I am going to have to start at the other end by telling you this: there are no crows in the dessert. What appear to be crows are ravens. You must examine the crow, however, before you can understand the raven. To forget the crow completely, as some have tried to do, would be like trying to understand the one who stayed without talking to the one who left. It is important to make note of who has left the dessert.
Barry Lopez, The Raven, from Dessert Notes, 1976
i
Piccadilly Circus, London, April 1980, Phil is standing high up in the bath of the fountain, thumbs in the pockets of his faded blue jeans. He’s looking at me with the intensity and directness of the slender statue above. Eros is pointing his bow straight at me - Here’s an arrow from the past - he’s saying. On the illuminated curves of the buildings behind him two promising glasses of cold Skol kiss. An ego-centric Coca-Cola sign blushes its universal red and white flourish. A giant, green, unopened box of Fujifilm is reminding everyone of their primary purpose. Eros back-kicks the Phillips logo and reminds the big corporations that ultimately, he's the centre of attention. Love needs no adverts. But billboards might need love. Either way it's still a Circus. Mike is a layer down, below Phil, on the ornamental surround, balancing on one of the innocent water-children who hold fish bigger than their fists. In his black jeans and Stranglers red Raven logo t-shirt, he's clutching an orange plastic bag, probably with a recently purchased LP. He’s looking slightly cowed, maybe just impatient, or corvid. We are mildly stoned. The twenty or so other people around us, mostly young men, are paying no attention to the two leather jacketed lads posing on the iconic monument. They are sitting on the steps of the double levelled, octagonal, monumental base, hanging out, in the sun, like thousands of young people have done for decades. We watch life go round and round the Circus; though it’s not actually been a proper circular roundabout since 1886, when Shaftesbury Avenue broke into the old roundabout. Side shafted. I'm hypnotised by multi-bulbed signage even in the daylight. I take a photo of Mike and Phil. A policeman has been paying attention and sharply orders us off - it’s a national monument - he officiates - you can’t just climb on it like that. We slink off, part carefree, part rebellious, part guilty. Phil’s more carefree, Mike’s more rebellious, I’m more guilty. My guilt, a natural inborn 'good boy' impulse, is also triggered by the fact this London trip is my first time sampling cannabis. We are staying at Phil’s sisters flat in Stoke Newington and have conveniently found her stash of sinsemilla seeds in a tin, not particularly well hidden. She was away, so were we. A brief glimpse back at Eros as we tramp away to find tickets for the Stranglers gig later that night, at The Rainbow.
ii
‘Blindfolded Love sending forth indiscriminately, yet with purpose, his missile of kindness, always with the swiftness the bird has from its wings, never ceasing to breathe or reflect critically, but ever soaring onwards, regardless of its own perils and danger,’ wrote Sir Alfred Gilbert, sculptor of the statue. Except the statue isn’t blindfolded. And it isn’t actually Eros. But let's come back to that later.
iii
Fly straight with perfection
Find me a new direction
Hugh Cornwell sings succinctly on the title track of the album, The Raven. The Stranglers have been on tour outside the UK in the previous year. Their sense of the world has broadened. A 1978 tour starting in Iceland and moving into Scandinavia opened up the possibility of Nordic myth. Jean-Jacques Burnell, the jack-booted long-legged bass player wants to haul in the longships of the Vikings, his heritage as a Norman and the power of Odin.
Odin, king of the gods, all observing from his high throne, rune reader, all-father, the gallows god. His understanding of magic was hard won. He hung himself from the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights and nine days, pierced by a potentially fatal spear, battered by winds, fasting to the point of fainting until his agony broke through to insight and the rope severed itself. He landed hard, but insightful, on the earth that packed the timeless roots of the tree. One of the three great roots of Yggdrasil goes deep into the underworld of ice, to Niflheim, literally the dark world of mist.
The Stranglers were always dark: black clothes; a drummer named Jet Black; Meninblack the tenth track on The Raven; their next album The Gospel According to the Meninblack. It’s why Mike is wearing black. Black, the rebellious anti-colour: fuck your rainbow hippy shit and the fake pastel promises of post-war politics. Keyboard player Dave Greenfield, (well ‘Blackfield’ would be pushing into cliché), employed his relatively new Oberheim OB-Xa polyphonic synthesizer on The Raven album. Oberheim: upper-home; Niflheim: under-world. Greenfield brought colour and musical intelligence to a dark themed band. With Golden Brown he introduced the harpsichord to the punk aesthetic. He died of Covid-19 in 2020.
When I was a Viking
My friend he was the raven
Or maybe two ravens. Huginn and Muninn perch on either side of Odin’s shoulders and whisper in his ears the news of the world, the gossip of the globe. Huginn means thought; Muninn means memory. Huginn is etymologically linked to Hugh.
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Piccadilly circus as magic mandala. A mandala being an artistic act of sacred geometry, generally circular, representing the unity of various parts into an integrated whole. A simple map of the earth could be a mundane way of looking at the principle - it's a whole planet, yet the basic directions of the compass indicate we can be N, S, E or W. Each point is not separate from the planet, they are abstract signs, yet it's very helpful to know if you want to get to a particular place, to know where to seek a romantic sunrise, to find home, to run from the enemy, or to decide what clothes to wear. It's also essential to know that the warm weather in more tropical climates of the West and East, is in no way separate from the condition of the icecaps and cold landscapes of the North and South. The Earth is a Whole.
Part of me wants Piccadilly Circus to be a perfect mandala-map. I want to draw patterns out of potentially overwhelming chaos. I want to make sense of sensory overload. I look at the stars, I can't bear the infinity of pinpoints, so I find comfort in the Great Bear, make magic out of the Milky Way, orientate by the Pole Star and seek relief in the Zodiac, conveniently spread out across in the sky into twelve neat portals or petals. The dodeca-cathedral of astrology: Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Horned-goat, Water-bearer, Fish. No ravens or birds in there. But there’s the half-human-half-horse archer with his arrows. He’s the bridge between heaven and earth. If Eros came down, or fell off his pedestal, this is what he would transmute into. He would take a good gulp from the fountain, canter off down Piccadilly, flirt with the Angel of Peace as she reins in her four horses of war on the Wellington Arch, and then romp around Hyde Park releasing a pollination of love arrows.
The Circus won't conform to that aspect of me that wants manageable order. This hub of London has been battered and bound by city planners, underground plumbers, pedestrian desires, population pressures, billboard bravado, consumer priorities, theatrical exuberance, transport twists, and several million pigeons.
In the end Piccadilly Circus just isn't a mandala or even a circle. Alfred Gilbert, sculptor of the Memorial, struggled with the irregularity of the proposed location for his work. He described the site as,
...a distorted isochronal triangle, square to nothing of its surroundings—an impossible site, in short, upon which to place any outcome of the human brain, except possibly an underground lavatory! I had this horrible shape on my mind continually, and that is why I determined upon the plan and elevation of my work—an octagon which should by means of treatment really present the same adaptability to any site, just as a circular form would.
v
It wasn’t always where it is now, the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. A time lapse film would show an ongoing buzz of blurred movement around a static centre and then the hub suddenly disappearing and switching position over time. It has the axis of a bent axel. I keep wanting it to be in the centre of the Circus of my memory, but it just won’t centre. My wish wobbles.
Initially in the eye of a mini-roundabout, at the centre of the Circus, in 1925 it went to Embankment Gardens so they could expand the Underground station, coming back in 1931 to a slightly relocated roundabout. During WW2 Eros took a trip out to Coopers Hill above Egham, while the fountain below remained in situ, covered up. Eros came back with a great fanfare in 1947, but was moved aside to where he was in 1980, and still is, standing poised on his right leg.
vi
I wonder if any other statue has had so many different names. Known most popularly as The Statue of Eros, or just Eros, the figure on the Lord Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain is actually correctly The Statue of Anteros, Anteros being the brother of Eros. Originally its creator Alfred Gilbert explained the figure would be Anteros and the fountain would be named The God of Selfless Love, thereby honouring Shaftesbury’s lifelong philanthropy. Gilbert felt Anteros symbolised reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.
However the pagan sentiment of the monument offended the Church mentality and some tried to rename it The Angel of Christian Charity. That name is still used by many. But he really isn’t an angel, he’s an energised archetypal god from the Greek pantheon. To me it seems uncharitable to claim a superior charity through stealing the name of an earlier charitable god from a different tradition. The public consensus towards misidentifying it as Eros is more understandable, as the winged god of love has been in the popular European imagination for centuries, through myth, fable and renaissance art. He, of course, was also renamed Cupid in the Roman tradition. Despite being reduced to a pudgy sweet child with prepubescent wings, he’s made a killing in the commercial Valentine’s Day marketplace. His brother Anteros just didn’t get the same publicity. The similarity of their kin names probably didn’t help. And shortening his name to the friendly ‘Ant’ is problematic from a deity promotional point of view. A 1913 postcard designates the statue as the winged god Mercury. Ooops!
It took me a long time to notice something obvious. Anteros has no arrow. The sculpture never had one. The bow arm is drawn back, the bow is gripped, the bowstring is loose, the arrow has flown. Anteros is in a perfect post-release pose. He has always come for you. Where did the arrow go? Well like any good archer of love the bow has aimed at many angles and had a bit of a dance here and there. Maybe it is time Anteros, the neglected brother, had a voice.