Wednesday 23 December 2009

Taped over (1)


I've been reading Dr Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After The Bomb again. That world or this one, I don't care which, but today I want to be in Marin County in the afternoon, where I can walk or bicycle to the coast or even drive, and stop, looking out over the bay at San Francisco, and know that I don't have to go there unless I feel like it, and that I probably don't, and will therefore find something else to do.

From the undergrowth, a viridian crab might scutter out across the chalky-white ground, a piece of green cheese held aloft in its left claw, to be followed minutes later by a dogged pursuer, wheezing mechanically from its motor and servos, casting with a long gooseneck antenna for the wake of its intended. Trundling along anyway, happily aware of the warmth of the winter sun and the sounds from the sea, if it has the capacity, and let us believe that it does...

One point on a map exchanges places with another.

A
"Good morning, and how did you find yourself this morning?"

B
"Well, I just rolled back the sheets, and there I was."

Sunday 6 December 2009

Echo Unvisited

INTERLOCUTER B: In his bedroom he’s got (.) he’s got this (0.2) a CD (.) it’s a stereo really (0.5) in the shape of a (.) of a jukebox and a (0.8) on the wa:ll there’s a err there’s this clock and it’s a an electric gu(h)itar (laughter)
INTERLOCUTER A: [Yeah?
INTERLOCUTER B: [it’s like yeah it’s like that game they play on the radio (.) only (.) you know (laughs) only it’s one thing in the shape of another.

There are those that we cannot love, those that we will not love – the unloved and unlovely. Upon such things, let us for a moment dwell. My intention first of all is to draw to mind a common scene, a British high street in the early part of the twenty-first century. It is important that you try to picture the thing I’m describing here, the herringbone bricks of pedestrianization buckled by two decades of wear; seasonally-blighted hanging baskets mounted from lamp-posts at intervals along the street. This is not London, though it might be; this is not any of the major cities, though it might be one of those equally. It is common, it is everystreet, but it is best depicted in the provinces where scale and ambition are smaller.

We have, let us say, an old Savoy Picture House on a corner: white Portland stone with statuary of Thalia and Melpomène dancing on the roof-top. It has been converted into a McDonalds restaurant since 1986. We have, let us say, a large neo-Georgian post office of the early ’30s; groaning and impressive and serving as an outlet of Argos. Banks scuttle the length of the street like apologetic hermit crabs in the vast shells of interestingly named Victorian banks long since swallowed up and forgotten about. There is a shoe-shop, probably, it may have closed; a travel-agents, ditto; a 1960’s Woolworths building now occupied by a shop that sells toilet brushes and dog food for under a pound. All of this is there, and for the most part unlovely, but it is not what I want you to look at.

Between two of these buildings there is another; it is hard to tell you what it is, it might be anything. For the purposes of our imagining though, let’s think of it as a former TSB or an Early Learning Centre. It is a small building, just a shop front and a storey above. It was built in the mid 1980s or early 1990s in a style that is probably best described as Provincial Post Modernism, though we will not call it that. We will not call it that, because I think what this building amounts to is a process common to all architecture, indeed to all artifice. Labelling its style would pin it down to an idea separate to its individual qualities, and in degrees both elevate and diminish it. I do not want us to dismiss this building, no matter how ordinary or unloved it might be to us. It is as worthy of our attention any piece of poetry or art:

Be Yarrow Stream unseen, unknown!
It must, or we shall rue it:
We have a vision of our own;
Ah! Why should we undo it?
The treasured dreams of times long past
We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!
For when we’re there although ’tis fair
’Twill be another Yarrow!

It would be simplest for me to give you a picture of the kind of building I mean. A photograph could be found somewhere on the internet, and linked to, and you would know instantly what sort of thing I am talking about. I am not going to do that. I am not going to do so because I trust the argument given by Wordsworth in the passage above, which is a stanza from his poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’. The poem, composed during the poet’s tour of Scotland in 1803, imagines a visit to the Yarrow Water, the river that ran beside Walter Scott’s house Abbotsford much detailed in his writing. Wordsworth did not visit the Yarrow that year, and would not do so for another decade. Dorothy noted at the time that they ‘debated concerning it, but came to the conclusion of reserving the pleasure for some future time’, and so the visit was not undertaken and it is not in the poem either.

Indeed, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ is a poem about the process of picturing a thing before it is seen: ‘We have a vision of our own; / Ah! Why should we undo it?’ is the question at the heart of the matter. The image of the river is present and possessed at the point when it is still ‘unseen’; a point stressed in the possessive words ‘have’ and ‘own’ in the third line of the stanza. Yarrow ‘unseen’ belongs to Wordsworth in a way that the seen river would not. It is the discrepancy between these notions of seeing and possession that are crucial in the poem; how can we own the thing we have not seen? How can we not?

The form of Wordsworth’s poem, based upon a 1701 broadside ballad Leader-haughs and Yarow, reflects this issue. The first, third, fifth and seventh lines of the stanza are written in iambic tetrameter; the alternate lines in trimeter with a hypercatalectic – an extra syllable added to the line’s final foot. The effect of this is an alternating scheme of masculine and feminine rhymes – the first and third lines rhyme on their final syllable ‘known’ and ‘own’, but the second and fourth also rhyme on their penultimate: ‘rue it’ and ‘do it’. Modern readers might note of the alternating masculine and feminine rhymes a similarity to Betjeman’s poem ‘Youth and Age on Beaulieu Water’ (1945), and perhaps the effect of it in both poems is to replicate the waves and movement of water. This might be the case, but there is more happening in that form.

What we must look at is how Wordsworth views the river which ‘we have’ despite not having visited it; it is ‘unseen, unknown’. What these terms suggest is not simply negation but also reversal. Firstly, they are negatives suggesting that in the present the river has not yet been seen or known; seeing and knowing are what might only exist in the future. However, the use of the word ‘undo’ in the fourth line prompts us towards another reading; to ‘undo’ is quite a different thing, a reversal of an act that has already been carried out. We can only ‘undo’ that which has been done; in the same way, we might read the first line of this stanza to mean that we can only ‘unsee’ that which has been seen, ‘unknow’ that which has been known. We assume of the alternate lines that they are written in trimeter with an extra syllable added; but equally they might be tetrameter with the final dipody cut short. These lines, put plainly might be ‘undone’.

The act of imagining is the primary instinct in the poem. To go to and look at the river would not be to ‘see’ it; for in doing so we would find it to ‘be another Yarrow’ a thing different from our own(ed) version. To fill in the ‘missing’ syllables of the alternate lines, would render it another poem. Our lack is our strength here; we own best that which we do not have and must thereby imagine.

And so, I do not want you to look at the building in the High Street, I want you instead to see it. It is, as I have already stated a small building. It is built out of brick; not simply brick but bricks of different colours; the main body is a yellow brick, around its shop front are two blank-faced pilasters of red. Beneath the two oblong windows of the first storey are panels of a greyish, bluish brick. The building is symmetrical. It rises to a brick pediment that houses a small, circular window. This is not a real window – there is not a room behind it – merely a network of pipes insulated with silver foil, though you cannot see this for the ‘window’ is glazed with opaque black glass. The window frames are red. I think they are red. They are red, or blue, or possibly green. They are probably a primary colour. The pediment is topped with a composite stone, a little like sandstone in colour. You can see the joins of mortar between each slab; these provide a rich habitat for moss. A ball tops the pediment, a globe if you will, a little larger than a football made in the same composite stone.

Can you see it yet? I really want you to try to.

Two oblong windows in the same primary-coloured UPVC frames occupy the first storey. In both, the glass is divided into four panes; behind which there is a halogen-lit office which may, or may not, be connected to the shop beneath.

On the face of it, it is not a very interesting building; it is less showy than the Savoy Picture House and meagre in its proportions against the impressive post-office building. If buildings expose the preoccupations of the age they were built in, then this building – squat, simplistic, cheap – gives a grim insight into the last two decades that may have built it. But see it; really take in what it is about. These buildings – up and down the country, infill in streets of greater structures – wants to be something else, something better.

Look at the out-of-town supermarkets of the same period; structures not constrained by space or finance in the same way as this pitiful structure. These sprawling edifices to Mammon, do not want to look like places where you buy nappies and diet coke in bulk. They decorate themselves with long external arched colonnades, pitched rooves, a clock tower perhaps, a weathervane or two. They desire to be the old market-halls of England made large, made comprehensive. They want us to look at them and feel those same warm feelings of love that we get when we find ourselves unexpectedly in country market towns. Only we do not love these supermarket buildings; we barely think of what they look like, we often hate their intention in the first place.

The intent of our 1980’s high street building however is surely less objectionable. It cannot be claimed that it is ‘killing the high street’ in the way that the supermarket might, because it is contributing to it. Yet we still do not warm to it, we do not want to love it. Our grounds for this are predominantly aesthetic; we do not take it seriously, we don’t think it deserves our love. To a degree, it is engaged in the same false nostalgia as the supermarket; only its reference points are other high-street buildings. Its pediment, roundel, globe, all point towards it wanting to be something grander, something Palladian, but it doesn’t really look anything like. Perhaps we do not like it because we think this nostalgia is ‘fakery’; yet all its neighbours in the street are also historical shams.

Our building occupies a shape. It is the shape of some other building. In silhouette, it might not differ greatly from a Georgian house, but in detail it is something other. This is the great difference between it and the 1930’s post-office. The post-office attempts to mimic a Georgian building in its dressing: fanlights, steps up to the door, big brass knobs. It hopes that we might look at it and not consider that it is not a Georgian building, though perversely where it differs most is in its scale. It performs mimicry of style and embellishment, and we take it seriously as such. Our 1980’s building merely echoes shape; and our response is somewhat different.

A few years ago, I taught John Hollander’s poem ‘Swan and Shadow’ to a group of undergraduates. These students, eager to succeed, were honed to seek out and analyse “serious literature”. They had fallen under a common misapprehension that their task in hand – their task in studying, their task in life – was to identify things that were “good” and things that were “bad”. “Samuel Beckett is a good writer”, “Tom Clancy is a bad writer”, “William Blake is a good writer”, “Shakespeare is an overrated writer”; these are the kinds of things you hear. They are meaningless statements, easily totted out, and utterly irrelevant. Yet, I think because of the way formalised education directs us towards some things in favour of others it is common to develop a sense of value-judgement in this act.

The students, faced with Hollander for the first time, took it to be a joke; a test, perhaps – it was the Emperor’s new verse and I had put it in front of them to see if they would fall into the trap. “It’s just shaped like a swan,” they sniggered. They dismissed it as a novelty:


                              Dusk
                           Above the
                      water hang the
                                loud
                               flies
                               Here
                              O so
                             gray
                           then
                          What             A pale signal will appear
                         When         Soon before its shadow fades
                       Where       Here in this pool of opened eye
                       In us     No Upon us As at the very edges
                        of where we take shape in the dark air
                         this object bares its image awakening
                           ripples of recognition that will
                              brush darkness up into light
even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now
                              already passing out of sight
                           toward yet untroubled reflection
                         this image bears its object darkening
                        into memorial shades Scattered bits of
                       light     No of water Or something across
                       water       Breaking up No Being regathered
                        soon         Yet by then a swan will have
                         gone             Yes out of mind into what
                           vast
                             pale
                              hush
                               of a
                               place
                                past
                      sudden dark as
                           if a swan
                              sang

Of course, it is shaped like a swan, but that is not the end of it – there is a lot more to say. Firstly, it is shaped not ‘just’ like a swan as the student said, but as a swan and it’s reflection – or, as Hollander titles it ‘Swan and Shadow’. That’s fairly interesting in the first place because what we expect is not shadow, the blocking out of light, but – and this is what the poem seems to describe – the reflection of it. It mimics the shape of another thing, much in the same way that our 1980’s building seems to. Both have a recognisable outline, but this is not all; they have a discernable form unique to themselves. If we look at the poem, what we find is that it is not simply the outward shape of the poem that is reflected in the middle line, but indeed the metre – the number of syllables in each line is mirrored in its reflected counterpart.

Though we view the poem initially as a whole; our reading experience undertakes it in parts. Reading is a progression. When we begin a book or poem we cannot know what it is about until we have reached the end. Seeing, however, fools us into believing we can understand the whole in an instant. This is the fundamental error that we make in our dismissal of buildings, art, poetry of this kind, that we assume we can understand in a moment. We must take time to read the visual in the same way that we do with the literature that we take time to study. This is in a way what the poem is exploring.

As we read, we encounter the poem in stages allowing it to ‘take shape in the dark air’ of the page, to produce ‘ripples of recognition’ as we begin to see the thing we are really reading about. This is true of all reading not only Hollander’s ‘Swan and Shadow’, yet it is a common mistake particularly amongst English undergraduates to arrive at a text with a preconception of what it is saying. Indeed it is the error that Wordsworth has already befallen in picturing his Yarrow – knowing it, owning it – before he has visited the place for himself.

When we begin ‘Swan and Shadow’ we are not reading about a swan at all:


                              Dusk
                           Above the
                      water hang the
                                loud
                               flies

This is dusk; we are placed in the poem ‘above the water’ hanging in the air with the flies. This description of what is above the water ‘hangs’ there over the main body of the piece itself. Throughout the poem we find this. The ‘object bares its image’ only when the text has reached a point when it can begin to be recognised as a swan. Similarly it is ‘already passing out of sight’ at the point when the image has passed and is now becoming a reflection. The fulcrum to all of this is the final line of the water: ‘now’. It is the last moment at which we are able to look at the swan and not at the memory of it, but it is urgent because it is only in that moment, only when the swan is fully visible to us that we are really able to see it at all.

The poem is without punctuation. New sentences are implied by capital letters, and pauses occasionally seem to come at line endings. In other cases the poem’s enjambment encourages us to a continuous reading pattern. This uninterrupted movement creates for the reader both the impression of an image being assembled from ‘scattered bits of light’ or scattered words, but also the sense of the passing moment, the juncture in which something might be seen.

What Hollander’s poem explores is the process of seeing before an object is in sight, the moment at which it is seen, and the passing of it


                                              out of mind into what
                           vast
                             pale
                              hush
                               of a
                               place
                                past
                      sudden dark

The ‘pale hush [...] past sudden dark’ is strikingly beautiful. It is both the entry of it into memory and also death, a notion instilled by the final image of the bird’s swansong. Whereas the first half of the poem opens in the physical space of dusk above the water; its ending is in the mind:


                                  as
                           if a swan
                              sang

This movement from the physical to the mental image is much like that of Wordsworth’s trilogy of Yarrow poems. As discussed earlier, the first of these ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ (1803) concerns the mental expectation of sight, much like the first half of ‘Swan and Shadow’. The second, ‘Yarrow Visited’ (1814) is engaged with the moment of seeing first-hand ‘Thy genuine image, Yarrow’ much like the central part of Hollander’s poem. In the last of these, ‘Yarrow Revisited’ (1831) concerns the remembered image of the day.

I have not seen this noted elsewhere but Hollander’s poem surely relates to the Yarrow poems, its title being taken from ‘Yarrow Unvisited’:


Let Beeves and home-bred Kine partake
The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;
The Swan on still St. Mary’s Lake
Float double, Swan and Shadow!
We will not see them; will not go,
Today, nor yet tomorrow;
Enough if in our hearts we know,
There’s such a place as Yarrow.

Though Wordsworth states that ‘We will not see them; will not go’ in the poem, the bird and its double are already seen. Both the poet and the reader picture them floating on the lake, as the swan in ‘Swan and Shadow’ is imagined from its outline before we begin reading it. “I see–” Wordsworth writes in ‘Yarrow Visited’, “but not by sight alone, / Loved Yarrow” and this is the crucial point here, our experience of “seeing” and “loving” must exist beyond “sight alone” or else we deliver false reactions like: “It’s just shaped like a swan.”

It’s with that in mind that I want us to reconsider our 1980’s high street building, or indeed anything that we have dismissed as being unworthy of our attention. The student’s stumbling block with ‘Swan and Shadow’ was that they immediately saw the ‘object’ of the poem, and decided it was frippery; yet the outline form of it is crucial to what the poem is attempting to deliver. What we are looking at is not swan at all, but a collection of black marks that reflect the outline of the bird. Most artifice is a kind of reflection; a painting of a swan replicates its physical appearance, the 1930’s post office building attempts to mirror the architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Some reflections are more accurate than others, and here there is a distinction to be drawn between reflection and echo. Here in Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s fate of reflection is depicted with quite staggering detail:

He feedes a hope without cause why. For like a foolishe noddie
He thinkes the shadow that he sees, to be a liuely boddie.
Astraughted like an ymage made of Marble stone he lyes,
There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes.
Stretcht all along vpon the ground, it doth him good to see
His ardant eyes which like two starres full bright and shyning bee.
And eke his fingars, fingars such as Bacchus might beseeme,
And haire that one might worthely Apollos haire it deeme.
His beardlesse chinne and yuorie necke, and eke the perfect grace
Of white and red indifferently bepainted in his face.
All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)
Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.
He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede.

The emphasis is placed upon the body parts, the ‘ardant eyes [...] like stars’, the ‘beardlesse chinne and yvorie necke’ produce in the poem a potently erotic image of the boy. Reflection is about detail, in the way that the post office copies accurately the Georgian fanlights it admires. Echo’s fate is different, she suffers because she is robbed of bodily form reduced to just a voice that resembles that which she admires:

Ay readie with attentiue eare she harkens for some sounde,
Whereto she might replie hir wordes, from which she is not bounde.
By chaunce the stripling being strayde from all his companie,
Sayde: is there any body nie? straight Echo answerde: I.
Amazde he castes his eye aside, and looketh round about,
And come (that all the Forrest roong) aloud he calleth out.
And come (sayth she:) he looketh backe, and seeing no man followe,
Why fliste, he cryeth once againe: and she the same doth hallowe,
He still persistes and wondring much what kinde of thing it was
From which that answering voyce by turne so duely seemde to passe,
Said: let vs ioyne. She (by hir will desirous to haue said,
In fayth with none more willingly at any time or stead)
Said: let vs ioyne.

Echo is without detail. What we read of her is only her responses to the words spoken by Narcissus. She is reduced to simple resemblance that we might mistake at first for something else, and as such is defined by her lack, the thing that she is not. In a sense this is the fate of our 1980’s building – it is a shape that resembles something, so we do not care to look at its detail. We think we already know it. Hollander in writing about Echo, notes that:

In the association of Echo with Narcissus, the profoundest relations between light and sound, emptiness and fullness of self, absorption and reflection, are established. Ovid’s story of Echo’s hopeless love for the autoleptic youth follows the spurned nymph into the woods and, finally, into what will be thenceforth her canonical doom [...] Within such hollow spaces she withers away into a voice speaking out of bones; then the bones petrify in time, and the voice speaking out of the woodland caves.


These petrified bones have built the architecture of our modern cities. Buildings, which we dismiss as mere echoes, deserve listening to; deserve perhaps even our pity. We refuse to love this building because we define it by what we perceive to be its lack – it isn’t ‘as good’ as the Neo-Georgian post office, and do not consider what it is beyond this assumption. The slavish replication of lavish reflection is not, I suspect, so different from the echoed forms of these ignored buildings. We should at least try to see if not love them.

Monday 26 October 2009

June—

June— and the bodies swell together in the gloaming, swell together in the chestnut drunk dark passageway, swell upwards in the foam dark mild and Anaglypta to part before the spark before the spark-bright swing-door to the gentlemen’s lavatory. June— and the CD in the jukebox skips kiss you're giving me is ae is me is me is…n my crown, and the gas needs changing in the pump room downstairs. June— and leaves scuttle upwards, crisp and pale as sackcloth against the pitch blue of the dressing-gowned sky; rising in the first of the autumn’s great breezes, hurdling with the crisp packets about the legs of the beer-garden’s benches where smokers huddle in the light from the back door—June—a queequeen in all her majesty stutters Helen Shapiro—Is it? June?

And he drops another coin into the payphone. June— I can’t quite— It’s very noisy here you’ll have to speak up— June? Are you there? Pressing one finger into his free ear hole he asks June— June— Are you there? I’ll call back, June. I’ll call back when it’s less noisy.

She catches him later. Joe, she says.

His eyes are red like flecks of bacon.

Joe, she says, you use the payphone here don’t you?

He fumbles in his palm for some pence. I phone my June, he says.

It is you then, she says.

I just phone my June, he says.

It’s about that, she says, I had a call. A complaint.

Oh, he says.

That’s not your June, she says, that’s not her number. It’s a club, she says, a club in town. And the man, the man who runs it like, he’s phoned me. He says it’s always this number, the pub number, and messages on his answer phone. You’ve been filling up his answer phone, she says, every night he says it is, with messages for your June.

Oh, he says.

It has to stop, she says.

He nods, he mostly ever nods.

It’s unpleasant for her, you see, having to tell him this. It’s unpleasant and it’s not really her job to. It should be George by rights, only George has the night off and so it’s her telling him this as she gathers beer-downy glasses, and it sets her wondering: who is this June? A wife? A daughter? A friend? Some woman perhaps who gave him the wrong number on purpose, who gave him the number to get him off her back know I’d die for you, now y now y now ygone that’s What’ll it be, love? She asks and the bodies swell in the passageway; leaves stirred up beneath the hand-drier.

And he drops another coin into the payphone. June— he says, June—


Friday 9 October 2009

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Saturday 22 August 2009

Preparation M

Last week I took my guitar to Soho. Not that anyone asked me to play, but I do prefer it if they don’t. I have played guitar with varying degrees of success for almost twenty years now, but I rarely play in public. Lately, in fact, I rarely play at all.

I went to Soho because I had arranged to meet M. I had rushed from work to the train platform with the guitar strapped across one shoulder - still livid from hauling a gun bag across Liverpool the weekend before, but that shoulder knows how to hunch and the other one has never acquired the knack - climbed on to the train and bought my ticket from the conductor as soon as she appeared.

I love these early August evenings, they’re like sneak previews of the next world.

There are two connections on the way to London and the first one was over an hour late. I found something to lean on there in the platform and watched people in jackets and shirtsleeves work their pagers and cellphones. Not to sound pious - I had mine, of course, and was even tapping away at it to tell M that I’d been delayed, but wary of battery life, I kept it stuck in my pocket most of the time and drummed out rhythms on my thighs while trying not to let my eyes rest on a well-groomed sort in a black jacket with the sort of saturnine countenance that fairly frails the heart-strings, while naturally contriving to steal enough glances for to daydream on the journey home later that night.

There’s a peculiar sense of, well, not community, but spiritedness of some sort that occasionally visits people sharing a train carriage. Such it was at Maidenhead where we were told that the previous hour or so delay was to be blamed on ‘trespassers on the tracks’. Just like a congregation settling in their seats after a hymn, this muted wake of sound rippled through the assembled, the sound of seventy-eighty people all saying ‘tch’ at the same time. You get the distinct and immediate sense in a moment like that that each and every one of ‘em would happily sign a warrant for the driver to full speed ahead and the hell with the consequences, and start imagining what else they’d sign away to get to work on time, or to get home from work on time. I sat back and looked out the window at the passing suburbs to set my mind at ease.

We don’t really do the concept of suburbs justice in England, we haven’t got the space for it. Foreigners often take our popular culture to be defined by its limits, cramped to the point of being impacted. They like it, of course, for the most part, Fawlty Towers and that, like receiving visits from a funny uncle whose paranoia never quite amounts to frothing at the lips, or any other course of action an uncomfortable expenditure of effort away from a wounded slouch, for that matter. A scale model of an English town would make it clear. "Imagine living in a road this far across. Imagine driving to work every day." The model village at Beaconsfield might do it. There should be a replica in the grounds of every foreign embassy to lend the appropriate perspective.

So I watched as green fields gave way to brown roofs and grey pebbledash, as that bright blue sky paled to a softer hue, telephone cable and power lines spanning the view, and thought, what a glorious view, from anywhere in England, you just have to look directly up. Blinkers might be helpful. A lad took the seat next to me, bleached bristles of a no. 1 crop, basketball vest and shorts, gym bag in his lap, skin where visible that exact Gold Blend hue that seems to come from a wardrobe mostly comprising sportswear. Blinkers. Yes, might be helpful.

The last time I saw M had been a little over a week before. One of those long sensual summer afternoons where the air starts to soften in the heat and settles comfortably against you like an old friend. We sat out on the grass counting the bugs. There were things like viridian oblongs and crimson hexagons with mandibles and pinions that I swore I’d never seen before in my life. It is another way that time is stealing away from me, from where I’ve been all this time: there are new bugs now. Upgrades have been made. It’s the kind of experience that makes you grateful to see a ladybird. Not that you shouldn’t be, anyhow.

I found myself hauling upward through the murk at Piccadilly Circus at around a quarter past eight. It was swarmed with glittering crowds as only Piccadilly Circus ever is. You get a different kind of swarm in Oxford Street, or Leicester Square. Those are hordes; governed by common minds, common instincts, recognisable. Piccadilly is different. These are swarms; if they can be said to have minds, purposes, they are pre-mammalian, insectile. Not to say, again, that that is worse. I rather prefer it. And a few well-chosen paces put you beyond the fug of it, in the end of Soho the tourists rarely traipse, curtained storefronts and bored touts, DANCING LADIES and HOT SALT BEEF strobing out in pink-purple neon, stage doors and roads cobbled in old grey muscle.

Again I thought that I could be at home here if I wasn’t so fat, or underdressed, or tired, and kept on, not altogether certain I was where I was supposed to be. It’s an unthreatening place, certainly: the windows might be boarded with haunted sigils of commodified sex as if warding off truthful daylight, but the desperation, such as it is, is comfortably abstract. Everyone here is made for the course of the production, if not strictly made for life. They are the real actors. They can leave at any time.

The guitar was beginning to feel every ounce of its thirty years of age. I shifted it into my left hand. Hungrily I stepped at last into Old Compton Street, crossed to the pavement outside Balan’s, looked around me. In all directions it thrived. Bars didn’t so much spill out onto the pavement as exhale. As circulatory systems go, I’ve seen worse.

I had walked most of the length of the street before I realised that I was holding my breath. M had sent a message ahead to say that he would be at least half an hour late. Not far from here, he had been obliged to stay on at work while my train was delayed, and had now been asked to provide timesheets for the last three weeks, which he was industriously fabricating now, and he was very sorry.

I didn’t want to eat alone, and I didn’t want a drink, couldn’t have one anyway: when all this fiasco was over I had to drive from the train station back to my place. So I found a post to lean against at the foot of the street where it divides into two, and stood for what felt like a very long time. Twice the same person wandered hopefully my way, in a Hi-Viz jacket, no shirt, and asked if I wanted a licensed cab. At least, that’s what I think he said. By the third time of enquiry his skin had turned green, his eyes were bioluminescent, and I was beginning to feel upset. Yes, I could have said, yes I do. This is all a bit immediate and lively for my liking, do you have a place in mind that’s a little more stifling and dejected?

So it was good, in all sorts of ways, when M appeared dressed as though he’d spent the evening playing squash with a werewolf, animated by a earnest sort of apology that I had to closely control myself not to punish. My stomach gnawed at me like a cheap suit. Oh shit, M said, you’re pissed off. I’m alright, I said, trying not to sound too mechanical, wanting not to, and failing. I believe the word is 'grating'.

— Let’s have something to eat, M said. At least let me buy you dinner.

By now it was a quarter past nine. I was thinking of the journey home from here, which would take at least two hours. I danced around the point in as gainly a fashion as I could manage before getting impatient, I realised, with myself, and said Fine, let’s find somewhere.

Somewhere was the café on the ground floor of the Curzon. I took a bottle of mineral water, a sandwich and, underestimating the sandwich, a sausage roll. We ate slowly, talking. On our last meeting I had been obliged to tell M the troubling story of my furthest education, finding then that I couldn’t tell it terribly well, finding myself stumbling to recall details and specifics. (I had established from this that my long-cherished plans to turn the experience into some kind of a memoir that would rightfully come to dominate the misery-memoir market while earning grudging respect from the literary establishment and, in due course, earning me bewilderingly rewards for all the acute suffering involved had, in fact, been rightly shelved for the foreseeable future.) M was troubled by my countenance, which the exchange of my guitar and his money had not greatly elated, and asked a few guarded questions which I don’t recall with sufficient clarity to relate to you.

— All I can say is that I’m still here, I said, that it hasn’t done for me yet.

I drank the water. Cool, clear water, in a tall glass with ice and lemon besides, perfect enough an image to be used in an advert for the stuff. I’d meant to ask for sparkling at the counter, but was distracted when her colleague, bending down, had risen back up and soundly smacked the back of her head into an opened something-or-other. Counters in any sort of coffee shop make me feel bad as I have an unfortunate tendency to fall in immediate and unstintingly painful love with the people who work behind them, so I’ll always get someone else to order for me if I can manage it, and answer without looking up if I’ve forgotten to mention whether I want the regular or the grande. “The one in a cup.” I’m a terrible creature.

M was musing that it’d be a lot of fun to live with a terrible creature like me. He has housemate trouble, that much I knew, but I hadn’t realised it was that bad. It was touching. I thought of the stack of pots on the stove at home waiting to have poaching-froth and burned oil scrubbed out of them for the last two nights, and kept my thoughts to myself. To tell you the truth, I had steadily warmed.

— An X-Box would be fun, I said. Or something like that. To play games together.

— Yes, he said with relief, and described other possibilities that I can’t remember.

Both of us knowing there was little chance of it happening. Before long we were talking about leaving London, as always, again. Both of us knowing that the future opens out beyond the North Circular into a great darkening sea. Neither of us, I should stress, particularly unhappy.

In the street outside, M wanted cigarettes and I needed to catch my train, the first place to buy them being a So-and-so’s Food & Wine across three lanes of taxis, buses and 4WDs. When we put our arms around each other to say goodbye I made a grab at him and held him tight. It had darkened above, where the buildings gave way. I wished him a safe flight.

I was on the train back home an hour or so later, with the capital crossed and the lights of north London passing me by. The harboured thoughts of leisure and sensuality were forgotten, only two or three hundred brain-cells still lighting up at all.

I had been steadily gathering discarded newspapers since the early evening, toting them around in a polythene Waitrose carry-bag. One Sudoku puzzle I’d completed already, but I had another two papers with me, one of which had four. I was very careful. Before the train left Paddington I had copied down the sequence of stops into the margin of my paper, and checked it each time we came to a halt, peering out into the sodium murk. I have taken this train many times, but I also knew how tired I was. The saturnine man of the early evening was very far from my thoughts, where he belonged.

Sudoku is a curious game. Watching someone confronted with one of these devious little boxes is endlessly interesting, if you get the chance. There are many who discard a puzzle as soon as they discover they have made a mistake, at that horrible moment where one goes to enter a final ‘2’ in confident strokes only to realise that a ‘2’ is already present and, by dint of having been printed there, entirely accounted for. Suddenly, everything has not worked out exactly as planned. “Oh well, so much for that. It’s too much trouble.”

Perhaps I am egregiously old-fashioned, but this, to my mind, is not playing the game; it's just following the rules. It is rather easier than unpicking stitches from knitting to find the original fault in a Sudoku puzzle, and still not so difficult to fix the original error.

Mostly. Of course, not all mistakes are easily rectified, knitting notwithstanding. I had some sort of a moral in mind when I began to write this, for instance, except I’m damned if I can remember where I put the thing.

Wednesday 12 August 2009

Friday 7 August 2009

Thursday 30 July 2009

Lancelot

THE BEARS OF THE OLDER COUSINS

Had he been born some five years earlier, some ten years before – had he been born in the decade prior to his own, his parents would have bought him a different teddy-bear and his whole life’s values would have been otherwise placed. Our obsessive temporal organisation of the world shunts history into tidy epochs like lead soldiers into toy boxes; gives decades fixed sentiments like the personalities behind the faces of blown-vinyl dolls. This is Judith she is caring; these are the nineteen-nineties they are caring also. It leads often to one self-defined generation reacting in opposition to the one before it; and he knew from the pillowcases of his elder cousins that his position in the world was more fulfilling, was more of substance than their own. For there, in these half-familiar bedrooms that had awakened to the moon landings or – though muffled – had quaked to a neighbour’s first discovery of Judas Priest, sat bears in pelts of purple and electric blue. Sat bears with glass eyes of vibrant orange. Sat bears with limbs that were not jointed, but presented outwardly as if for crucifixion. They bore little to the naturalist representation of the grizzly; they bore little, indeed, to the artful representation of the teddy-bear. The bears of the older cousins, a species apart from his own, were mindful of the furthest reaches of imagination. They were produced by brains that assumed spectacle; whether in landing on the moon or in the stuffing of kapok into stitched, plush templates. They were vibrant, but they were cheap. They were often, as it turned out, extremely flammable.




LANCELOT IS A FAWN BEAR. HE IS 43cm TALL

His bear, was not like this. Lancelot stood at forty-three centimetres, a height he was comfortable in assuming, born when he was, and unaware of any other measuring system that may have been used before his time. His fur was synthetic, but was a skilled approximation of mohair. He was not electric blue. Lancelot was a beige bear – or fawn – he would learn to say. ‘Lancelot,’ he would say, ‘is a fawn bear. He is forty-three centimetres tall.’ Lancelot’s limbs turned on axles at the joints. His head also turned. Lancelot’s eyes were chocolaty brown, with large, dark, penetrating pupils set in his wide, open face. His muzzle was a pale cream, the pads of his hands and feet a soft, buttery velvet. He had large ears much like the boy’s grandfather’s; and he wore a sky-blue tank-top that his mother had made as her only experiment on the electric knitting machine. Around his neck was tied a purple ribbon, once flat and silky, but which curled with wear into a thick, stringish loop.

Put short, he was the best kind of bear.

Not all bears were so well produced as Lancelot at this time. The concerns of the age lay traceable in the dull button eyes and poorly stitched expressions of his contemporaries; in the commercialisation of their form, and the notion that they must do things. But a trend was visible in each, a conservative reaction to the gaudy emptiness of his forebears. Lancelot was a bear of tradition, a bear of security; or so he appeared.

He was only imitation mohair, after all.




THE BABY AND THE BEAR

What a responsibility a bear is given when they are presented to a child. In that moment as they are unwrapped from their paper, they are at once enthroned as lifelong companion, confidant, confessor. The child, barely old enough for memory, will later never know of this moment, there will not be a time before the bear. It will seem as if they were born together. The baby and the bear: like the mixed-up twin children of Dorian Gray. One set to grow and develop in beauty; the other to remain stunted but prematurely go bald. They are bedfellows, they are brothers; and yet in those early years the bear in his deep unfathomable stare has more knowledge of the world than the boy ever can hope for. He is invested with the character developed by the parents’ understanding of how things are. They tell the boy what Lancelot is like. They build for him a self-image that the boy might look up to; take aspects of Winnie the Pooh, of Badger from Wind in the Willows, things that fit those penetrating brown eyes, and stitched pursed mouth. Lancelot emerges as complex as any character from a realist novel.

Of all things, he is inscrutable. He is sensible. He is indignant. Lancelot is a noble bear. He is proud. He is the best sort of bear, and the boy looks up to him.




THE STOICAL BEAR

In the shifting uncertainties of his youth; the foul moods and tempers of the adult world, the rages and tears of the grown-ups he encounters; Lancelot’s steady gaze is a welcome comfort to the boy. Before the television’s onslaught of dangers beyond – the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the unintelligible punctuation of the IRA’s many bombs – the boy clings to Lancelot’s quiet stoicism for support. He tells the bear everything. He lays beside it every night, and unfolds his many concerns into its empty, velvet paws. The bear understands what he tells it, and he listens with the considered concentration that adults rarely show. The constancy of this bear constructs for him a benchmark for his fellow man. He tells Lancelot:

‘I love you.’

Yet as much as the bear is a partner, the bear and the boy are as one. They are inseparable. At times, in their opinions, it is hard to tell which is bear and which is boy. He builds upon his parents’ depiction of his companion’s character; he shapes him with his own understandings of what is what.

‘I love you, Lancelot. I love you.’

These are words that he only uses for the bear, but he means them with his entire mind. The boy is not soft. He is not soft, as the bear is soft. His head is not filled with stuffing. He knows that the bear is not alive, and any projection he makes upon it is only an extension of his self. There may have been a time when he believed his parents’ stories that his toys came awake when he was asleep, but the boy did not hold that thought that for long. He knows that the bear is merely an object. Yet knowing this does not diminish the power of that inscrutable stare.

The constancy sticks fast. The bear is, and remains, a fixed mark against his changing self. As he creeps longer down the bed, his twin remains seated at the pillow, indignantly refusing to join in the growing game. As his opinions and interests shift, the bear looks on judgementally, reminding him of what he always is.

How the boy changes. He lengthens into a man. He discovers books that he knows the bear will disapprove of, and for the first time he begins to keep secrets from Lancelot. He sometimes turns his bear to face the wall and discovers new things his body is capable of.





SEPARATION

These are the nineteen nineties, also. At some point, the boy and the bear become separated. It is a Saturday afternoon and while a Sara Lee Black Forest gateau defrosts on the worktop above the fridge, and the football results creep monotone through the cork-lined hall, the boy is at work tidying his room. Dinner will be ready in five minutes, and isn’t he a little old to be sleeping with his toys? Maybe he would prefer the bed to himself; give him more room. It is put to him like that and the words do not leave much scope for discussion.

Lancelot is put away in a cupboard above the wardrobe, and though he knows it foolish, he seats the bear and apologises to him – apologises perhaps that his childhood had to ever end, apologises maybe that it went on far too long. Apologises that so much feeling was placed upon the bear for it to come to only this. He shuts the door and hopes he has enough air to breathe.

The following years are a distant rumble inside the cupboard. Were the bear to hear, he would hardly notice when the boy goes away searching for answers, out out, into the following decade.






DISCUSS THE INTERPLAY OF SENTIMENTALITY AND REALISM IN COVENTRY PATMORE’S POETIC DEPICTIONS OF CHILDHOOD

‘What I think is underappreciated –’ he once would say, ‘what I think is underappreciated –’ he found himself saying one night after too much whisky, laying on some other man’s bed, ‘what I think is underappreciated is the strength of those bonds and affections that we develop with inanimate objects in our formative years.’

He rubs the back of his hand across the man’s belly, and stares back at the dark moon through the skylight.

‘Don’t you think it’s weird,’ he says, ‘how parents give their children objects through which to explore ideas of interpersonal love? Dolls, bears, they’re the taxidermy of human emotion – that’s what they are. Just think about how long a child must spend with a favourite toy; going to sleep with it every night, staring into its eyes, expressing love and care for it. Which is all well and good, but it bears little resemblance for what human relationships really are. Children bestow identities upon their toys, yet that’s not how it works with people, is it? Those feelings of warmth and affection that are created in the relationship with the toy – that’s the learning that the child has for what they will seek out in their life. I mean that, I really do. I just think it’s natural that if we’ve felt a strong and intense love as a child, we will attempt to seek it out again in adulthood – but the basis for that love, the love felt between a child and a toy, it’s a flawed model – do you see what I’m saying?’

He ran his hand back and forth across the firm, soft flesh of the naked man’s stomach.

‘It’s like– as a kid,’ he said, ‘I mean, for most of my childhood this was, I had this bear. Absolutely gorgeous fawn teddy-bear called Lancelot. I’d go to bed with him every night, and my affection for him was no more or less than it was for my parents. In some ways, perhaps – in some ways, perhaps I’d even say it was stronger. The feelings I had from Lancelot were consistent. He was always there. And I think that now as an adult I’m looking for that again; I’m seeking out in guys the same steady, intense affection that that bear gave me. It’s so messed up! I’m looking for another Lancelot. Only that doesn’t allow any room for the man to have any personality of his own. I’m not looking for a real person at all. I’m looking for an inanimate boyfriend who will love me unrelentingly and upon whom I can place all my preconceptions of what a lover should be. Does that make sense? Does that sound totally mad to you?”

Only the man does not reply. He has been asleep for the last two hours.





THE SAME OBJECTS ARE BEFORE US

He was still seated as he had been in 1992. Little had altered. Bears do not move. He noticed that some of the colour had fallen away inside one of the dark chocolate eyes, a small fleck of clear glass now swam in the heavy brown pool. He took the bear out, and from the pit of his stomach the same emotions revealed themselves. They stirred themselves up and ran warm down to his fingers and his feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The words were involuntary. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. That’s what he said, to the bear he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

Little had altered, but the changes were there. He noted the bear’s skin now sagged slightly, seemed softer than it was. The bright, cream muzzle hard turned
a tired grey. He tried to mark the differences, but realised his memory of the bear spanned across many years. Though the bear had seemed never to alter to him, it was plain that as he was becoming a man, Lancelot had also been changing, balding, growing worn. He tried to compare the object in his hands to the memory of the bear, but which point of memory was he supposed to occupy?

He held the bear tight and told him he would never leave him again.





PATTERNS

The bear will sleep beside him in the small, unheated basement flat not far from Gloucester Road tube. He will tuck the animal – that once, in its forty-three centimetres seemed almost life-size – beneath his arm and hold him tight whenever he goes to sleep. He will be astonished by the comfort that this small bundle of cloth is still able to give him when the entire world grows dark outside the rusty barred window.

Some nights he will stare back into the dark, round eyes, and the familiarity of the form seems to grip him as if nothing is different, and the innocence of those early thoughts of love still burned in his mind with the force that had conditioned him to them. Some nights everything is perfect.

And other nights, all he can feel is how much has changed. The bear is pressed against his ever-sharpening ribs, or is seated on the dirty bedside table guarding over the small stack of coins that must support him to the end of the month. He feels the changes in the bear itself, feels how the padding has broken down in the once stiff limbs to reveal the circular discs that connect them to the torso.

Most nights he awakens to find the circulation in his arm stopped from where the bear has pressed hard against his prominent bone. The bear begins to lose the familiar smell of his childhood. It absorbs the scraps of meals he cooks on the other side of the room. It acquires the musk of mildew that creeps up the basement walls. The bear sits through all this, indignant to the fate that has befallen him.

‘I’m sorry, Lancelot,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry that it has come to this.’

Beneath the duvet that has lost its cover, and has never been washed, he digs his fingers around the intersecting discs that allow the bear’s arms to pivot, exploring the mechanism of the toy. He wonders what they are made from, what keeps them in place. He is fully aware that though it is possible to turn the bear’s head a full 360°, he has never once in his life attempted it, for fear that the animal might somehow be killed.

When men come to the bed-sit, he places Lancelot in the small cupboard under the sink. He sits him upright with the bottles of Domestos and the small yellow bags of mouse poison. In part he does not want the men to see this much of him, does not want to reveal his whole life invested in the bear. He is for them an image of what they are seeking; they do not come to know the real man so he is careful not to offer it. More than that, he does not want the bear to see what it is he does with them. He stows the money the men give him in the cupboard with the bear.

There is often just enough.

Wednesday 29 July 2009

Tuesday 28 July 2009

Monday 27 July 2009

Saturday 25 July 2009



Friday 24 July 2009


Thursday 23 July 2009

Where once you saw waxwings

“I know a secret,” the old man says.

“What?” you ask, “what?”

“I know,” the old man says, “where Father Christmas keeps his sleigh –”

“Where!”

“– in the Summer.”

“Where? Where does he keep it?”

“An elf told me,” the old man says, and he gives you a knowing nod.

“Where does he keep it? Where does Father Christmas keep his sleigh?”

“I could take you,” he says, “if you were good.”

“Please can we? Please can we go?”

Cabbage is boiling in the kitchen. A fog of dinnertime has flushed the glass behind the geraniums. You can’t be long; it will be ready soon.

“If we’re quick, we can get back before anyone knows we’ve gone.”

Walking beside him through the quiet suburban streets, where colonies of lawnmowers protect their queen, it seems unlikely that the old man would know. It must be a trick, a stage prop from a show. A beautiful troika, copied in intricate detail to give the appearance of the magical vessel whilst on film. You suppose that one of the old man’s friends at the auction house has spotted it and told him where it was. In your head, Leroy Anderson accompanies every step.

“Are we going to the auction house?” you ask.

“Shh,” he tells you, “it’s a secret. We can’t have everyone knowing where it’s kept.”

You’re going to the auction house. This is the way you always go. Perhaps someone has brought a sleigh there to be sold, a sleigh like Father Christmas’s. It could raise a lot of money could that; you don’t suppose these things turn up that often.

Though you do not believe in Father Christmas, you don’t tell the old man this fact. It is something you have long known, that adults enjoy the conspiratorial protection of believing in children’s innocence. Telling him now – asking him, “So, what really is this sleigh?” – would destroy his safety. He would be forced to recognise the pretence that had been going on for years. You had always known; he had not.

“We can’t stay long,” he says, “your dinner will be ready soon.”

The auction house, low and pebble-dashed, sits amongst the industrial sheds around the sweet factory. Burnt sugar smogs the few thwarted rowan trees where once you saw waxwings, but today there are none.

You are not going to the auction house, but instead he leads you down a long, narrow path between two of the adjacent sheds.

“He has to hide it very well,” he says, “no one would find it here.”

You are stepping over cardboard and discarded polythene sheeting. The old man has to push a metal trolley to one side. Leroy’s jingle has become somewhat forced, a reluctant death-rattle as your shoes scrape through the gravel yard behind the building.

“And here it is!” he announces.

And here it is. Even in your most pragmatic reasoning, the sleigh was not this. This is not a sleigh. You stand there and nod. This is what you have come to see; this is what the old man was excited about.

“And he comes to collect it every December, to fill it with toys!”

You nod. Of course he does.

It is made from the same material as your wardrobe at home, only the damp from the yard has seeped into it here; the plastic veneer has buckled revealing the grey, fuzzy chipboard within. It is a large, square box – much like a skip; indeed, it is currently being used as a skip – and on the side is painted the image of a sleigh, packed with toys and a sign: BARGAINS! CURTAIN RAILS! DISCOUNT!

You nod.

“Yes,” you say, “here it is.”

The old man grins at you.

“Aren’t you getting in?”

You look at him, and then at the sleigh, and you cautiously walk towards it, peering down at the contents. It is packed, not with sacks of toys, but with black bin-liners. There is a broken whisky bottle. Some guttering. Moss.

“Go on,” the old man says, “get in and play.”

So you step over the lowest part of the side, and you stand there facing the front, and you stare out. You try to imagine the thing flying over the rooftops of the town – small glittering lights beneath as you have seen in films – but all there is to look at, is the metal shutter to the grey industrial shed, where someone has spray-painted a giant penis.

“Come on,” the old man says, “we haven’t got long. Why don’t you play?”

You look at him, and acceptingly nod, and you pull on your imagined reins with a savagery that could choke a reindeer.

“Why won’t you play?”


Tuesday 14 July 2009

Monday 13 July 2009

Franky and Jimmy






Original artwork taken from 'Merlo the Magician in Payroll Raid'
Boys World Annual, 1966.

Sunday 12 July 2009

Saturday 11 July 2009

Friday 10 July 2009

Thursday 9 July 2009

Out Now from Black Queen:


"Treading that instinctual graviation between the conspicuously, near magnetic eschatology of the pit's 'accessibility' and the pendulum's Anglican apologia of our own lost period, Edmund Custard's Sash Fiction (Black Queen: 1966) intuitively perceives the semantic ingenuity missing from the majority of works since Hooker, and commands an authority of persistent philosophical and theological deference that revokes the rich speech of 'Little Gidding' and turns us to the cathode ray as our new Messiah."
- Geoffrey Hill




"A lot more papery than I seem to remember books being."
- Harold Bloom





Tuesday 30 June 2009

The Tally


Every year, George would give them each a spaniel for Christmas. A generous gift; but George was a man of give and take.
Every year, George would give them a spaniel for Christmas, but without fail by St. Valentine’s, all of the dogs would have mysteriously vanished.
One would run away on Boxing Day night, homesick for its mother; a firecracker would startle one on New Year’s Day. The January frosts took most; they would go out walking and most probably they had fallen through the ice.
The Mill Brook Lake had taken 43 dogs all told. That’s what they said – the bottom must be dog deep.
But every year, George would give them all a spaniel for Christmas.
It would not be the same spaniel; that would be reckless. For such an operation to work you must rotate the dogs, otherwise folks would get suspicious.

“George,” they might have said, “you said dog drowned Mill Brook Lake, Handsel Monday last. Now you give dog back. Why you do this, George?”
But George rotated the dogs, so each would receive their neighbour’s dog of the previous year. Nobody was any the wiser, though occasionally one might say,

“George, I am not so good with the dogs, is there not some better gift? Four have drowned; one stole my horse and left for the East; birds ate two. Please George, no more dogs.”



Or one might think, “the dog at my neighbour’s house is the likeness of poor Rex, who burned straight to ash.”
Every twelve years or so, George would have to buy new dogs. This was the part of the plan he hated most.