When country folk like this writer take a train trip to Melbourne, it is rarely for sightseeing on the way. Once you hit suburbia, for the most part the scenery consists of rusting tin fences, brick walls, weed-infested banks, and all the accumulated debris of a mechanical civilisation. What you look at from the train window is the backside of a civilisation – the bared and ugly buttocks of an industrial society. And those images of squalor never seem to change much. The rusting signal boxes, the newspapers caught up in the rank vegetation, the piles of slowly-decaying iron, were all there when I was a child. There is something timeless about suburban railway-line squalor. Even those faded signs on the walls advertising ‘Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills’ have survived several generations of travellers. Likewise with some of the slogans: ‘Don’t Get Yanked Into War’ is still faintly visible on the brick wall, decades after I first saw it as a youngster. Some might even say that it is still relevant!
Few people would find anything uplifting in such sights. One who did was the late Michael Wharton, better known as Peter Simple, an eccentric columnist for the Sunday Telegraph in Britain. During the 1970s (and I cannot be more precise with the date) he wrote a little piece in his column regarding official plans to ‘tidy up’ the general environs of suburban railway lines. Part of his response to such plans goes thus:
They are miniature wildernesses, places that men have made, certainly, but places which have the pathos of all things that have once been used but are now neglected and abandoned: tangled garden-plots, rusting springs, shattered bricks, shards, books sodden by the rain and, blistered by the sun, lumps of newspaper that no one will ever read again.
The train, held up by signals, slows down in the summer heat; the wondering eye looks through the glass into those suburban jungles and finds there, as in childhood, a mysterious poetry. Who knows what strange flowers – moly, nepenthes – may grow among that unloved, grimy undergrowth?
Perhaps it is as well this has not occurred to the official mind. Wouldn’t it wish to institutionalise this sense of wonder, to incorporate it into its official system: tidy up almost all the eyesores in its own image but leave, for recreational purposes, a few Protected Areas of Designated Suburban Railway Squalor?
In this age of ecological correctness, I doubt that Peter Simple’s view would find many adherents. And yet, there is one group of people (if one could really call them a group) that does have some real emotional connection with such railway squalor. These people are the graffiti producers. In fact, when I supposed above that the environs of the suburban rail lines exhibited a sort of timeless character, the one exception would have to be the graffiti. I speak here not of the scrawled political slogans or the dribbling obscenities (Peter Simple very tastefully describes the subject matter of this latter category as ‘advice on human reproductive processes’). Nor am I concerned with those outpourings of puppy love that one sees painted on hoardings or carved into trees and park benches, arrowed hearts with ‘Ginger Mick loves Doreen’ or similar. Such little inscriptions are probably as old as writing itself. I am concerned, rather, with those strange hieroglyphics which fall in a sort of no-mans-land between recognizable written characters and formless doodling, or between modern art and wholly randomized angular forms. Some of us, of course, would make no distinction between modern art and wholly randomized forms, but opinions differ on this matter and I refuse to be drawn into an argument. Whatever the case, the graffiti producers of the latter categories – a sort of post literate language– seems to be a new development in the ancient ecosystem of the railway wilderness. Here is a shining example of Darwinian evolution at work.
The more astute observer – a sort of railway siding anthropologist– will be able to discern many other characteristics of this mode of human communication. In the first place, one can quite properly speak of a demography of graffiti. Its presence and abundance is demonstrably correlated with urban wastelands such as rail corridors. Furthermore, within its total range or territory, one can speak of trends in abundance or density. It works something like this. As you travel in from the most outer of the suburbs, the density of graffiti on available substrates (walls, tin fences, billboards, etc.) gradually increases until a maximum is reached in those industrial suburbs ringing the inner city. Thereafter, as one approaches the city centre itself, the density of graffiti tends to diminish.
One other characteristic in the demography of graffiti is clearly discernible. Within its general habitat, a definite dominance hierarchy prevails. The most favoured sites, large walls or fences in full view of the travelling public, tend to exhibit the most developed forms of the product. These are often works on a massive scale, full of intricate detail and usually many-coloured. Less favoured sites such as metal signal boxes, car bodies, posts, small billboards, are colonised by more primitive forms of the work, often no more than a single scrawl made (one supposes) with a single movement of the hand. A comparison with biological colonisation is not at all out of place. The most complex and well-developed species occupy the most fertile niches whilst the lowest-order colonisers are pushed to the marginal habitats.
We need to differentiate, too, between what I will call scriptsorial (to coin a new word) graffiti and pictorial graffiti. The former is related to written text, the latter is not. There is, of course, a graduation from one to the other so that strict categorisation is not always possible. As a rule though, the pictorial form is on a larger scale, occupies the better niches, and is usually multi-coloured. Moreover, the pictorial graffiti often shows signs of real artistic ability. The colours are well chosen and well blended. The work shows some evidence of overall concept and of planning. Remembering that these larger pictorial works are probably executed under the cover of darkness and in some haste, lest the offenders be observed and apprehended, we have to grudgingly admit that production in such circumstances requires real talent.
We now come to the most difficult question of all. Does graffiti have any meaning? Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question of why it was produced. Can it be read or deciphered in such a way as to deliver a common understanding to all who study it? On first appraisal, that seems a silly notion. The stuff seems to be simply some sort of doodling by minds which have no other purpose than to deface or to establish some sort of territorial conquest – ‘see that there; I did that’. One thinks of those Viking raiders of old who, having sacked some little village, were often wont to carve a rune or two on some imposing local monument.
And yet, I still have some lingering doubts. Is it not the case that, when you look at scriptsorial graffiti, certain shapes or certain strange hieroglyphs seem to show up wherever you go? Sometimes, those strange scrawls seem maddeningly close to a certain English or Greek or Cyrillic character and yet, not quite the thing. They are not quite intelligible, but yet not really to be classified as random movements of a marking pen or a paint brush. A possibility begins to form in your mind. Could those strange hieroglyphs really constitute some form of primitive written language? If that were the case, then it would have to be some sort of unconscious action – a case of the writer being simply an unwitting intermediary allowing the unconscious mind to express itself. We must suppose it to be unconscious since to do otherwise would be to postulate some sort of underground ‘school’ in graffiti, where the language is taught.
Now I am well aware of certain types of graffiti which are partially legible to ordinary folk like us. The letters are simply deformed English characters which probably could be recognised with a bit of practice. Indeed, there are helpful sites on the World Wide Web which instruct the young criminal on how to produce such deformed letters with a single, curved stroke of the spray can or marking pen. These letters are not what I have in mind. I am thinking, rather, of markings which cannot be associated with any recognisable characters in any language and yet seem to be reproduced, as the same shapes, in different places at different times. It is a case of something ‘Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken’ as Shakespeare tells us in one of his sonnets.
I suppose we have a sort of precedent for graffiti as unconscious language in that strange case of William Butler Yeats and the ‘automatic writing’ of his wife, which led to the publication of A Vision in 1926. More pertinent, perhaps, is that scholarly work on cultural ethnology and mythology, Hamlet’s Mill, by Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha von Dechend (Nonpareil Books – D.R. Godine, New Hampshire, 1977). Here the authors present some very interesting data on the unconscious transmission of certain universal elements of myth. Meaning can be transmitted without understanding. We have that on the good authority of Aristotle who defined an esoteric doctrine as one which is learned long before it is understood.
Here then is a golden opportunity for all those young and budding students of language and ethnology padding about the Groves of Academus. Get yourself a research grant to travel around the world, photographing graffiti. When you get back home, compare all of your material and look for some common symbols. If you are successful then, without doubt, you will achieve a status comparable to that of Sir James Frazer. You will have discovered a new language and a new, universal tribe. You may even be able to translate this language. The world will be your oyster. If not, well you will have had a good holiday at any rate – and all at the taxpayers’ expense. Mind you, I could be years behind the running with this suggestion. Some American museum of modern art has probably commissioned such a study and, even while I write this, distinguished academic journals are probably moderating an intense debate in the ‘correspondence’ columns. After all, Peter Simple did briefly mention a rather shadowy figure called ‘The Master of Paddington’ whose works in graffiti are avidly sought by just such museums.
But let us leave aside for the moment such matters of intrinsic meaning, interesting though they are. How is one to interpret all this graffiti stuff in terms of human behaviour? I am not a psychologist or sociobiologist, but I do have a theory. I propose that the occurrence and relative abundance of what I will call ‘traditional’ or ‘old fashioned’ graffiti is simply a direct and tangible manifestation of human anxiety, human frustration, and of a sense of hopelessness. It is, in short, a sort of index of spiritual sickness. For most of us surely, meaningful work is the only way in which the innate desire to create, to express ourselves, can be satisfied. In those industrial suburbs where the factories of Gradgrind and Co. have not yet become fully automated, the soul-destroying activities of human machines on production lines prevents any normal expression of art. The ancient idea of work as craft is gone. But the artistic desire burns on and, finding itself thwarted at every natural opening, finally expresses itself in the diseased form of graffiti. The crippled intellect, deformed by the blight of unemployment or the mindless, robotic actions of the production line, slouches out under the cover of darkness to relieve itself in this manner. It is a sort of defecation of the intellect.
Now this sort of explanation might do for the sorts of graffiti that I observed along suburban railway lines in former times. But things have changed in the graffiti scene over the last two decades. There is a new breed of graffiti and it is not necessarily produced by sick people. It is more commonly produced by hip people. According to the New South Wales Government’s Graffiti Information Service, one type of graffiti has come to dominate the practice over the past twenty years. This is the graffiti which ‘forms an integral part of an entrenched sub-culture called Hip Hop’. It is difficult to give a brief summary of what Hip Hop entails. One element consists of the ‘performance’ of certain types of music where human voices talk over the beat of the music or where elaborate sound mixing is used to produce ‘stuttering’ or ‘scratching effects. This is a sort of auditory, dithyrambic, graffiti. Another element is break dancing where the participants engage in vigorous athletic contortions and whose exponents, I am told, included Michael Jackson. I have not personally witnessed such dancing but have it on good authority that the actions resemble those of a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides; an apostasy of the dance perhaps, to misquote Wagner. But ‘Spraycan Art’ or ‘Writing’, which is how these folk quaintly refer to graffiti, is also part of the Hip Hop culture.
Earlier in this essay, I made the assumption that graffiti of the unintelligible type is a relatively recent development. That may be a dangerous assumption. We must at least entertain the possibility that such a mode of expression – an attempted relief from intellectual despair – may be as old as human history. We have an account in the ancient literature of the shipwrecked Aristippus and his men being swept up onto the Rhodian Shore. They have no idea where they are, and they are gripped by that fear associated with all unknown places – ‘here there be tygers’. Then, in the sand, they see markings – unintelligible but clearly of human origin. And so Aristippus delivered up a line which has now become a commonplace in the history books: ‘Let us be of good hope, for indeed, I see the traces of men’. I sometimes imagine that what he saw was an early example of graffiti. Perhaps some outcast from the nearby city, some youth recently made jobless as a result of a new shipment of slave labour, had scrawled his frustration and sense of hopelessness upon the sand.
Even more shocking thoughts come to mind. Readers of this piece will no doubt recall a number of recent television programs dealing with the development of Homo sapiens. It started with Jacob Bronowski and Sir Kenneth Clark, then everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Certain crude cave drawings from whatever lithic period are given as evidence of our ‘coming of age’ as it were. This interest in self-expression, they suppose, really marks out the beginnings for civilised humankind. I think you know what I am about to say, so I’ll just set the scene for you. It is a starlight night sometime in the Neolithic era. The tribal elders are up on the hill with the young initiands. They stand between two great rocks placed there to mark the positions of the setting sun at the summer and winter solstices. The lesson in astrogeography is about to begin and the chief teacher points to a constellation of stars we know as Ursa Major. Tomorrow afternoon, it will be basic geometry. Down below, meanwhile, two spotty-faced youths recently ejected from the class for sub-standard work, creep into a storage cave under the cover of darkness. One holds aloft a sputtering torch. The other carries a crude pot, possibly made from a Pterodactyl skull. It contains red ochre and some lumps of charcoal. They are clearly up to no good.
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