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Again...
Here...
And nothing that I can talk about. Simple words, eh?
Don't do anything hasty. The time has come to go West again. I leave in the morning. It seems I'm a supervisor. Good.
Tenth time.
Things.
AirI see a you, looking at this, wondering if it's worth the effort. Perhaps ten or twenty words will rise up. But perhaps even that will be enough for me to cross your mind in some distant time. If you can read every word I wish you well. It would surprise me: One assumption you carry when you are always alone is that no-one really cares that much. That's fine. In a way, it's better. I like the idea of speaking into a void. It gives me comfort at times to know I can say anything - in any way - and shite a worthless tale.
You see, it rained, and I thought of fire. I took a walk along the embankment to the gardens. By the slipway a man burning wood on the shore. He had boxed up the flames and smiled over the water and when the rain came again he laughed about it with a passing canoeist. I lingered awhile, on the terrace, to inhale the fumes. I looked over the edge, feeling possessed and lost. What next? I wondered. I checked my body. It still felt sick. I thought of death, felt my own presence and shuttered my eyes momentarily - to feel the world hold me. I leaned on the balustrade, looked at the man again, regarded the flowers and lit a cigarette.
Through the gate into the gardens, under the tree, there was a darkness - near the secret entrance to the buried works which is sequestered now by a screen of reed. Around the corner, in the gardens proper, the flow trickled weakly on the naked ladies. It often changes - sometimes nothing; at other times a noisy cascade the width of a cruiser with beads of ricocheting water in fits in sprays in the air like offerings of gemstones poured from pitchers...
...by some antique minions.
People throw coins in. From time to time I have.
At the feet of Venus, a Wagtail hopping around an oyster shell.
There had been a panic, and appointments and talk, and then the emergence of hope and peace. I seem fit other than the fear. It appears the end of something - but not me, yet.
Nor the end of you, as such. Are you still there? - all of you who come...You can watch me fail - see the disaster unfold.
Because now I think of air, and everything that flows. I dream during my waking hours. The nocturne never ends. I feel it healing me. I am growing very quickly.
I think that we spawn like sleepwalkers. The truth runs away from us - as though the realities are phantoms and beyond our grasp to trust. Do you see them, these little things you can scoop up and hold in your hand? Diamonds and coins and tadpole tails. This is the beginning of the revelation: This is the beginning of unfolding. You do not need to hear me. If I speak to everyone and no-one - it's alchemical: The Union of Opposites.
And witness, how I can unfurl my hand like a crown of stamen, in this dream - a dream within a dream - to grip the very fabric of the world. I can act on creation - as though a thought in the mind of creation. I see the world and it is like my creation. It's a world I helped make. This is my part. Join me if you like. Fall in me. Forget. Forgive. They cannot hurt us here.
Ay; prithee, let me sing. And if I wish, a fool, let it be another measure of nothing; No more than a common song of living; born out of a need to breathe life and be blown in the wind. Let me make a howl in the night, which registers with none: or sing a song no maid will know - no knitter in the sun. Fellow, I am at leave to sing off-key; For I am no fallen angel...and I have the right to forgiveness.
Yes, I see the world as one.
It strikes to me at some stage, listening to McKenna and reading Valis for the third or fourth time, that we find ourselves in a very odd position. The guilt we carry now is the guilt of destroying the world. Yet never have we been so cruel as nature. It occurs to me that the only thing that has a chance of preventing another mass extinction - the kind that nature seems fond of - is humanity itself. We do represent the leading edge of novelty. Nature created us in defence.
It hits me in a rush. This is a thought, yes? People have thoughts. They call them ideas and opinions. You read about them all the time. Everyone has a position - a way of looking at things.
It seems dangerous to me. How can I get this down? Who would believe me?
...
Silent running as the night cools down. The Robins never leave the bush outside. I can think of nothing - no conversations or happenings worth relaying - I think nothing other than the need to keep going. Anything. I would talk about anything. The light by my side, the big fan on a roll, the music coming at me. What more is there? Just me.
The times to come preoccupy me now - and the need to slim down. Everything waits for the season - for Glastonbury.
Let's say I die this year. Why not? One year I will be right. What then?
If I sit quietly I can sense the world around me - but I cannot feel you. You are the ghost now.
Things have been strange recently. Something has was playing on my mind, and it wasn't just a poor result from a heart scan recently - there was something else. I lost another friend today - a co-worker. She was in her late twenties I guess - and she was beautiful. There had been some kind of illness, I heard about second-hand. Then she was back, and soon after she rung for me and followed up a contact. Why, did I need to speak to her? What was it about?
Oh, it couldn't have been important.
She actually died yesterday. I found out from a phone call this morning. For the first time in years - if I'm honest; for the first time I can remember, I cried at someone's death.
I went outside and as I crossed the bridge in the Japanese Garden I saw a flower floating on the water.
It happened a couple of times later in the day.
Other things happened. No doubt I'll talk about them at some point.
Here's something I've been meaning to do for a while, and now seems like a good time. Here's a recasting of Lorenzo's podcast 211 - Empowering Hope In Dark Times. The key speaker (surreal flashes of California) is Terence McKenna. There's a preamble by Lorenzo and an intro by Tim Leary. Why not recce the Psychedelic Salon? I recommend 125 - The Trialogue on Crop Circles, and 170 - How the Web Looked Back in 1994.
Here's a photo too...
Surviving. Improving. Working.
holy
fatherA solitary flame from the stub of a candle adds some heat to the room. Just a while ago I packed my rucksack for the hospital. Over the last few days I have felt myself at the gates of Hell. Dizziness, uncertainty, constipation. I am weaker, they say, and it seemed as though a time for suffering beckoned. Suddenly, today, I felt much worse. But with the bag full behind me I felt a certainty, a relief. The mobile was charged and I planned to take my notebook, pen and envelopes - so I could send a few last letters. I wanted to leave my FTP passwords with my boss...and I wanted to write to the Lady Of The Flowers and apologise for writing about her. It had all been a mistake, I wanted to say. We never really knew each other, I had somehow reached out for her in desperation. I did not mean her any harm and I was very sorry. It was nothing really - just an illusion - a hallucination. I wanted to let her know in case she knew a little - or in case one day she stumbled across the book.
Time to die then, one way or another. It seems like a miracle that I can sit here and spew this vomit into TextPad and subsequently into your mind.
There is a silence now I have rarely known. Awesome, to be on the edge of the abyss like this. Just on the edge.
About two weeks ago Claudette died and I got a letter from the hospital that scared the shit out of me. Death and suffering seemed close. I called on the holy fathers - Henry, Terence etc - and tried to imagine their hands upon my head. I listened to their voices, read their words again...I swam in their waters.
But now, there is here, and I must make the best of it. I must conjure up a little stream myself. As usual, it seems impossible - only now with a touch of hubris as I wait to hear more bad news that will reduce me to a body and a number - a cripple or dead meat. 'Dead man walking' echoes in my head from time to time as I take the streets. They do not know, they do not see my fear, or the growing belief of an afterworld, moving away from the world, the culture, a stranger we cannot know: For to seek revenge on a dumb brute like me seems blasphemy...and I try to imagine there is ever a sense of fair play...and our suffering and feeling has meaning...
Claudette died of brain cancer, and Jimmy was bereft. I had never met her, never even seen her, but the night before the service I was pissed with Alex in the garden and he told me to come for Jimmy's sake. He wanted as many people there as possible. St Mary's, I thought, Jesus, there must be some money kicking around - or some serious connection.
I was the worst dressed person there. It seemed inexplicable - the sister from LA, the childhood in France and Switzerland, the black suits, the gay and black friends and the poems he used to write her in the evening, to be read with her morning cup of coffee. They read one - where he compared his love to drops of rain - and all the time I reviewed my mind's eye of him as the weasel-faced wino with a battered face, greased-backed hair, a handful of teeth left and his big whiskey and Guinness in his shaking hands. As she lay dying in the flat we heard his tales of woe - how the medicos ignored him for a nutter - an alky - an idiot. He was going out of his mind with the detail. It's always the fucking detail that takes your soul.
The woman priest (priestess?) looked like my GP. She looked a little witchy, a little asymmetric and raw. I fixated on her and built a story in my mind. She seemed like the kind of maniac ripe for an intense and illicit fuck; something mythical and haunted. I felt I could keep it together with her, skirt around the despair and at the same time live a lie. Did that make sense? What I mean to say is that she represented a dark initiation. I felt she would go like a train and send us both close to the edge. I imagined her in tights (thinking of the feet). They would certainly be black. They usually are.
A few days ago I got the train back to Royal Holloway. I took a cab up to the war memorial and photographed what I saw. The sky was clear, if a little polluted on the horizon, and there was hardly anyone there. I had trouble climbing the stairs of the tower, so sick and weak I felt. Half way up is a small chamber where you can sit and look down and through the huge inscribed window below to the fields of Runnymede. I paused here and looked at the solitary bench where 21 years ago I sat alone in agony and despair - my young world falling apart. There I was, a dying man for all I knew, never having known love, looking at the ghost of a lonely boy about to offer up his soul. Two forms of agony, separated in time, and how like a pair of star-cross'd lovers we seemed. Should I live and suffer again perhaps I will go back and look on them both. My ghosts - and 20,000 others. Two mes, looking on, with only each other to fall back on. I look at myself and weep from a distance. Not one other has been so close. Not one of us has any idea about love, other than the rumour it exists.
Jimmy told me that he had been through loss before. But, he said, you are never as close to someone as your partner. I imagined it must be true. On the one hand, thank god, on the other how harsh to have them ripped away from you. Where was Melville's sense of fair play for Jimmy and Claudette? Where, for that matter, was it for McKenna, as the tendrils of the tumour reached out into his brain like a web of mycelium? There will be no mercy, you would think, no justice. We are sculpted by the hand of death and our suffering is inevitable. One cannot avoid it.
Take these as my last words then. It seems better that way. If dawn comes then so be it. Now I must try to sleep. Best wishes.
for
even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature.
A confrontation on one of the floors of the office, like an episode of madness.
My mouth dried up and I got the shakes and a sweat. I can take screaming in
my stride, and raving abuse, but not a mask of reason, wisdom and righteousness,
with a touch of contempt. It's all political, which is to say it is far from
the body. A strange game.
And, you see, life itself is like pools of electric phosphorescent oil that pour out of a wound in your head - complete with crustacea. Christ, it makes no sense - not a single thing. I make no sense. This, for example, is a joke. I can see you laughing at it right now. It's so very odd, so very pitiful: So pointless and half-baked. What a prick, not to believe in the thing - or that other thing - or be straight. What a prick to spew his guts out. It's as funny as eating a pie off a young librarian's cunt. It's as funny as the fat fucker who shat himself at the Rotary club. Mary and Douglas would never have understood it. Mary was an MBE and Douglas was always straight with you and made big money. He kept a cellar and his wife had a chair. Douglas would have no time for this. He would paint his face in the language of reason in exactly 0.3 seconds - with the minimum of metabolic energy. Douglas breathes the primary qualities: He has no time for wankers.
I went for lunch at a local place. There were two old Northern women in there, drinking coffee. I had seen them before. One wore a head scarf and the other wore too much make-up. This time they see me - and the made-up one can't take her eyes off me. It occurs to me she is batty. More to the point - I realise she has gone randy.
There was a randy old hag on the wards in Kingston. She would wander around all day, all night, stealing things and trying to get into bed with the men. She had a habit of pissing and shitting herself. They had taped nappies on.
One day she came and looked at me with sex-drunk eyes and asked: Are you bored? and began clawing and tugging at the elongated mass of tight little knots that secured her dressing gown.
She had that same look in her eyes, this one. Their conversation seemed to be breaking down. The one in the head scarf gets up to leave, looking back at her friend with worried eyes. She brushes by me on the way out. She smells bad. It sickens me and I imagine I carry the smell back to the office.
That evening I lay in the dark. My mind had been a torrent of pettiness, obsession and posturing. I thought of death. I was high and had a fear...and then I had a vision of death as pure termination - utter cessation. All flows. I felt myself almost rush out of my body into this dark question. My heart leapt, my spirit moved. I nearly touched the void. In its face I was a cipher.
So so. I'll float my boat on this sea of shit. I can make all the old mistakes in a different way. Call it what you will, for I can abjure you too. I can squeak like a stabbed rat in the scullery with a tumour on its tongue - accompanied with hurdy gurdys, if you like. What difference does it make?
I'll elude you.
Yah, it's quiet. I'm in my box. The food sits unused, the beer undrunk. My jacket is a dark green, a little like Chairman Mao, I walk slowly now, and I assume a persona, the prospect, of an old man. The wind cuts into me. A fear of falling. A feeling of impotence, transience. A stoic acceptance of the end, but like a façade, like a fake-out, a bluff. This is a new game now...me as the old man.
But I am so lost, caught between times: a life that is not worth transcription. What can I reach out for? What can I give you? Leaping from illusion to illusion, a shifting sense, perception, a need to forgive; a need to be permeable.
I fooled myself the other day into a funk. Men are finished, I thought, and I wrote lists of the characteristics of women and men. Men lost in every detail. Women represented everything currently good; men everything currently bad. Women therefore lived in the plenum of the divine immanence - in our most advanced thinking itself a woman. Men lived in history, virtualised, impersonal, with not a single blameless work among them. They made history by committing the greatest crimes in history. They now bore the guilt of the world. The lying scum had even pinned it on women. Therefore I was born a criminal, I felt, walking past Marble Hill with the lists in my pocket and staring into the park to avoid the eyes of the people walking down the road (and to look like a visitor).
Creation, sight, beauty, adults, birth, sensitivity, nurturing, loving, close to god, better educated, more intelligent, knowledge of sex, knowledge of children, knowledge of feelings.
Violence, death, blindness, criminality, stupidity, ignorance, evil, egotism, selfishness, no knowledge of sex, rapists, insensitivity, superficiality, anger, madness.
It seemed right and it suited my mood - and indeed the area in which I was walking. I fell deep into it. As I fall now. There is a difference between thinking about writing and the act itself. The craft seems to manifest when you let yourself be carried away. In the very act association occurs - which is to say; novelty. You begin to live a new life, in the light, as I am living now. I do not like the word 'art' - nor 'ego' - nor any other word that attempts to bridge the gap between this world and the other, and thereby press down upon my soul. Let yourself be carried away, and embrace it.
Fall. Fall.
Is there any hope for this, for me? At work I find I can barely type. Then it seems to occur to me that I have never been able to type. I type as fast as probably Blaise Cendrars. They must be listening, watching. I have no confidence.
Later that night, with the lists still in my pocket, I brought up the subject with Alex and Catalina. Their daughter was there too - Sarah. She was studying English Literature at a local uni and was into creative writing.
I guess I strung it out for a long time. The women struggled to think of things. 'Willies.' They were the 'providers', someone who could 'take charge', you needed someone with a different sensibility.
I called their bluff every time. Gradually they came round to my point of view. I gave example after example, where women outstretched men...and they began to agree more and more. Women were stronger, more natural, eternal even. I was winning the argument.
After a while I sat outside in the garden with Alex, under the new marquee, in the dark, under one of the heaters. At a moment I began...
"You know, there is an answer to all this."
"What's that?"
"I mean, I did draw a conclusion...the one thing that men are better at
than women..."
"What?"
"Men are more creative than women - artistically."
He lowered his head. "Yeah you're right."
Catalina came outside.
"I think that's the answer," I said, still looking at him.
"What's the answer?" she said.
"We found something that men are better at than women."
"And?"
"I'll tell you inside."
She put her hand on his shoulder and squished up her little face: "Alex,
can you get me a Rosé?"
He came to life. "It's my round!" ...and we went inside.
Back at the table I told the women the news. They weren't happy - immediately. Catalina chipped in straight away...
"Oh yeah, that's only because women were so oppressed. No-one would publish
a woman - 'huh, a woman!' - if we hadn't been so excluded from the arts there
would be just as many women artists as men..."
"You can't keep genius down..."
"Yes you can!"
"Dostoyevsky had a gun put to his head..."
Sarah looked pained. " For a long time women were not taught how to read
and write..."
"You didn't stand a chance..." said Catalina.
Sarah said: "It's only been in the last fifty-odd years we've been allowed
to do anything."
"All right then. Maybe it's a measure of just how oppressed women have
been over the last 50,000 years. If that's true then..."
I paused and took a breath.
"...then we have nothing. Men have no redeeming characteristics. We're
nothing."
"No!"
I went on to explain how it was probably true. It was simply a measure of the scale of the crime. Look, I said, there only three people I currently read[1] - and they are all women. Women are expressing themselves now. There are as many women writers as men. The richest writer in the world is a woman. You're right.
But there was something wrong. It didn't seem convincing enough. Alex had agreed with me so emphatically when I had popped the idea to him - and I saw in him a reflection of myself - a kind of enoptromancy, if you like. It was the tiny pause, the short, soulful analysis, the sudden lowering of the head and the sadness in his voice. The affirmation seemed to collapse out of him into reality, like it was already dead.
Enough...illusions. There is a pain. I must rest a while. I'll conjure a creature - to feel. What shall we have?
We shall have nothing, but the confines of these four walls. I may reach the point soon when I need nothing - give up the ghost in other words.
It seems that way. Why else should I play these nervous games? Surely it's better to live with an exploded view of the world around you - the whole world. Often hard - to live so far from people - imagining arms or legs over you in the same way you are obliged to imagine standing on the Moon. You go crazy sometimes and you think the real people are the people of your dreams. And then you play at being this or that - or take a particular view - as if you can find an answer in the pages of history, philosophy, or a party manifesto. As I say, it is far from the body. It's sad how it seems to mangle this moment we live in.
I wish I could stay silent.
...
Andy died.
where
extra princes goDeep down. And so many words between me and enlightenment, between me and death. I feel the pain in my heart as I write this...which is to say I feel the agony in my face - like a burgeoning shriek of disgust and appal. Something new. Something I have never felt before. The hopelessness of it. The bed calls, the cards. I roll them around, fifteen times widdershins. Finish on two hearts. Zen Tit. One ace off. More than one. Two off. More than two. Nothing. Must take a punt. One. Nothing. Start again. Hearts and clubs. Joker. More than one. Put the coins in. Fuck out on 32. Doomed. Start again. Spades and spades. Bar. Win with cheating. No good. Play again. Play the last game. Cigarette, piss. Holy Gonfalon. Move coins. Deal. Hearts and diamonds. Ethnic. Take a cheat. Fucked. One more. The very last. Spades and hearts. Zen Rough. One. Two. Play the coins. Three. Play again. Fucked.
Why not? It's all I'm good for.
Move to the desk. Get away from this god damn bed.
Whither now Mr Light?
They text.
Fuck...off. Fucking leave me alone!
One more game. Score big with all the best bonuses.
...so know, there are extant eight kinds of creature with power - the Wicce, the Wǣrloga, the Wyrm, the Sceadugenga, the Shaman, the Strigoi, the Grande Putto and the Lunatic. Of these the Wǣrloga is the most magical and powerful, as he commands not only the ring, the sword, the brone, the sanctum and the she-devils, he is also in league with no lesser or greater than three gross Machine Elves - of the self transmuting genus (the higher order). These elves can be anything at any time - slave, assassin, warrior, mage, bard, craftsman, midwife, monster, concoction, drug, healer, tool, oracle, orator, sage, succour, factory, sanctuary, fabric, engine, structure and element. Or any plant or creature in the universe. Or any machine. They are of unimaginable intelligence and strangeness.
The Wǣrloga himself is a master magician of every path. He commands the light and the darkness, the land and the sea and the air. He summons fire and death - and sways life with the beauty of his song. He is one with life, and yet wild in the sense only a man can be; For he shatters oaths, unseats power, and is a master of deception, war and politics. So in a sense he both betrays nature and betrays the world of men, for he abides by no law or scripture other than that of his heart, and thus he sees the world of life and the world of mind and the world of death - all worlds - as one.
Roll on darkness. Take me in your arms. Comfort me this night, make me your lover...and banish the world of men. Flow through me and reveal the mystery.
Eddies of cooler air in the room. The small window is open. It stinks of weed and tobacco, no doubt. Noises outside. Coughing. In the boscage some rustling - a rat by the sounds of it. I noticed that a few of the cigarette butts have disappeared from the tarpaulin covering the canoe. Are they eating them? Are they addicted now?
Wax falls from the candle. I was in a dream. Another cigarette. The ice is melting on the canoe. Frozen Britain. My hand is warm near the small desk lamp. It is made of steel and burns hot. I can feel the heat even from the keyboard.
And so it is 4:38, a magic time, as I open my heart on these few weeks. Look at this: I am right here.
Have I been busy at work - or am I faking it? Certainly; there is too much to do - too much for me to do. It's not sustainable. Money appeared, meetings convened, lunches occurred, electronics were bought, dodgy deals prepared. Unravel this time and you let slip a flock of crazy sheets, curling and fluttering and batting and flapping like speeded-up drunken gulls with four giant wings each made of rice paper towels tied loosely with flayed cord and painted with scenes by a pharmamaniac. I can make nothing of it. It's like walking along the bottom of a ditch.
Imagine, for example, I am with one - let us say the youthful redhead with the bandaged arm - one who self-harms - one with a good body and years of festival flight time: One that everyone fancies. Let's say I'm with her, perhaps outside Henry's Beard late one night, and I have lost three stones, gained a tan and we are both a little high and some amazing miracle has transpired where we have actually enjoyed each other's company for an hour or two...
...and she says; Will you come back to my tent with me tonight? Will you sleep with me?
In one way I am an old man, and in another way we are both children - in different ways. I would be so nervous, so hopeless, so vulnerable. You don't want me - not in that way. It may be nothing to you, but it would ruin me, however it may end.
Not in this world.
There was a moment, back in the Nineties, where I found myself in a sitting room with a woman - talking. Her partner was upstairs sleeping off a hangover, for the previous evening he had celebrated his birthday.
I had bought him a late present - a bottle of whiskey, I recall.
We sat there and the conversation unfolded. After a while, no more than 10 minutes I suppose, I began to feel tearful. I didn't recall ever sitting with a woman like this, alone, talking. She seemed comfortable and amused. I felt the tears welling up. I made excuses and left. I must have been about 35.
Silent times now. Deep in some occasional esoteric bifurcation, an obscure wormhole of sorts, one with a negative value. Magic comes in strange, unpalatable forms - in the form of dreams and sick fantasies: half-baked and puffed with a pride of uniqueness. Always away, never here, the reality hidden sometimes and the mask revealed at others. We sit in silence, waiting for a spell to manifest. There is only this madness - like a Shepard tone, in suspension. A neverending neutrality and ten billion worse ways to live.
But the sound of crickets and toads or frogs - coming from speakers either side me. I might make it to summer. Dream with me. Sleep, and dream of me with croutons.
Anything but face this page again. I am looking for something...
QueckI am dressed in bed: Combat trousers, T-shirt, hoodie, beanie hat. Sleepbot plays. Candles burn. I have everything I need, but not a voice. At this moment only Astarte herself could know how I yearn for a birth. And I need her now - to plant her love, to give me life.
Of course, she can also kill. Many of the old matriarchs were like that: Fervid and fecund, blowing warm milk from the teats and swimming in the blood of hapless men. A fifty-foot titan, a monstrous contradiction, a schizophrenic psychopath shrieking like lightning on cold black iron in a heady stink of ancient horror. To be fair, what a privilege - if she were to kill with love and sexual lust, and not hate, as one would wish of a Goddess (or any lover). For me, to be killed by a woman's hand, tenderly and with wanting, must be best...
Kill me then, and take me back inside you. I'll exist as your memory of me. I will be the thrill you experienced at the dénouement. Everything I was would be reduced to the recollection of how you felt, at that moment of passing, from between your legs.
But not now, if you may. I have a little rain to conjure. I need to cast my thoughts as if to throw a bundle of sticks on the ground like a madman in a storm... And then perhaps some neotenous glossolalia; like the gawk of a victim, one of the unenlightened believers, a naked monkey, who thinks the sun is a memory, who lives a brutal lie.
Or perhaps an apprentice of distortion; so easily misled and misleading. Then let me be; to evaporate into nothing, with nothing, from nothing. You see how it falls. You move away, even if I freeze and do not look.
Or let me come to term. A moment: A realisation: A kindle in the shadow. I do not need much. And I expect very little. To move you would be something - to stop you. Who would need more? Perhaps one day I may speak. Then a miracle would have occurred. And even if every word is lost, as it was with the Phoenicians, it would still be a miracle. I would have found my soul.
Let me dream for you, and walk by like a stranger from an old memory. Do you see? You see how it falls?
A walk to Richmond by the river. Layer of wet leaf matter on the path feels like dead skin from blisters under my boots. At first I am afraid of falling but I find that the friction is good. On the way back I sit on the bench facing Marble Hill House. Young men play football in the distance. It has been so long since I put pen to paper and I find it difficult. I find that I cannot read my own writing. What is happening to me? The sun comes out brightly. I consider myself a fat man. I resolve to shop for smoked salmon and beer. I realise I saw nothing on the way here - not even the people. I was in another world.
A girl on a pink bicycle scatters a few pigeons. Here is a man with a small black dog.
The sun buffets my eyes, brings a warmth to my form and the grass and the bench. Everything is soaked through and slick. It's akin to staring at a bright light under water, like Ophelia's last apparition.
Neat rows of leaves on a young tree nearby. They shiver in the breeze in the manner of ankle rattles at the climax of a dance. Another sapling close-by like pencil strokes - a delicate fissure directly in line with the sun. It occurs to me that the sun is a raging star - just far away. I feel uncomfortable putting this down. Surely I will die soon. I cannot live this way. No-one will come.
A flash of Home Ground, in front of the Pyramid Stage. I sleep. I dream.
They come, in a fashion, and speak to us. They are our neighbours and one of them has passed away. It is felt that I should attend the wake - a memorial - a party of sorts. Up I sense, to the rooftops, high, very high, feeling uncertain of my place - so little have I seen of these people. It is expansive there, resembling LA. Everything is whitewashed plaster, the geometry variegated, as on the set of a Spaghetti Western, some awnings and trestle tables. They are all Indians; Sikhs apparently, but mostly young and Westernised. His name was Peter. A flash of a photo. Him standing formally on his own, wearing a suit and a turban. An attractive woman hands me a bottle. Champagne, she says, very expensive. She gives it to me because she understands I am proficient at opening such bottles. They do not want to waste any and it would be an honour, as it was Peter's favourite drink. I notice that the bottle has an odd shape - more of a fat decanter, very rotund, like a Bocksbeutel, all round. As I remove the foil I notice the cork is even more unusual. It covers the broad spout like a flat-cap mushroom, and is ragged around the edges - asymmetric. The liquid inside is Rosé. It explodes out of the bottle in a geyser the breadth of a knitting needle. In a panic I realise I am losing the precious drink and at the same time making a fool of myself. With a flash of inspiration I hold the wide concave cork over the spout and direct the liquid back into the bottle. So it goes, in circular fashion; a jet of Rosé rebounding at an angle off the cork back into the bottle, which now seems enormous. It fizzes and boils - in close-up. Here I realise that the liquid is losing its effervescence. It settles and I hand the bottle to a man who pours it into flutes. He gives out the glasses, but I do not get one. I wander around the rooftop, smoking.
Here I remember a woman somehow. A brief and tenuous assignation. I cast the cigarette away but there is danger of a fire. I find myself in a white-walled bedroom, looking for the burning stub. I focus and refocus. There is some alarm - some form of communication of the circumstances - as if by radio. I am lying on the floor and my eyes are scanning the immediate area - no further away than an arms-length, like a zoom lens. Suddenly I see it; a coil of smoke rising inches from my eyes. I pick up the cigarette and immediately the scene changes. Men appear, all Anglos, all late forties or early fifties and all electrical engineers or technicians of some sort. Exactly the type of lower middle class professionals you find on production crews of big league films. They are jovial and friendly. Everyone arrives at a consensus that I had located the burning cigarette butt only because I had been inspired by a particular episode of Dr Who. One pulls a DVD of the very episode from a shelf. After meeting some of the Sikh family - all handsome young men - highly Westernised - bordering on criminal - I go down - I descend...
Down, down through hidden stairwells - far down. I find myself at ground level in pleasant surroundings.
I am in front of a quaint pen shop - reminiscent of something you would find in Cornwall. The walls are white. The awning is black and the display window dark. Both are so low I almost have to stoop to see in. In the window are displayed the pens, but they are huge, the size of plantains, and of strange, futuristic (presumably ergonomic) designs. They appear to be fountain pens. I enter the shop through a very narrow door and I am confronted with a narrow passageway partially blocked by a black pram. The counter is to my left and a man behind it offers to take my rucksack. In the back of the shop I sit at a table examining the pens. Two men approach and sit down. I explain my difficulties in writing and my belief in how a fountain pen might help me. I show them my Moleskin notebook and a picture of the interior of the shop that I had taken on my previous visit - only a week before. They read my diary therein and remark with some amusement the note from last week that a cricket team at the TUC conference had scored 137-6. They seem struck at the historical significance of this - the very fact that this was last week's news seems a poignant commentary on society and culture.
Suddenly I am outside the shop and meet with my cousin. She talks briefly of Glastonbury and introduces me to her friend - a long-haired brunette. Her friend indicates her desire to attend the festival and reveals her plan to gain access by ascending a perilous looking slide on the building next to us. It's like a water slide - leading up of course, but dry, narrow and rocky with a dry stone wall. It seems dangerous and I offer to get her into the festival myself - explaining that I know of a better way. Nearby is a stately house with wrought iron gates. This, I assure her, is a better way to gain entry, but as we approach a servant appears and a large dog and the wrought iron gate begins to close. The servant explains that if we wish to enter the festival we should try the library - just round the corner. The woman - my cousin's friend - is beginning to change. At first she seemed a little rough and brash - now she is becoming more attractive, responsive and vulnerable. The library is in a fact a US border station - manned by Rangers - with vehicle barriers and fencing. Cars are streaming out in our direction. There seems to be a bit of a jam. I notice a black cab and behind it a strange vehicle with what seems like an elongated hook protruding from the front - something like an upside-down stylus. So close it gets that the hook goes underneath the rear bumper of the cab and it causes both vehicles to slide as they turn to move round a barrier. We manage to blag our way through and find ourselves in a cavernous space like a warehouse - but embellished in a futuristic industrial dystopian fashion - like a set from an Alien movie - or a Laserquest shooting range. There are hundreds of people milling around - all with rucksacks - all trying to get into the festival. I have to crawl along a narrow ledge high up on one of the walls and reach a ladder made of elastic bands, bulldog clips and bars of steel. I now have two hats and a small backpack which I put onto a dumb waiter. I then ascend the ladder briskly, surprised at my strength. Suddenly I am with the brunette walking on a narrow lane amid a stream of people. The setting is idyllic - beautiful cottages and trees and as we turn a corner I find that there is an open-air disco. Lights have been strung in the trees and speakers for the music. At this moment I realise I am wearing my blaze orange hi-vis vest - standard kit for Oxfam Stewards - and I am wearing my Boony Hat. I am enjoying myself so much I begin to dance while I am walking - and I am chatting and jeering at other punters. I am generally acting like a Pikey - to the amusement and occasionally shock of the crowd. Again we turn a corner and reach a small glass passageway between two buildings that is acting like a gate. There are three young blokes on duty - all Oxfam Stewards - and I begin to blag them. I tell them I recognise them but they do not seem to recognise me. We discuss a gnome over the doorway. They joke about it. As I say, they are young guys - and somehow typical of their sort: Smallish, seemingly feminised, bright. They see that I am wearing a wristband and agree to let me enter, but they will not let the brunette enter. Here I begin to gain consciousness. I intercede and cast a logic bomb, shaking the structure, getting the brunette passage through the gate. For a moment I stand with her on the inside as I woke.
A dream then, and tonight - strange moments of delight. Gales and rain inside the mother. Where does this warmth come from? Falling, I feel the change - slow - a yawing. Nothing lasts - not even nothing.
Strange things have been happening, Fey...
fallA holding pattern, of course, a sudden burst of light, the craziness of finding myself here, against all the odds. Perhaps I will live, after all. Perhaps a hidden sheet of blood will dissipate, a heart will appear - some such conceit; And break it up like bread and drink it with chilled red wine. Panic sets in. I knew this place. This was a place. And four weeks is a fan of cards, if you like, on a wooden terrace over the water, and a blind boatman who sings in the night, and his lantern flickers like shorting neon in the mist.
My Jack tonight is a dark figure on the embankment lighting a cigarette. I approach cautiously. He holds out a hand in friendship. In mine a twenty layered in palm. As we turn he slips me the weed and we walk talking of the evenings and lives teetering on the edge of a fall.
To meet the same card four weeks ago I walked the dark road to a failing pub. On the way I see a Four of Clubs ahead of me, walking unbelievably slowly. My heart leaps. He has a plastic bag, a broken arm, and his hair is long and lank and thick with grease, ragged beard like dead black dune grass foaming, falling, from gaunt cheeks, and haunted eyes.
It seems incredible that he can take to the streets - almost funny. He must be moving at about 0.2mph. I am on full alert as I overtake him - in case he tumbles. I've seen them do it even when they can't see you. Perhaps it's the pheromones; or the air pressure.
Ten seconds later I pass an independent place - seems to have a following - authentic Italian - suchlike. In the window inches from me an attractive young couple, well-dressed, the woman with long and carefully kept hair, a bright and healthy face, she glances up at me as fleeting as the shadow of a Robin. I look down. He will be coming after, long after, and they will share a special pain - marked with contrasting shades of shame. As always, the edge, the interface, will be most interesting.
He arrived, eventually, while I sat outside with whiskey and ice. He bummed a cigarette. I may have put it in his mouth. When he had made a few yards the Jack appeared with another and they all talked briefly at volume. The Jack told me later of his doomed adventures, his wife and daughter. I would have bought him a pint, but what good would it do? We would never get rid of him. I told him we were talking business and I didn't want him around. Thing is, in that state he must have a bus pass. I reckon he's...(here he twists his hand palm-up round behind by his waist). He was alright a year ago. What fucked him up was this...(he holds up the joint he is smoking)...and the smack.
Nein. This is not the way, nor even the Ace of Hearts of hearing the meaning of Look Out For My Love break through the angst of petty anger, nor even the women I conjure up, all of them mad, as that can be the only way. Nor the hirings and firings, the insurance money, the fear, the pain, the swollen belly or playing the game to the point of discharge against the right temple.
What then?
Is there nothing other than waiting?
I saw him yesterday, another, in his wheelchair, with his gloves. I smiled deeply.
A kind of death then. Wish me luck.
a flowerThe time has come to tell a truth. I will attempt to speak clearly, for those who do not understand. If need be I will speak in dung...and put everything down. You can stop reading now if you like. Of course, that is permitted. Indeed, move away from me, for what follows here is my personal confession, between me and my god, which may be nothing more than a specious squawk to an emptiness. And, after all is said and done, after the revelations and definitions, after the dancing and the laughter, after the tears and the joy, who would want to listen to a fool and his primordial version of the truth? I am not joking: Here is no illusion: I am likely to fail (right here - in this very sentence!). In many senses I always fail. You do not need to forgive me. You do not need to hear me.
I care not for clearing my voice to sing. When I open my mouth out comes a wheeze and a croak. My skin is raw...coated, my blood polluted, my heart feels weak, my body and soul broken. Like the dreamed cancer on the back of my hand, I turn to dust...to disappear like a dried petal rubbed between two rough palms. It is as red rust tasting sweet and infected - a scab turning to a powder with a mythical, mechanical corruption. I am dizzy and reeling. My ears ring. I feel like the modern man, which is to say I feel like a clown trapped in a machine. I am permanently ill and I dream of my own death.
But a blossom came - to save me. A flower made of adulterated cells, turning me to red dust to be blown in the wind; obliterating me and all my lies. She was there - the Lady of the Flowers - and so I conscripted the dream into waking hours. I forced out a pattern...no: I cast a situation. Like all waking dreams it struck a false note. But it ramified as a curio in my memory forever. Therefore I will wheeze it on this page with my nicotine breath (with my bent fingers and fragile arms), and offer it up to you and the eternal Goddess who rules this world of making. It is nothing more than an exhalation of half-grown thought - the bauble of an idiot. Let me be thereupon. Leave me forsaken. I am not a beast. I am just like you...
There are blemishes on the backs of my hands, like small burns, where I tanned so heavily at Glastonbury. My hands bore the brunt of the sun. (In one photo my fingers are wrapped around the arm of a companion and look like thick rolls of caramel candy.) There seemed to be no reason for these strange contusions other than sun damage. I have been watching them for weeks, to see if they grow.
A sickness has afflicted me of late and I found myself literally losing my mind. A week ago in a restless sleep I dreamt that one of these spots turned into a flower: a mutilated tumour of fruiting skin, complete with corolla, stigma and filaments: A living thing.
She was there at one stage, examining a film of the growth. It was a film in full Technicolor...and it reminded me of the projections in the death scene in Soylent Green. She seemed to be offering her medical expertise and fighting for my cause - somewhat distantly, of course. In many ways similar to the pro nurses who looked after me in ICU when they thought I was fucked. I hung on to two of them - Irish girls. I would ask them when their next shift was and feel a wave of relief wash over me when they appeared. I counted down the hours in fear to when they would leave and the cannon fodder took over. To me The Lady was the same kind of bird - young, healthy, intelligent, friendly, relentless, disciplined, professional, knowledgeable, indomitable, brave and popular. The right level of cheerfulness and confidence - which always go hand in hand and produce the most powerful spell. God knows what it would be like to hold such a creature in your arms. I forgive myself for falling under her geis, as she was certainly such a woman, and to shed tears over the loss of never knowing her seems like a noble consequence - and not trivia, but deep and somehow dangerous and human.
The flower turned to powder, and I wondered what it would taste like on the tip of my tongue - and whether it would poison me.
The following night I dreamt I was terminally ill, and my 'friends' threw me a dying party. My GP was there, making calculations. The prognosis varied, but finally she gave me two years. There was much revelry and it seemed so real.
I can hear choral music. I am still going out of my mind. Two notes, over and over, at a high pitch. Reality has the quality of a stainless steel table. If Mick had come up with the goods I would be fine. Mick and his miraculous bar... The patch on my left hand stings like a burn. My palms are dry. My left eye is bloodshot and my stomach sick. Jesus, when will this sickness end...
Speed of horse. Use all chains. Kill the dragon. Settle the waters. Now drift into dream life. Forgive yourself and be redeemed. There must be a way out of here. There must be something...
A captain's bunk in a deserted boat, deserted but for her and her patient. I awake. I am sick. She pumps clear liquid into my cannula, gives me oxygen and pills and changes the drips. Every two hours she measures my blood pressure. When it is too low she wraps the pad around my ankle to get a another reading. I wonder why. She checks the electrocardiograph on the hour and three times a day brings a tray of food and a jug of water. In the morning I sit in a chair while she changes the sheets. She asks me if I need help washing and I decline. I have no catheter, give me that - indulge me. Let's say a pot to piss in and a trip to the head twice a day to make poo-poo. It can be done. It's achievable.
She wears Crocs. Avoids conversation tactically.
The night is still. I stand at the window to smoke and look down in defeat and exhaustion. With cigarette between my fingers I rub the base of my palm onto my forehead, transferring some grease, taking care not to knock my glasses off, and not a whisper moves the leaves, just the rustle of some animal in the wall of bushes. Drink? Not Diet Coke, she says, water. The caffeine will keep you awake. Water then. And lie and pray for the hand of god to guide me to another time.
...
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