ON QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT AND THE REMEMBRANCE OF DAYS LOST
A few years after my parents passed away, I was sorting out some old photographs. Historically, we had always had about four large albums, which held all the family photos dating back to about 1960. Prior to this, camera's were not something my family were able to afford, as far as I could tell and the ones we did have were something of a precious novelty. Having two sisters, the albums were divided up between us and the one I had contained mostly photographs of my own childhood, which was an idyllic time and leafing through the snaps, could quickly transport me back to that wonderful era. Most of the photographs, I was familiar with and recalled almost every instance of the shot being taken, but amongst them all, I came across a small square print of me and my dad, standing ankle deep in the sea at what I reasoned must be West Kirby beach on the Wirral.
Seeing it, I wept openly - something I had struggled to do properly at the time of my fathers death, or later - but something in the shot - struck a chord. Maybe it was the profound memory of that wonderful day, probably about 1967 on one of our summer holiday days out, or perhaps it was the expression on my dad's face - he was not a very demonstrative man most of the time, but when he laughed, it was loud and long. So I took the photo and placed it in a small frame on my wall, an instant and very clear link to my past. Oddly enough, some years later, I uncovered an almost identical print of what appears to be the same location with me and my Mum, on a different day, maybe 12 months apart. I was amazed and really happy to have the pair of photographs and backed them both up immediately, before framing them up.
Fast forward to 2016 and I am coming to the end of my Creative Writing Masters and looking for inspiration for a set of 30 poems for my dissertation. I have a vague idea about writing a series of sonnets, based on messages and writing inscribed in the glass of the windows of Speke Hall, a tudor mansion in Liverpool. After a visit and a private photoshoot out of hours, nothing is coming through and time is ticking away. In a bid to invigorate my muse, I pay a visit to my friend and writing mentor Woodsy, in sunny Yorkshire. It was Woodsy who gave me the idea to pursue a writing course and who's songwriting and poetry had instilled a renewed love for the word in me some years before.
Our mutual love of car boot and yard sales found us at York Racecourse the following weekend, for a huge antiques and vintage sale, picking amongst the stalls and boxes for toys, books and for me - camera gear. Within the first 15 mins, I came across a guy with various baskets and boxes strewn across the grass, with what was clearly the contents of house clearances. There was all kinds of junk, bric-a-brac and ornaments haphazardly arranged as he unloaded the van onto the grass. The first thing that caught my eye was the distinctive yellow box of a Kodak product. In the sixties, Kodak had a lush cadmium yellow base, a red kodak logo and a band of coloured stripes on their packaging and I spotted a small box from about six feet away and promptly dived in. It turned out to be full of glass Kodachrome slides and nearby, in the old washing basket it was sitting in were about four other plastic slide boxes, full of more glass slides. A quick check revealed a landscape shot of one of them, so I picked out all the boxes, gathered up a couple of other items and bought the lot for less than a fiver.
When I got back a few days later, I examined them more closely. There were four boxes, all labelled up, some appearing to be holiday snaps from a European trip and a lot more from a road trip to Scotland.
The photographer clearly had some skill and the images were very pretty when held up to the light. On the back of one of the yellow Kodak box, which was from a mail order development company, was a postal address for a house in Yorkshire. Out of curiosity, I put the address in Google and amazingly, found the vacant property for sale on an estate agents website. The sight of the empty rooms of what was clearly an older persons house was quite jarring and I felt almost intrusive. The bulk of the slides were purely landscape shots, but amongst one lot were four photographs of a family group on a beach and in particular, a father and small son playing in the tide.
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| Time & Tide |
The date on the slide was 1965 and the image so reminded me of my favourite shot of myself and my late father - from around the same period - so much so that I felt quite sad and quickly packed everything away.
It was some weeks later, during a writing session, that I hatched the idea of a series of ekphrastic poems - which describe or relate directly to an image - and began to write using the slides and their beautiful sweeping highland panoramas, as the basis. I had sorted through them, choosing some choice images of mountains and lochs and had taken the family grouping out of the set completely, as I found it difficult to look at them, without feeling upset in some vague way.
Over the next few months, the poetry began to materialise and I felt confident that I would be able to get something useable from them. Xmas rolled around and I received a joint gift of a holiday for myself and my wife, for a coach tour round the Western Highlands, out of Oban and I immediately thought that it would be the ideal time to get some supplementary photographs on the way and maybe do a little on the spot writing.
The following February, we took off on the weeks excursion and had a great time, enjoying the sights and sounds of Scotland. Then, on a trip to Fort William, we passed a loch and a little way ahead I saw a bridge we needed to cross to get to the town. I had a sudden rush of deja vu and realised I had seen this bridge before. Back at the hotel, I checked my notes and the digital copies of the slides and realised that the photographer had taken a picture of the same bridge, back in 1965 and what was more, other slides showed images from the same areas that we were visiting.
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| Original faded slide from 1965 |
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| Snap from Coach window 2017 |
I was very pleasantly surprised and double checked the map to see the locations of many of the slides tallied with stops that we were visiting on the trip. This then cemented my belief that I was doing the right thing and that choosing the slides as the basis for the writing was the right move. Being at the same vantage points that the mysterious photographer had visited almost half a century ago made me feel a strange kinship with them and the nature of the poems changed radically, becoming more personal and powerful. The rest of the holiday was spent busily photographing almost every part of the trip, using my iphones built in geolocation to tag the photographs for future reference.
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| Shot from car window 2023 |
With this new direction, I revisited the group shots on the beach and examined them more carefully. There was a young boy of about 4 or 5, and a mother and father. The addressee on the film mailing box had been a lady and most of the photos showed the man and the boy on the slide, so I began to assume the photographer had probably been the lady on the beach.
It was round about half way through the portfolio, that I realised I would need a name for the set and began to try out different titles. Somewhere along the way I came up with 'Light of Other Days' and while discussing the idea with a friend and creative writing tutor, he said the title sounded vaguely familiar and that I had best check to avoid any copyright issues. A quick Google revealed that it was in fact the title of a science fiction story, written by Bob Shaw and featured in the August 1966 edition of Analog magazine. Cue Amazon and I managed to get a copy to look at and read the story. (I've since realised that its also the title of an Arthur C Clarke manuscript too)
If I had not been amazed at the amount of synchronicity displayed by the project so far, things were about to get a whole lot spookier!
Shaw had named his story for a poem by Thomas Moore's "Oft, in the Stilly Night"; which is quoted within the story and ends with the lines:
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
These lines, in themselves echoed the sombre tone that had developed in the poetry, since I had made the connection between my dad and the person in the photograph, but when I read the story, I began to see why Shaw had chosen them.
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| Slow Glass |
The story concerned the invention of a material called 'slow glass' which impedes the flow of photons through its mass and has the effect of storing energy, but most importantly, of delaying the appearance of any visual phenomena which is seen through it. Shaw explored the material and its effects in a larger series of stories, entitled 'Other Days, Other Eyes'.
This in itself was fascinating, but the protagonist, a poet - visits a remote loch in Scotland on holiday and finds a small cottage fitted with slow glass windows. The owner of the cottage had lost his wife and family in an accident near the loch and due to the nature of slow glass, was able to preserve the images of his lost family inside the cottage, before they were killed, as a virtual memory.
This idea resonated strongly with my thoughts on the glass slides and an idea I had about quantum entanglement - that at some point in time, the photographer was still standing on a shore in Scotland, or overlooking a loch, just as I was, fifty years later.
What really threw me though, was besides the main character being a poet, the action took place nearby the loch that was crossed by the bridge I had first recognised. If I had been sure as to whether I was doing the right thing before, this succession of weird coincidences had completely secured my attention to completing the portfolio. In the next few weeks, the poetry changed again in terms of process and tone, becoming much darker and slightly mystical, to reflect my most recent experiences and became much stronger and cohesive as a result.
Just this year, we embarked on another family holiday to Scotland, this time on the shore of Loch Long. On a day trip to Oban on the coast, we took the same road past loch Awe and I saw the bridge once more and many of the sights that I was familiar with from the slides, virtually unchanged over the intervening seven years. As I wasn't subject to the timetable of a coach party and able to stop more easily, I made sure I recorded as much of the area as I possibly could.
The parapsychologist and scientist T.C Lethbridge, investigated a great many theories around E.S.P and other mysteries, recording his theories in a series of books. One such idea was that the electrical activity in the brain could be impressed upon natural objects, such as running water, due to a difference in the level of energy. This had the effect of creating what he referred to as a 'ghoul field', when a negative emotional state - such as depression, suicidal thoughts or anger - was unconsciously transferred to a place in a landscape, so that someone crossing the same point might pick up on the unpleasant emotions being carried by a stream or rivulet, like a recording. He also suggested that visual stimuli might be recorded in a similar fashion and account for regular ghost sightings, when a person with a particular sensitivity might be able to receive the signal and 'see' the visual impression.
A keen dowser, he went to great lengths to investigate the science of divination, with the rod and the pendulum, producing measurable results, which he systematically charted and recorded. He laid out his findings in a series of books, with experiments which can be followed with demonstrable success.
Lethbridge was always at pains to find a physical cause and explanation to these mystical phenomena and his books go to considerable length to explain how the process works.
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| Luss |
While staying at Arrochar on Loch Long and sitting on the stony beach overlooking the loch, I was impressed with a wonderful feeling of calm and contentment. Whether this was just the splendid views and beautiful landscape, I can not be sure, but certainly it had been a favourite spot for other people judging by a small memorial plaque attached to a tree and a small votive offering left at the foot of another.
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| Four Angels |
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| For B |
Eventually, the sequence neared its end and I conceived of a title - 'Still'. This reflected the idea of the 'still' image and also the theoretical permanence of the quantum state - imagining that the photographer was 'still' taking photos back in 1966, as I was doing the same in 2017. During the course of the research for the writing, I also stumbled across a film about a Liverpool family growing up in the sixties directed by Terence Davies.
The film, "Distant Voices, Still Lives" was an autobiographical account centred around the difficult relationship the director had with his father and opens with a funeral, to the strains of the 1927 dirge 'There's a Man Going Round Taking Names', beautifully rendered by spiritualist singer Jessye Norman. As child I grew up in the same neighbourhood as Davies, so once more I was on familiar ground, at least from the geographical perspective, as my childhood had been the polar opposite of Davies.
However, this also resonated with my research into the mystery photographer and the fact that I still had no idea who my benefactor had been. With this in mind, I penned the penultimate poem which for me, gave the project a little closure. I named it 'Shadow Aspect' after the Jungian theory of the psychological 'twin' and the unconscious action of the inner mind.
SHADOW ASPECT
There’s a man going round
taking names.
He has yours
and though
I press him for it
he will not relent.
Silent and still
grey hands deep
in black pockets
resolute - implacable.
All I have is a view
to understand and see
as you look askance
back across decades.
I cannot divine your calling,
since he purloined
your identity
slipping your name
into his darkest book
where it lies
stricken through with lines.
As a result of finding the discarded slides, I now make a point of printing certain photographs to be framed, in order that the memories contained therein can live that little bit longer.
