Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere
For many years there was a piece of grafitti that ran along a wall beside the railway tracks that led into Paddington Station. You could see it as the train slowly pulled into London, or accelerated away into the west. “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere”: an evocative phrase that still echoes today, when the wall has been demolished, and the paint has joined the dust of the fallen bricks.
No one knew who had written it, or why.
There was a piece in this week’s Sunday Times that finally shed light on the mystery. The original artists had finally come forward.
The first six words were from a Robert Graves poem:
Far away is close at hand
Close joined is far away,
Love will come at your command
Yet will not stay.
And the rest came as a misquote from the title of a paper by Ruth Padel: “Imagery of the Elsewhere: Two Choral Odes of Euripides”.
The article revealed a pair of artists who wanted to make people think:
But Dave and Geoff seem to have regarded graffiti as a way of giving people food for thought as they travelled by train — a precursor of Poems on the Underground. The first occasion, admits Dave, was alcohol fuelled. It was the night before Geoff left for Australia in 1968: the brothers had several farewell drinks, took a nostalgic walk to their old family house at Blackheath which backed on to the Lewisham railway line, and painted “Be Cool, But Care” on the wall. Very 1960s.
After Geoff returned home, they fell into the habit of going out with brush and paint after midnight on Christmas Eve, when no trains ran. Each excursion was recced in advance and planned with military precision. Scaling walls was no obstacle: both were practised mountaineers from childhood holidays in the Lake District. Among their opus was “May the long time sun shine upon you”, from the song by the Incredible String Band (railway wall, South London, 1971); and Bakunin ’s “All submission to authority humiliates; all exercise of authority perverts” (canal wall, Walthamstow, 1972).
Unfortunately the article itself will soon disappear behind a paywall (like the wall fell to the demolisher’s sledgehammer).
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on April 20, 2005 on 7:52 am
I remember reading about that piece of grafitti in the early 80s, when I first read my dad’s copy of the Nigel Rees book.
on April 20, 2005 on 8:08 am
Radio 3 mentioned this on Monday evening too (about 7)
on April 20, 2005 on 8:09 am
On the wall of the Convent of the Sacred Heart on Hammersmith Road there is a graffito that says THE NIGHT. It’s been there at least since 1980 (I found a picture in the borough archives from then that shows it). that Paddington area also had one that ran along the lines of ‘Tube – Work – Sleep. 90% crack up.’. Then there was the rash of CHRISTIAN GOLDMAN? that appeared on the rail bridge under Hammersmith flyover and persisted till recently: selfpublicity by said Goldman, but publicity, it seems, that backfired.
on April 20, 2005 on 9:55 am
Was explained in this book back in the ’80s.
on April 20, 2005 on 9:55 am
So what’s ‘GOURANGA’ on motorway bridges then?
on May 8, 2005 on 12:40 pm
I remember “Far away…” when I used to go into Paddington in the late 1960’s. It always stuck in my mind. So much so that I just put it into Google, out of curiosity, and ended up here.
I was saddened when I found the wall knocked down, one day, but, I do believe that if you look closely, you can still see the end, (or maybe the beginning) of the words. I went past less than 10 years ago and spotted this.
Of course, I did have a good idea of where it was in the first place.
on January 23, 2007 on 10:09 pm
I used to travel to Paddington for years from 1975 and always wondered what this phrase meant and who wrote it. I never expected to find out. It was one of those things which stuck in the memory, and conjoured up such an evocative image. Even though it’s long gone, I still look for it whenever I go to and from Paddington.