Fake Views
Trigonometry Points or Trickonometry Points?
The clue is in the name of course:
Ordnance Survey: Ordnance: artillery;
Survey: examine and record an area of land;
The clue is in the time as well as space:
The 18th and 19th centuries:
The formation of the United Kingdom,
When English and Hanoverian imperialism
Mapped the new Union Jack with redcoat ruler,
And with muskets and new names and mathematics,
With charts and furlongs and charters,
Enclosing common and custom
With a new and ruthless toponymy.
Hear William Blake in London,
Marking signs of woe in the ‘charter’d streets’
And the banks and docks of the ‘charter’d Thames’,
As access, space, and freedom immemorial,
Were measured and circumscribed by new laws:
The Age of Reason trumpeting the triumph
Of Adam Smith and the division of labour
In the advance of dark, Satanic mills;
The Age of Reason trumpeting the triumph
Of the division of space through enclosure,
Both rural and urban, both maritime and littoral,
With chains to measure, but also to fetter
Republicans, protestors and trade unionists;
The use of chains for William Blake’s
‘Mind-forg’d manacles’,
An image suggestive of both
Government propaganda,
And an individual loss of imagination;
Autonomy exchanged for alienation
Among these green and pleasant lands,
Where we have today a right to roam
Through just 8% of our Jerusalem.
And beyond those dark Satanic mills?
Lines of latitude and longitude
Colouring the globe Stroud scarlet,
And the seas too, as Britannia ruled the waves,
And as William Blake penned these lines:
‘They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up,
And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sink my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning,
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased’;
These trig points may have mapped our highlands and islands,
But they also pointed the way to Blake’s Atlantic Islands,
To Ireland and to the Americas, and to Africa,
To the Atlantic Archipelago,
To the slave trade and to Empire,
And they also pointed the way to the Age of the Anthropocene.
This is the hidden ambient history
Of these six thousand concrete pillars:
The illusion of mathematical neutrality,
The illusion of abstract reason and rationality,
The illusion of freedom;
And so:
‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green & pleasant Land’.
Inspired by a Reading of
Red Round Globe Hot Burning
Peter Linebaugh
