Evelyn's Ladder

A story in verse and images, exploring themes including personal financial responsibility, surveillance, architecture as a statement of power, and symbolism in the city. The threads of the narrative are looped between the Bank of England and Canary Wharf, and around Nicholas Hawksmoor's London churches; in mapping urban connections that span centuries, the piece ultimately aims to examine how our symbolic heritage holds a continued power on our lives - and how through storytelling this esoteric inheritance may be interpreted and vividly extended.



The Bank of England has subsumed the shadowy business of the financial reference agencies. Now, as a core procedure in its role as overseer of currency and economy, the Bank surveys and archives comprehensive personal and financial information on all consumers.

The Bank coins and issues compulsory lead weights, through neighbourhood 'weighing-houses', to symbolise the burden of personal over-spending. These weights must be borne around the shoulders as the physical 'price' of debt.

Doves carry accounts and memoranda between an enormous aviary at the Bank of England and dovecotes in the spires attached to each weighing-house. Their flight-paths provide a constant visible reminder of the city's central source of control.

William Evelyn, a senior official of the Bank of England, has fallen foul of his own regime. On the day of the reckoning he knows will crush him, he undertakes a journey across London that will lead him to the weak point of the system he helped create.



Fair avenues of flocking hundreds,
doves of finance, bearing messages
of flourishing and ruin in their claws,
ambassadors and envoys of the Bank of England.

Flapping radials emerge at Bank,
and branch away across the map of London;
clear linking lines span airspace, cooing,
racing over heads of bankers, mercers,
window cleaners. Each spire is an aviary,
and serves a neighbourhood, dispensing lead
in due accordance with the airborne missives.

Summaries of names, arrears, needs and promises,
desires, borrowings and spendings
are provided by all clearing banks
and lenders, councils, card suppliers.
Processed, archived, averaged, and finally
consigned by dove, such numbers are received,
assembled and deciphered in the spires;
ladder-climbers, dove-keepers, weighing-clerks.

Leaden coins are sewn in ribbons, week on week,
as measure of all dues unpaid, and worn
around the shoulders, hanging down
below the knee to knock and swing;
and by inference, by a sense of physical response,
a reasoned swing of income and expense, and hence
Micawber's happiness.

From excess
comes heaviness:
all are judged
by bow of back,
by hang of neck.










Behind his bulging eyelids,
wine-swell, warm and pulsing skin-full,
Swann surveys the spires ablaze.

He sees, in damp imaginings, a dark
landscape of speckled flares, field of supernovae
spreading from a single beacon source.
Booze-spun hazy widescreen opens out
in hues of orange, burnt sienna, furnace umber;
autumn dawn a-glow, all screams
of luckless burning birds and matin sirens
wailing Rise! Apollo!

Close at hand, the red-brick Bunhill spire ignites;
ivy flames reach out to curl around
its upper cube, exploring sheer concrete sides
and licking out the dove-holes. Furious,
the birds erupt and flail and spiral dive
to blackened-feathered ashen smacks on ruddy
Old Street rooftops.

Swann looks down; he perches on a needle point
a mile above the Moorfields, precarious,
the obelisk of old Saint Luke; brogues upon
a burnished orb; a pole is grasped between
his knees; upon the vane itself he hangs
from clammy fingers; horror scrabble;
greasy purchase. Kiln winds push the vane;
his lurching mass begins to whirl
around the ball, now orrery,
now mechanism apogee,
in ever wider arcs
and ever spinning, wilder arcs.





Sing Luna, Sing Saviour (from the album Vessels)




© No Spinoza
2009