Where I really excel is in daydreaming. Ever since I can remember I’ve been found with my head in the clouds, away with the fairies…whatever other phrase you wish to use to describe it. I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve got it down to a fine art. I’m not sure whether my natural disposition towards daydreaming stimulated my love for literature or whether being transported to various imaginary worlds via reading was responsible for my frequent forays into reverie; I suspect that it’s a chicken-and-egg situation. What I do believe is that any writer or poet worth their salt must possess a great capacity to daydream (and I’m not trying to insinuate anything with regards to my own ramblings…); logic and reality mustn’t be undermined in the process, but they only take you so far until creativity inevitably takes over and works its magic. For all those who dismiss daydreams as a waste of time, merely wishful thinking; remove the daydreams of writers and readers alike and things would be quite dull indeed. I think Edgar Allan Poe puts the case for daydreaming particularly well: “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” So daydreamers, take heart!

Poe himself was quite the dreamer, if we can draw conclusions from his array of work; Dreamland, Dreams, A Dream Within A Dream to name the pieces that reference dreaming directly. We can find in Poe’s poems evidence of a fantastically creative mind filled with extraordinary visions and places of imagination but we are also able to trace significant solemnity; at times an almost desperate sense to cling to a disappearing dream to avoid being stranded in what can seem and feel like a reality devoid of hope. A Dream is a good example of this, as it is not free from troubles. The repetition of dreams, existing both in ‘the dark night’ and ‘in Truth’s day-star’, makes us wonder: what visions and ‘dreams’ can truly be distinguished from reality?

A Dream

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro’ storm and night,
So trembled from afar-
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth’s day-star?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

This clip is from an episode called ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (other episodes have such titles as ‘One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue’, ‘The Backbone of Night’ and ‘The Edge of Forever’) which looks at intelligence and the evolution of the brain. Luckily, some kind soul had posted it on YouTube. I apologise for the quality – but only of the picture!

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

I find the further north I roam the more compelling the landscape. The epic hills seem to put my own transient physicality into perspective, and I have a stronger sense of myself in comparison to the vastness of the world. The undulating fields rise above me, setting heights in their hearts. The earth here seems more alive, more full of vitality, than the infinitely flat fields which surround my home in Warwickshire.

Glimpsing the lakes, I recall some of the greatest writers and their work. My head is filled with dreams of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit, Arthur Ransome and his swallows and amazons, William Wordsworth and those daffodils.

This window seat in the train carriage proves brilliant for surveying these magnificent vistas. The hopscotching rivers, the evergreen firs (which are always naked Christmas trees in my mind), the Scottish air itself – all is tantalisingly close. And yet it remains utterly inaccessible to me, locked as I am in a train which flashes red through this verdant Eden.

My journey today takes me as far as Edinburgh where I meet a group in the Bibby Financial Services office. Together we read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s short story Accelerate and enjoy William Henry Davies’ poem Leisure. We listen to a lilting Scottish accent sound out those simple and very satisfying rhyming couplets (care/stare, boughs/cows, pass/grass, light/night, glance/dance, can/began, care/stare) and take comfort in the repetition of that line ‘we have no time to stand and stare’. Some in the group are moved profoundly. ‘My dad died last month,’ says one, ‘And there’s just never enough time, is there?’

Time is a concept which haunts my working life at present. Journeys seem to encompass too much time, destinations too little. It is ironic then, that I often feel strangely wistful for halted journeys, especially journeys north. Later this week I shall be in Aberdeen and an oil storage platform unit in the North Sea, and next week I visit Glasgow. I expect to feel a yearning to go more north, and north again. Like the proverbial moth, I am overwhelmingly drawn to the lights: the possibility of the aurora borealis, the promise of twenty-four whole hours of sunshine.

If only Bibby Line Group had an office in the Arctic Circle.

Posted by Ella Jolly

Visit Books at Bibby

Phil and I discussed the likelihood of the end of the world before breakfast on Wednesday morning. What if the CERN scientists were wrong and the collider bang did cause a new cosmos to burst out of the ruins of our old one? And what if that kept happening over and over again in a weird 14 billion year loop? We get this far and they say nothing much’ll happen and then they collide the particles and BANG! Up we go again. 

I waited around until 8.00am (when Phil assured me it had happened ‘and everything seems ok.’) Then I set off for The Reader Organisation office, listening, en route, to the Today programme on Radio 4 where (after we heard of the Cabinet having been to Birmingham: wonders, wonders, signs and wonders) we got Andrew Marr in the Control Room at CERN. It was a magnificent piece of radio. Everything seemed so very tentative yet also mildly possible, like the early days of Tim Henman’s Wimbledon career. Something just might be about to happen: something for which we have been waiting for thirty years. We were all cheering. But we realised, too, in our hearts, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But then perhaps it might. Let’s cheer. Let’s hope it will. Let’s hope. The scientists (as they each spoke they turned out to be a wonderful mix of Ulster, Welsh, English and French) might just manage to bring off what was being billed as the most important scientific experiment since the early Apollo programme.

Which was what it reminded me of as I sat in my traffic jam and listened. Did I really sit on a parquet floor in a primary school assembly hall with 200 other under-11’s and watch ‘one small step for man…?’  I think I did but it is all so long ago… Life is long. And very short. I listened to what Marr called ‘the atmosphere so tense you could it with a … laser beam’ and I could see the grainy black and white pictures, and hear my grandfather mocking ‘It’s all in a studio! The Yanks have mocked it up! It’s anti-Communist propaganda!’

Later Andrew Marr wondered if Big Bang day would get kids fired up about physics. I think, despite my grandfather’s perfectly reasonable doubts, that it was the Apollo programme that got me interested in Science Fiction. I couldn’t get interested in real science because of the maths or rather my paralysing fearful innumeracy but I did read John Wyndham aged about 11, finishing The Day of the Triffids by torchlight way into the night because I simply could not stop reading and then it went on: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg. Until at some point I got bored. Later, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. le Guin resurrected my old SF interest when, in my early twenties I went through a period of reading only women but after that I forgot all about my early love, until Doris Lessing introduced me (via ‘Some Remarks’ at the beginning of Shikasta) to the biggest daddy of all Sci Fi books: Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon. 

For Big Bang Day, Big Bang Week, Big Bang Year, this is the man to read. He is the biggest. Cosmology? Infinity?  He’s got it by the billion squared. He tells our human story from the primordial soup days to the way past the end of the our universe, and many other universes.

But he doesn’t think of it as Science Fiction, just fiction. In the Preface to the 1930 edition, Stapledon writes:

This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

…The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

‘The human race in its cosmic setting.’ I loved that – the enormous size of it.  

It was an amazingly lucky stroke for me as a young post-grad to discover that Olaf Stapledon–despite his exotic northern name–had been a lecturer in the Extension Studies programme at the University of Liverpool. Not only that, but all his papers had been donated to our very own Sydney Jones Library. Not only that, but they had not (I’m talking 1983) yet been catalogued. Not only that, but when I arrived breathless with excitement in SJL Special Collections, some of them hadn’t even been lifted out of the original, dusty, old cardboard boxes Olaf himself (probably) packed them into before carrying up to his attic. Some of the boxes had string round them. I undid it, thinking: he tied this careful knot.

Reading through that stuff (almost all of it totally unrelated to my PhD thesis) was an experience of immense magnitude. It was like getting involved with a ghost. There he was–everywhere and in all sorts of ways–but I couldn’t see him or touch him, though I could sense him, feel him and hear him but then I couldn’t quite feel him or hear him. Yet he was in my mind. I knew him. 

One day I found a letter, hand typed on one of those old sit up and beg typewriters, from H. G. Wells, and there was H. G. Wells’ signature in heavy ink, and (as I remember it) it was a kind letter, praising (was it? My memory isn’t too good) Last and First Men but not praising it with huge generosity and, I think, a little egotistically drawing Stapledon’s attention to something Wells had himself recently published or written. I remember it as being on hotel notepaper. It was a wonderful moment, holding it, with the box in front of me, and no one telling me not to touch it. Two great giants of Sci Fi seemed before my eyes. Yes, I think I saw them. Both dead, they were in some sense present. 

There’s an awful lot we can’t see. Think of all that dark matter: we don’t even know what it is, only that it is most of what’s here. Three cheers for the particle colliders then and for more people taking ‘A-level’ physics. They are going bring a little more of that darkness into the light.

Posted by Jane Davis

Since I have been back, Lord Byron’s ‘Beppo’, Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees and Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ have been quickly devoured in an attempt to re-live walking along those narrow back canals, imagining the past that clings to the disintegrating stones and aware of its transitoriness. Each of these texts brings very different qualities of the city back to life and I can appreciate them all, glorifying and disapproving. These three works show very differing approaches to Venice, some majestic, some threatening and some peaceful. Yet it is Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that utterly captures the ambiguous nature of Venice. Constructed as a series of short accounts of ‘made-up’ cities by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, the descriptions offered are of just one place – Venice. So beautiful in its narrative style it is more akin to reading poetry, Calvino’s masterpiece brings together the fantastical and authentic, the celebrated and deprecated elements of the city. It is in the pages of this book that I can experience all the varying sensations that Venice offers, a true testimony to its uniqueness.