THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 10

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

I first heard The Storm locked away in my bedroom with the radio, as was my wont whenever the rest of the family became too much, too loud or simply too present. The room was not large, but once the door was closed it became a country of its own, with borders I could defend and a population of one. I was not depressed in the way I would later come to understand depression, and it would be dishonest to force the Black Dog backwards into every solitary moment of my youth. I was escaping, certainly, but at that stage loneliness still carried the promise of freedom rather than the weight of abandonment.

The radio was part companion and part exit door. I could lie there listening while the family continued beyond the walls, close enough to be heard but far enough away to become somebody else’s concern. There was comfort in being alone because nobody expected an answer, an explanation or a version of me adjusted to fit whatever was happening elsewhere in the house. Solitude allowed my mind to expand without interruption, although I had no language then for what it was expanding away from.

Then came the preliminary oration to The Storm, with its silvery beams of light reflected here and there by drops of spray, and the bedroom disappeared. The voice led me towards an underground ocean where enormous creatures fought beneath gathering clouds, while Rick Wakeman’s music supplied the force, danger and scale that ordinary radio programming rarely attempted. I could see the spray catching the light, feel the movement of the raft and watch the sky darken before the clouds heaped themselves together and released the fury they had been carrying. The fact that none of it was physically present did not make it less real inside my head.

That was the attraction. I was not merely listening to somebody else’s fantasy but entering it, adding my own pictures to the spaces between the narration and the music. Jules Verne had imagined the world, Wakeman had converted it into sound, and my mind completed whatever remained unfinished. I joined the travelling party, including the man I remembered as Arnie, and allowed myself to be pushed along by circumstances created in another person’s imagination. In that world, being alone did not mean being excluded; it meant having unrestricted access to somewhere nobody else in the house could follow.

There was a peculiar pleasure in the loneliness of it. The closed door, the radio and the imagined journey combined to create a place in which I did not need to belong because I had invented the terms of admission. I could disappear without physically going anywhere, which was a useful skill for a boy who often felt more comfortable inside his thoughts than among the collisions of family life. It was not yet the inward descent of depression, although the pathway may have been under construction. At that time, escape still felt like exploration, and the darkness beyond the bedroom walls was filled with possibilities rather than warnings.

Hearing The Storm was enough to make me buy Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the second album I ever owned. I did not make the purchase because I had conducted a careful assessment of progressive rock, orchestral ambition or the long-term value of concept albums. I wanted to return to the place the radio had opened, and owning the record meant I no longer had to wait for somebody else to decide when the door would appear. The album gave permanence to an escape that had first arrived by chance.

It was not an album of conventional songs, although it was not without words, voices or human drama. The words arrived through narration, sung passages and choral sound rather than through the more familiar pattern of verse, chorus and an easily repeated declaration of love, loss or dissatisfaction. The standard album was built as four extended movements, while the section I remembered as The Storm sat within that larger journey and was separated more clearly on some specially banded versions. None of those details mattered to the young listener who had already decided that a few minutes of spray, silver light, prehistoric creatures and approaching violence were sufficient grounds for purchase.

The album drew its path from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth², although my first relationship was with Wakeman’s version rather than with the orderly ownership of the original book. Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and their Icelandic guide Hans followed the trail left by Arne Saknussemm, whose name my mind appears to have softened over the years into the more companionable “Arnie.” Arne was not really another member of the travelling party, as memory occasionally tried to make him, but the dead explorer whose coded instructions pulled the others after him. That correction does not destroy the memory, because in my private version he was still there, somewhere ahead in the darkness, leaving enough evidence to persuade more sensible people to follow.

Jules Verne supplied the impossible geography, Wakeman supplied the atmosphere, and my mind supplied whatever remained unpaid on the construction bill. I did not need a film crew, a set designer or a modern bank of computer-generated effects, because the repository in my head already contained water, caverns, cloud, fire, monsters and enough shadow to hide whatever had not yet been imagined. The pictures did not arrive as still illustrations waiting to be admired. They moved, changed scale and placed me inside them, usually without asking whether I had suitable footwear or any obvious qualifications for subterranean exploration.

That repository had been accumulating material for years before I knew it was a repository. It stored fragments of poems, pieces of dialogue, overheard phrases, images from books, sounds from records and scenes assembled from places I had never visited. Some memories were filed accurately, while others were placed in the wrong drawer and later retrieved with impressive confidence. The mind is not a disciplined archive merely because it produces a convincing result; sometimes it is closer to a theatre props room managed by somebody who has misplaced the inventory but remembers that there is probably a thunder sheet behind the Roman helmet.

For a young mind trying to negotiate a world that often preferred its thoughts in manageable portions, such places were not trivial. The imagination offered width when the room felt narrow, movement when circumstance appeared fixed and complexity without the social requirement to apologise for it. In ordinary life, a thought that travelled too far could make other people impatient, suspicious or simply bored. Inside the music, travelling too far was the entire point, and the further the journey moved from the surface, the more faithfully I was following instructions.

That may be one reason this album stayed with me when so many other things passed through. It did not demand that I reduce the picture to the correct answer before I had finished looking at it. There was no teacher at the entrance to the cavern asking me to identify the theme in twenty-five words or fewer, and no gatekeeper suggesting that the sea monsters would be more acceptable if they were brought within the approved syllabus. The music allowed scale, excess and unlikely association, which meant it allowed my mind to behave like my mind without first dumbing itself down for admission.

I do not want to overstate the nobility of this process, because sometimes escaping into an imagined world is simply escaping into an imagined world. A young person does not necessarily need a psychological theory to explain why enormous caverns, underground oceans and creatures left over from another age are more interesting than the ordinary demands of the day. Yet escape can still reveal the shape of the prison, even when the person escaping has not named it as such. The fantasy showed me how much room I needed, and perhaps how little room I sometimes felt I had.

Music without conventional lyrics was particularly useful because it did not close the meaning too early. A lyric can be a doorway, but it can also tell the listener which room has been prepared and where the furniture is meant to stand. Instrumental music, orchestration and sound effects leave more work for the person hearing them, which in my case was not an unwelcome delegation. Wakeman could provide the weather, the pace and the danger, while I decided what the danger looked like and whether I was observing it from the raft or clinging to something much less seaworthy.

Even the narration did not imprison the images. It acted more like a guide pointing into the darkness and suggesting that something extraordinary might be visible if I looked in the right direction. The mention of reflected light did not merely tell me that water was present; it created a moving surface on which my mind could place whatever else it needed. The storm did not remain a meteorological event, because the music gave it temper, motive and scale. It was weather behaving as emotion often behaves, gathering itself beyond sight until the atmosphere could no longer contain it.

Only much later did I recognise that the same mind capable of constructing those fantasy places could also construct less welcome ones. Imagination does not sign an agreement to work exclusively in wonder, and it can use the same tools to build dread, humiliation, catastrophe and failure. The ability to see several moves ahead is useful until every possible move becomes visible at once, including those that are unlikely, unhelpful and entirely beyond your control. A repository of imagery can be a sanctuary, but it can also become an underground system in which the darker pictures know the tunnels better than you do.

Depression has often felt less like falling into a hole than entering a passage that gradually ceases to resemble an entrance. At the beginning there may be a reason for each step, or at least a plausible explanation for why one more turn is necessary. You follow a concern because it matters, then follow the implications because they might matter, and then follow the possible consequences because failing to do so would appear irresponsible. By the time the Black Dog is clearly present, the route back has become one of those facts that everybody assumes somebody else recorded.

The analytical part of me has always believed that a problem can be solved if enough of it is understood. That belief has been useful in business, accounting, family responsibility and the many occasions when another person has placed a complicated mess on the table and hoped I might find a beginning. I look for the hidden passage, the coded instruction and the point at which the apparently impossible arrangement begins to obey some form of logic. Professor Lidenbrock would probably have approved, although he might also have regarded my risk assessment procedures as an unnecessary delay.

The difficulty is that not every inward journey rewards persistence. Some rabbit holes contain information, some contain explanation, and some merely provide a more elaborate view of the rabbit hole. Complex thinking can become an argument for continuing long after thought has ceased to produce movement, because stopping feels like intellectual surrender rather than sensible navigation. I have sometimes mistaken depth for progress, as though a problem must be closer to resolution because I am now several levels beneath the place where it first appeared.

That habit has served other people better than it has sometimes served me. When a client or family member brought a problem, I could descend with purpose because the task had edges and another person’s need provided direction. I could search for the missing fact, test the structure, challenge the assumption and eventually return with something that resembled a map. When the problem was my own mood, exhaustion or sense of worth, there was no agreed brief, no reliable data and no grateful person waiting at the surface to confirm that the expedition had achieved its objective.

In those journeys the human part of me was often left carrying equipment selected by the analytical part. Logic packed evidence, precedent, alternative scenarios and a torch powerful enough to illuminate every flaw in the cavern wall. What it sometimes forgot was food, warmth, companionship and a clear reason for being underground in the first place. The equipment was excellent for explaining why I felt as I did, but explanation alone did not always know how to bring me home.

The album’s great underground sea became a useful image for this difference. Water suggests movement and possibility, but an ocean beneath the earth removes the ordinary assurances of horizon, sun and familiar direction. The travellers make a raft and continue because that is what travellers in such stories do, while a sensible accountant might ask whether the engagement letter properly excluded encounters with prehistoric marine life. Yet the deeper truth is that they have no worthwhile map, only fragments, judgement and the belief that movement may reveal what standing still cannot.

Then the creatures rise, and the sea becomes a battlefield between forms of life that should have remained safely extinct. The young listener could watch that battle with excitement because the danger belonged to somebody else and had been arranged into music. The older listener hears something more familiar in it: large forces colliding beneath a surface that had appeared navigable only moments before. A mind can be like that, carrying ancient fears whose continued existence seems unreasonable until something disturbs the water.

The storm follows with a kind of inevitability, although storms rarely feel inevitable before the first signs are recognised. Clouds heap up, the atmosphere changes and what had been an adventurous crossing becomes a contest with forces too large to negotiate. That is how the imagery stayed with me, not as a technical sequence in an album but as a complete emotional climate. The silvery drops of spray belonged to wonder, the darkening clouds belonged to warning, and the released fury belonged to everything that had been gathering while attention was elsewhere.

Actual depression is seldom generous enough to provide an orchestra at the moment of descent. It does not reliably announce each new stage with narration, nor does it arrange the darkness into movements that end neatly before the record must be turned over. Much of it is ordinary, repetitive and stubbornly without spectacle. Yet the album gave me an image large enough to recognise the scale of an internal event that could otherwise look, from outside, like a man sitting still and failing to get on with his day.

That difference between the outside view and the inward landscape has followed me through much of life. Other people see the room, the chair, the desk, the unfinished task or the conversation I have not begun. I may be seeing tunnels, water, unstable rock and several competing routes, each carrying consequences that must be examined before movement can be attempted. The danger is not that the inward picture is entirely false, but that it can become so detailed that the ordinary next step appears insultingly inadequate.

“Just do something” is often sensible advice, although it can sound like an instruction to cross an underground ocean by pretending it is a puddle. The analytical mind objects to the simplification because it can see everything the instruction has failed to take into account. The human mind may understand that a small movement is still movement, even when it does not solve the geography. Somewhere between them is the difficult recognition that a complete map is not always a condition of taking the next step.

The repository of images helped in adult life because it allowed me to translate complexity into something another person could see. Numbers alone rarely persuade anybody to change direction, particularly when those numbers are attached to hope, pride, fear or a business that has become part of the person’s identity. A picture, comparison or story can carry the logic across a bridge that technical language cannot. The same mind that once built underground seas from music later built verbal landscapes for people who needed to understand where their decisions were taking them.

There was always a danger in that ability as well. If I could imagine the consequences clearly enough, I could begin to feel responsible for preventing every one of them. I could see the storm before the client saw the spray, and because the picture was already real in my mind, their reluctance to act could feel like wilful blindness rather than ordinary human uncertainty. Anger sometimes entered there, not merely because advice had been ignored, but because I had already travelled through the wreckage they were still insisting could not happen.

That anger was not always fair. My mind’s ability to produce a detailed future did not make that future inevitable, and another person was entitled to hesitate before entering a picture that existed most vividly inside me. I may have been right about the direction of the clouds while still being wrong about the only acceptable response. The adviser’s task was not to force everybody onto my raft, but to make the weather visible enough for them to decide whether they wished to keep sailing.

The album also reminds me that imagination is not merely escape from responsibility. It can be preparation for empathy, because entering a world that does not belong to you requires the temporary surrender of your own ordinary boundaries. I travelled with characters whose circumstances were impossible, yet the fear, excitement, stubbornness and dependence between them were recognisable. Long before I could explain the value of seeing a problem from inside another person’s experience, music and story were rehearsing the movement.

There is a particular generosity in a work that leaves enough space for the listener to participate. Wakeman’s music was elaborate, ambitious and hardly shy about making an entrance, but it did not complete the picture on my behalf. It gave me a framework strong enough to travel through and open enough to alter each time I returned. The result was not simply Rick Wakeman’s journey or Jules Verne’s journey, but the version assembled by a young Jeff Banks from whatever materials were then stored in his head.

Perhaps that is why being the second album I owned matters more than a ranking of its musical importance. The first few records a person buys are declarations made before he knows he is making them. They say that this sound, this voice or this imagined place deserves not merely to be heard when chance permits, but to be kept within reach. I was not only purchasing music; I was beginning to stock the private station that would continue broadcasting long after I had forgotten when each item entered the library.

The station was never interested only in lyrics. It collected moods, openings, instrumental passages, changes of tempo and the particular tension created when a sound appears to know something before the listener does. Sometimes a few notes could identify the emotional weather more accurately than a complete sentence, because words were still trying to decide which explanation would be safest. Atmosphere reached the truth by another route, avoiding the checkpoints at which the analytical mind demanded proof.

That ability became both comfort and warning. Music could create a path away from the immediate world, but it could also reveal that I had already begun travelling inward without noticing. A dark passage might feel grand and exploratory when accompanied by keyboards, orchestra and narration, while the same movement in ordinary life could lead towards isolation. The question was never simply whether imagination took me away, but whether it returned me with greater understanding or taught me to remain where nobody else could follow.

I cannot answer that question neatly, because both outcomes have probably occurred. Fantasy gave me room to survive environments in which some parts of me felt inconvenient, yet it may also have made retreat too available when the effort of being understood became tiring. Complex thought helped me solve problems others could not see, yet it sometimes led me into problems that did not need further excavation. The same capacity that formed a voice could also become the cave in which that voice echoed back without reaching anybody.

Listening now, from the later edge of work and the uncertain territory called retirement, I hear a different journey. The centre of the earth no longer feels like a destination to be conquered by cleverness, courage or superior preparation. It feels more like the point at which all the usual external directions become unreliable and a person must decide what can still be trusted. The older traveller is less impressed by the depth reached than by the ability to recognise when the expedition has ceased to serve him.

I also hear the importance of companions. Lidenbrock may possess the driving certainty, Axel may carry much of the fear and Hans may provide the practical steadiness, but none of them completes the journey alone. My younger imagination concentrated on the creatures, storms and impossible landscape because spectacle naturally attracts the eye. My older mind notices the quieter fact that somebody must hold the rope, build the raft, share the burden and keep enough calm for the next decision to remain possible.

That may be the point at which this album now meets the Black Dog most honestly. The answer to an inward descent is not always to think harder, explain better or produce a more sophisticated map of the darkness. Sometimes the necessary act is to remain connected to the people, routines and small pieces of evidence that still belong to the surface. A rope is not intellectually impressive, but it is considerably more useful than a detailed lecture on the geological composition of the hole.

The imagery repository remains, and I would not empty it even if such a thing were possible. It has given me fantasy, language, analogy, humour and a way of seeing connections before I could state them plainly. It has also enlarged fears, rehearsed disasters and occasionally turned an ordinary concern into a fully orchestrated catastrophe with choir. The task was never to silence that machinery, but to learn that not every picture it produced was a destination requiring my immediate attendance.

When the radio in my head returns to Journey to the Centre of the Earth, it does not necessarily play a tune I can hum or offer a sentence I can quote. It may offer only the glint of light on spray, the gathering of clouds or the sense of movement across a sea hidden beneath everything familiar. That is enough, because atmosphere sometimes recognises my condition before language has assembled its report. The station is not merely playing music; it is opening the repository and asking whether the image belongs to wonder, warning, memory or some mixture of all three.

I began with Wakeman’s journey because I wanted somewhere for my mind to go, and I return to it now because I better understand the cost of travelling without noticing the route home. The young Jeff saw an underground world and entered gladly, carried by the whims of Jules Verne’s imagination and the scale of Wakeman’s music. The older Jeff still enters, but he pays more attention to the companions, the weather and the thread leading back towards daylight. The centre of the earth remains available, as do all the tunnels of thought that have opened across a lifetime, but depth is no longer proof that I am heading in the right direction.

Notes

1. Journey to the Centre of the Earth was written by Rick Wakeman and recorded live at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 18 January 1974 with the London Symphony Orchestra, the English Chamber Choir and narrator David Hemmings. Released in 1974, the standard album is divided into the four extended movements “The Journey,” “Recollection,” “The Battle” and “The Forest”; “The Storm” appears as an internal episode and was separately identified on some specially banded editions.
2. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth was first published in French in 1864 as Voyage au centre de la Terre. The expedition follows Professor Otto Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and their guide Hans after they decipher directions attributed to the Icelandic explorer Arne Saknussemm.