreats, and so do we. Less than half way through the drive. The goat remains on the road, gazing enigmatically at our departing van.

Portland, Oregon

Portland was fun
Our venue, the Doug Fir Lounge is custom built for musicians.
Sand inside the stage to prevent nasty bass vibrations.
A tartan carpet in the dressing room.
Hotel and restaurant are part of the same complex, only a stumble away.
The whole place is covered in mirrors and silver
The show is good.
Someone shouts 'let's get fucked up!'
We head to a bar.
A big, middle aged man approaches me and snaps, 'you're the Clientele guy, right?'
He's smashed, drunk out of his mind
'Sububbbban Light was... fuckin A......but after that.... what the fuck happened?'
'You win some you lose some'
'Right' he says, slumping, wagging his finger at some inner weariness he recognises, 'Right'.
Then, abruptly, he sits down on a poker machine where his glass of whisky was resting
Crushing it with the seat of his all-American pants
'You better get that seen by a doctor,' I say
'Right... right,' the weary finger wags again

Jimmy, singer of the Radar Brothers, is wearing a dogtooth trilby, ice clinking in his whisky glass, sat at the bar with Steve and me. A quiet, spooky man with a gift for repartee; everyone is trashed, some playing shuffleboard at the back of the bar, drinking Hefferweiss, more members of the underground society of semi-succesful musicians taking some time off to relax, shaving a few more days off their dwindling life expectancies.

The morning is unmentionable

A Phillip Larkin sort of Day

Afternoons

Summer is fading;
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering the new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
'Our Wedding', lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all at school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

Phillip Larkin - Afternoons, from 'The Whitsum Weddings', 1964