Piper at the Gates of Dawn

#43, March 5, 2004

“Piper at the Gates of Dawn”

From the archive again, here’s another of the short chapters from Inside Out, Outside In. It is an exercise, I suppose, in showing how many everyday cultural icons and references can be wrapped up in the package of empire – port out, starboard home!

...Fairy stories held me high

on clouds of sunlight floating by.

– Syd Barrett, 'Matilda Mother'

The little groovers talked esoterically of Syd Barrett.

– Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia[1]

Three-quarters of the way up Putney Hill (a stone's throw, I like to think, from where the great debates were held), down a side road, misnamed “Avenue”, several detached houses stood in a row facing towards a council estate. Inside one of these, up the stairs, was a room from which emanated the noise of Eliot Comprehensive schoolkids meeting in their lunch break. The room was dark, a little dingy, and smelled of incense to cover the pot and cigarette smoke. The walls were covered with posters – one an advertisement for the movie 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' another a silkscreen of Ché, and many homemade commentaries on 1970s Britain. Nothing peculiar there, I suppose. The sounds of music, usually of psychedelic rock, were the standard accompaniment to all that went on within. Nothing peculiar there also.

The favorite album of these school kids, without much doubt, was Pink Floyd's “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (a second favorite being The Rolling Stones' 'By Her Satanic Majesty's Request'). Occasionally, when my brothers would invite me into this den (it generally being accepted that this was their hang-out, not something that a 'Public [read private] School' kid like myself could fully appreciate and share), I would venture in nervously. I would sit down on the mattress on the floor, under the window, and between the two large speakers, to be played 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn.' One particular moment seemed to strike the assembled group of friends as glorious, when the sound seemed to travel along the wall and through the body, back and forth, from one speaker to the other. This was particularly great, I was assured, when one was high – but I wouldn't know about these things being a Public School boy, virtually from a different class.

These memories came flooding back to me several years ago as I read my son a chapter from Kenneth Grahame's 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, in particular the chapter called by the same title as the Pink Floyd album. What on earth had the title meant, I asked myself as I read, and why had Pink Floyd used it for this album? I bought the album, or at least a later incarnation of the record (a tape called 'A Nice Pair', which combined 'Piper' with the group's second, inferior, album 'A Saucerful of Secrets'). I listened to the tape again and again, and on long commutes, again. But, given that the music was of a psychedelic nature, its meaning wasn't readily apparent.

The first thing that occurred to me was that it was odd that such an Establishment text should be the inspiration for an attempt at counter-cultural statement – which is surely what this album was, at least to my mind. The album, after all, was something that non-Public School boys (certainly those who had been expelled anyway) and those who questioned social norms seemed to listen to. So what was the story all about? What was this particular chapter all about?

Well, among other things, the story is about Britain and Empire – or some animal equivalents. As far as can be discerned, the story seems like a prototype for Brideshead Revisited, before anyone needed to return for a visit. Chums –Toad of Toad Hall, Rat and Mole, and the fatherly and stern Badger – represent all that's right with Edwardian England. As illustrator Ernest H. Shepard described them: 'Mole, the field worker, the digger; Rat, the perfect waterman, wise about the currents, eddies and what-not; Badger, big and stout, uncouth but oh! how dependable, a champion of the smaller folk, and Toad, the impossible and lovable, never out of a scrape and never ceasing to boast.'[2] There seem to be class distinctions among them, but muted, as each one is appreciated for what he brings to the world – within reason (provided, of course, that they conform to their basic natures and don't begin to see themselves as beings of a different types – superbeasts! – as Toad's boasting inevitably leads him to do).

The three main chums live on the river bank, the Metropole, while Badger, more of the missionary sort, is off in the 'darkest' Wildwood, inhabited by the dreaded Weasels, who are either the uncouth working classes of England or those of the Empire, take your pick. Once when Ratty has rescued Moly in the Wildwood and they have through good fortune ended at Badger's humble domicile, one of the first things Badger says, in typical colonial fashion, is 'Now then! tell us the news from your part of the world.'[3] Ratty, in response, tells him how the world is changing, especially with the Motor Car, Toad's new infatuation, which seems to be transforming their 'part of the world.'

And this, in general, is what the book seems to be about: The irresponsibility of Toad, losing his sense of proportion, his sense of duty, in his infatuation with the modern world and its inventions – the empire, perhaps, eating its own. All things are put right in the end, of course. When the dastardly Weasels take over Toad Hall, because its master has been in gaol, the friends club together to use their superior intelligence to outwit these lesser beasts. Five (Otter helps out) are enough to put to flight several hundred of the Weasels (Rorke's Drift, or the return of Jedi warrior, Lord George Gordon – again, take your pick).

The chapter, 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn,' focuses on Rat and Mole's search for Little Portly, Otter's son, who had gone missing and had been lost for several days. It is a strange interlude, in some ways, not really fitting in with the rest of the world view of the story. Certainly bumbling Toad isn't in the picture, thankfully. But, it is more than that. There isn't as much of the civilizing mission about this chapter, that sense of the superiority of the friends when contrasted with the lesser animals. Here, we find, that there is an alternative, spiritual world, that has the ability to draw the animals away from their natural habitats. Portly has been pulled by the force of a Piper, and both Mole and Rat find the Piper irresistible too:

Perhaps [Mole] would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with moral eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the even, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between those very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet – and yet – O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.[4]

Rescued from the Ashram, Portly is returned to the river bank and all returns to normal – the one thing needful: to reestablish order in the world of Toad Hall.

This, of course, can mean any number of things; but it is presented within a particular Orientalist and imperial framework common for that period. It has embodied within it the division of the world into the material and the spiritual, which replicates that of the scientific and rational West and spiritual and mystical East. Neither Walt Disney's Mary Poppins nor Somerset Maughm feels too distant.

Something within all this conformity must have appealed to a young Roger ('Syd') Barrett, growing up in England and looking for something to express his sense of the counter-cultural. Syd Barrett, of course, was the driving force behind the early Pink Floyd, the man who would be replaced at guitar by Dave Gilmour, and whose leadership role would be usurped by Roger Waters, who would then take the band's music down a more commercial path. The first album combined some of the musical jamming and experimentation that Pink Floyd persevered with through 'Saucerful of Secret', 'Ummagumma', 'Atom Heart Mother' and 'Meddle' until the commercial success of 'Dark Side of the Moon' made potted populism and anarchism in relatively simple melodic form seem worth a lifelong commitment.[5] The first album, though, also included Barrett's madness and sense of the surreal or plain absurd, building on the comic whit that someone like Lennon was famous for, but perhap going further than 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' 'I am a Walrus', and 'Glass Onion.' 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' would be an inspiration for many who followed in the British Rock movement; from the Pythonesque absurdity of The Small Faces on 'Ogden's Nut Gone Flake,' to the rather more serious early Gabriel-led Genesis albums like 'Nursery Cryme' 'Foxtrot' and 'Selling England by the Pound,' and, further still, to the altogether pretentious Yes ('perpetual change') and King Crimson. At moments during the album one is almost inclined to think in terms of connections with British punk, with Ian Durie and The Sex Pistols.[6]

Most of the songs seemed to deal with the experience of being high, or the various kinds of hallucinations witnessed under the influence. One of my particular favorites, 'Flaming':

Swimming through the star-lit sky

Traveling by telephone

Hey ho, here we go

Ever so high.

Many of these visions were summoned up by tales of nursery story-like characters, such as the gnome Grimble Grumble and 'the King who ruled his land'; or by simple homilies, as in 'Chapter 23,' which seems to want to tell the listener something of moral value derived from some eastern influence, but who can tell what it is? Barrett resorts to a world of make believe, which has so much in the past been used to inculcate morality and correct behavior, now to give it alternate readings, now to contrast it with the bourgeois existence of 1960s suburban Britain. Barrett casts himself as both the Piper (of Hamlin perhaps) and Portly – ‘a Buddha of Suburbia'.

'Bike' showed Barrett at his most surreal, turning the prosaic world of suburbia into an altogether unsettling affair:

I've got a bike

You can ride it if you like

It's got a basket

a bell that rings

and things to make it look good

I'd give it to you if I could

but I borrowed it...

I know a mouse

and he hasn't got a house

I don't know why I call him Gerald

He's getting rather old

but he's a good mouse.

And so on, through the coat that looks good if you think it should, the ginger-bread men and the musical tunes, 'most of which are clockwork.'

Not surprisingly, Barrett went slightly mad, or sane, depending on how one looks at it. After seeing Barrett binge on LSD whenever he could lay his hands on the stuff, perming his hair so that he could look like Jimmy Hendrix, and when he began merely playing middle-C in all the band's gigs, the other members of the band, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason (who up to that point had been along largely for the helter-skelter ride) decided that Syd's behavior was altogether too erratic for their taste. He was pushed out, and replaced by his former friend (they had taught each other guitar and so played with much the same style), Dave Gilmour. Barrett produced another couple of albums in the 1970s, with the help of Gilmour, the first of which was called 'The Madcap Sings,' lending credence to many of the rumors about his madness. The album was experimental in the extreme, mainly because Barrett never liked to play the same song the same way twice so his accompanying musicians didn't have much of clue what was going on. Last I heard, which was from a published interview with Gilmour that I have mislaid, Barrett was living with his Mum in her house in Cambridge where he grew up...Portly returns.

The story of The Wind in the Willows shows clearly the empire at home. Both in the story itself and as it is naturalized in the reader's mind as he or she sits before the hearth. But this empire, and all that is relational along with it, is silenced or muted. We have to dig beneath the surface of a text that was in every middle-class English home to find it. This silencing is then carried over into popular culture, as it is found in this Pink Floyd album (and one could make similar links to The Beatles obviously, as only a cursory glance at the movie 'Help' will reveal), and in the process the absence, not the presence of empire, is naturalized. Just as it is for popular culture, so it is in the practice of history. Imperial location lies beneath the surface of historical practice, there for our imaginations to reach or to cover over when necessary.

Our appreciation of 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' places us, readers and writers, in a moment after that imperial relationship has been exposed, locating us as part of the narratives that follow and thereby tainting them in certain ways. We endeavor to observe these narratives by creating spaces, inside and out, that allow us to position ourselves as subjective or objective parties. In the end, though, these spaces can be no more than strategic, subject to inversion – inside becoming out, outside moving in. Retaining an air of radicalism in all this confusion, requires that we be honest about our own locations and attempting, through our gestures, to move beyond the arrogance of our own privileges.