You'll notice when you visit Shandy Hall, framed on one wall the original Krauze cartoon from Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books. This shows a copy of Tristram Shandy carved into the shape of a maze, an appropriate symbol for the Digressions project which began to take shape at the end of 2013, the Tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. Like Gaul and Yorkshire, Digressions has three parts: prose such as this, articles I will be writing for magazines and a section of the book Digressions which will also contain poetry and art by Philippa Troutman, which will in addition be shown at exhibitions in London, Leeds and Shandy Hall itself.

This project is intended to draw people closer to Tristram Shandy and the extraordinary work being done at Shandy Hall, situated  in the beautiful village of Coxwold in Yorkshire’s North Riding. The tripartite structure of Digressions accidentally reflects this, as does the fact that the only other place I have ever come across divided into ridings is Tipperary, where Sterne (and my parents) were born. Chance operates in Digressions as powerfully as it does in Tristram Shandy, but I always intended to recognise the Irish dimension to Sterne. When I was International Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, I wrote an article for Poetry Ireland review connecting, fancifully no doubt, the narrative techniques of Sterne, Paul Muldoon and Flann O’Brien (see his At Swim-Two-Birds for an entertaining take on the Celtic threefold obsession) with traditional Irish music. Regarding the last of these, I quoted Bayard (in A.L. Lloyd’s Folk Song in England) on the difference between English and Irish traditional music:

The English singer’s leaning to relatively straightforward and simple melodic lines is counteracted in Irish tradition by a love of ornament, of multiplying notes, of varying rhythmic patterns by this sort of multiplication.

This ornamental tendency gives Irish music a ‘wavering and unemphatic movement’ as opposed to the English preference for the sort of melodic movement that ‘gets somewhere’, while the Irish habit of lingering on certain notes and tones, ‘repeating them before going on to another tone, thus almost impeding the onward course of the melody…(dwelling on) inconclusive or indecisive scale-tones that do not contribute to resolution or finality in the entire phrase or musical utterance…”

For in talking of my digression—I declare before heaven I have made it! (Tristram Shandy IX 15)

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This project has involved consideration not only of historical texts, but also work at the very forefront of contemporary experimental writing. A number of authors who have held residencies at Shandy Hall are of international significance in the field of Conceptual writing such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök. Conceptual writing is a strand of the contemporary avant-garde linking literature and art (Goldsmith is MoMA’s Poet Laureate) that Shandy Hall’s connection with Information As Material. That Conceptual writing is relatively little-known in the poetry world of these islands merely adds to their reputation for insularity. Whatever you end up thinking about Conceptual writing if you take the trouble to look into it, and it is deliberately controversial, I think you would have to agree (as Robert Archambeau wrote recently in a piece available on the US Poetry Foundation website, which has a number of interesting articles on Conceptual writing) that it is at least interesting. We hope too that Digressions is at least interesting, at least in part.

I have been a great admirer of Tristram Shandy since university, digressing into it from the prescribed curriculum, and have harboured hopes of being involved in a sustained piece of work around this groundbreaking novel for many years. My interest only increased as I got to know the many imaginative enterprises Shandy Hall was involved in under the direction of its curator Patrick Wildgust. They convinced me, in the way they broke down barriers between prose and poetry (reflected in Digressions), literature and art, that if I ever got the opportunity to do something in keeping with the infinite hypertextual possibilities investigated at Shandy Hall, I should set up another mirror to my own to multiply the creative reflections of Digressions, and that this required a second, very different face to this project could be supplied by an artist. I immediately thought of Philippa Troutman because I had enjoyed her own work for many years and responded to some of it in my last book Pandorama, which contains a sequence based on her travelling exhibition The Shanties, developed from her research into the lives of the railway navvies and their families when they built the Ribblehead Viaduct. However, Philippa is a very versatile and experimental artist herself and I quickly saw the value of her cut-ups (continuing the accidental theme of chance) of Tristram Shandy’s text we called Sortes Shandeanae, ‘Shandean Lots’, on the analogy of ‘Virgilian Lots’, although attempts to foresee the future with this procedure have proved unrewarding. Also, her employment of suminagashi (‘floating ink’) marbling techniques added new dimensions to my understanding of these processes, though I had contributed to Shandy Hall’s The Emblem of my Work exhibition of 2013 based on Tristram Shandy’s marbled page. The way Japanese court artists let ink on prepared paper lift in the marbling trough to dissolve and create new patterns on the surface of the liquid seemed parallel to the processes we were engaged in, immersing the text of Tristram Shandy in new media. Similarly, in the more usual suminagashi technique where ink is dripped onto the surface of the liquid, its growing enclosed spheres looked like matryoshka worlds reflecting the Ptolemaic cosmic model (the pun on German star in Sterne’s name is well-worn) destroyed by the Wold Newton meteorite (A poem is a meteor Wallace Stevens wrote, which, along with his observation that we don’t live in places so much as descriptions of places, became one of my project mottos),  which I shall return to in a later digression, but note here that it landed on property owned by Sterne’s ‘Didius’, responsible for launching Sterne himself as a creative writer by virtue of being the target of Sterne’s The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat. Ptolemy’s tiered and broken worlds also reminded me of the science fiction Wold Newton Universe created by Philip José Farmer, which also entered our creative mix. Her flexibility with techniques and approaches seemed perfect to me for investigating Sterne’s motley novel. I am glad to say the Arts Council of England agreed, and we are grateful to them for funding, as also to Claire Malcolm, Director of New Writing North, without whose continual support I have no doubt this venture would have been lost before it started.

Lost. Which reminds me. Digressions. Planning trips to and around Shandy Hall and studying the many inadequate maps of the area, we came across some interesting-looking local mazes. Alerted by Chris Pearson at Shandy Hall, Philippa and I attempted to visit one of them, Asenby’s Maiden’s Bower, at the beginning of Digressions in the Month of Door, January 2014. located behind the Crab and Lobster pub according to our information. However, staff and landlord said he’d never heard of it and on our further investigation we discovered the maze, reported by an archaeologist in 1908 as then recently in use, was part of what looked like a miniature or ‘crazy golf’ course. However, one of the local people we asked for directions to it on the day mentioned the intriguing idea that the maze might have moved, and perhaps it had. I comforted myself by remembering that ‘Shandy’ used to mean ‘crazy’ and imagining what Shandean golf might be like, with bunkers including Toby and Trim’s military earthworks and holes missing, in the wrong order, or subject to metaphysical speculation with double entendres about holes deployed in battalions.

We did manage to find the tiny City of Troy, like a thumbprint or mandala on its hill but with a magnificent, legendary name, making it the paradoxical capital of one of the many local parallel universes we thought of generically as Byland (its Abbey now visible from Shandy Hall since a tree fell, another Tristramesque thematic detumescence). This turf emblem, which never seems to appear on maps, is in some sort of meta-relationship to the land, a location for, in the American poet Fanny Howe’s sense, bewilderment, reflecting the spirals of poetry in its structures of repetition and refrain (like Bayard’s Irish music), not to mention those spirals Jorn described in 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art. We would set off on our trips to Shandy Hall and the City of Troy from the City of Leeds, where I live, a paradoxical place in itself: the architectural historian Patrick Nuttgens in his book about the place described it as The Back-to-Front, Inside-Out, Upside-Down City. Digressions made me particularly sensitive to the religious background of Sterne and these islands and, always a place for immigration, old anti-Semitic nicknames for Leeds include the Holy City and the Jerusalem of the North; Leeds’ Jewish communities centred formerly on Chapeltown, an area often painted by the reclusive local artist Joash Woodrow, nicknamed The Insider/Outsider Artist due to his ambivalent relationship to the art world. We’d drive past Joash’s old house and the school Damien Hirst attended, heading to Coxwold and Troy on a road I found out was made by a blind man, Jack Metcalf, working at the same time as Sterne was writing Tristram Shandy, and whose descendants I came across in the course of my research. It seemed in itself emblematic in itself that a blind man should make the straight road  I took to get lost in the first place in Sterne’s labyrinthine novel and then literally around the City of Troy.

When we did find the City of Troy, and an abiding memory is of one local laughing at me when I asked directions there, we subsequently discovered that leaving it is even more difficult than finding it. I felt like some kind of baffled minotaur, half Irish bull, in the expression so appropriate to Tristram Shandy. It is possible to drive north or south from there, not easy to drive east and impossible to drive due west, a bit like a version of Abbott’s Lineland but with ancient mythical associations of being cut off from the land of the dead in the direction of the sunset, more prosaically that part of the West Riding where I live. I’m assuming this difficulty in the roads is something to do with the long-gone railway line; I’ve noticed the Coxwold signal-box at the bottom of the village, now there only for the trains of ideas, as Locke describes them, which so enrich Tristram Shandy. However, I sometimes felt as if the imaginary train had been conflated with the fiend as at the end of Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Night of the Demon’, which was pursuing me from Troy because, like it, I was too much a creature of the straight line. Patrick Keiller in his The View From The Train writes Films even physically resemble railway tracks - long, parallel sided strips divided laterally by frame lines and perforations, as is the railway by sleepers. Straight roads and railway tracks are what busy city people want, not to mention developing capitalism—Patrick Keiller has made the Wold Newton Meteorite a harbinger of deracinated mobile labour exploited through the Speenhamland System. But I have at least learned enough not to fall into that trap with Digressions and will circle round before returning to continue with this story. I hope some of you will stay with us for the ride, during the course of which I will explain this: