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the
region cloud hath mask'd him from me nowWho clears the stone-place of the mountain?
What the place in which the setting of the sun lies?
Who has sought peace without fear seven times?
Who names the waterfalls?
- Song of Amergin
One afternoon, a couple of weeks ago, I made a call to Hanworth Crematorium. Talk in the office of our own cemeteries team had triggered something. I called from my mobile in the wooded gardens at the back of the building. My trees looked on.
I wanted to know if there was anything there in remembrance of my dad - even a name on a wall. They called me back in the office a while later: Michael James Light. He died 17 April 1987 aged 58. The service was on the 30th. Reference number 86269.
There was no plaque. They didn't do that. His ashes had been scattered on plot F2, Lawn 3, should I wish to pay my respects.
For a while everything has been going...well. Broke, but money coming in. Money. Arm is better. Heart is better. Hours go by cannabinated. Yalumba Shiraz is rich chilled and the 10th beer festival loomed with promise and ebbed with a measured defeat of how useless I was in crowds and noise; but with a victory inside the defeat of a better understanding of two people close to me - maybe more.
Excellent meals at home; sausages with crispy potatoes, carrots and cabbage, baked onions, thick gravy and a Yorkshire Puddings. Similar deal with liver and bacon and mash with celeriac and broccoli. So good both times I forgot to apply mustard.
The crash will come soon enough, but there is the screen and the deep quiet. I can hear the music now. It makes me smile and cry and makes my skin tingle. Blessed be.
So I come to this second day of November, as we drift toward Andromeda at hundreds of miles per second on the Orion Arm, as we unravel the essence of matter and reality, as we look through time both ways (are there really two ways?), as conquer dimensionality, as we...
And again, so. I sit here with worse than nothing it seems; something, but not much. The last month? I went to the office. In the evening I ate well, drank and paid my bills. By eight the rip-tide had set in. Oh, I forgot, I shop nearly every day - Waitrose and Marks & Spencer. I have my bags with me all the time. I know the staff. I buy tobacco and Diet Coke and beer and wine.
There can be something comical about a tree, like it's nature's clown.
Deep night outside, twilight zone, in here. Episode 13: Joe Soap enters an office in a Late Eighties modular block surrounded by fields. He is the only one in this part of the building. There are other people around - outside, in the distance - but he can always pull the blinds down. He sits staring at the tip of his shoe, and then out of the window. The entire episode consists of this.
Episode 27, of the greatest series ever broadcast: Emily runs away from home and meets Bert and Ray, the old Mushroom Men. They drug her and take her to the woods, strip her, and begin to perform bizarre homoerotic rituals with antlers on their heads. They have huge knobs, mushroom cocks, and pendulous bollocks. "We must pornographicise the arse at this stage. The anus: it is inscrutable." Cue Emily running naked in panic. Everywhere she looks she sees Bert and Ray; here with penises crossed like swords, here with the two of them recumbent on a rock, members swaying gently as if in an eddying tide, here with Bert holding Ray's buttocks apart; his hands around the dark hole like a picture frame. All the time both of them looking deadpan and expectantly directly at her - straight into the lens. Emily screams as the branches lash her body, her crystal of cultural convention dissolving.
Darktime. A call to arms. I went for a walk earlier, my face set in a poker mask, my forehead knotted, my jaw set, my lips balanced. There were people outside, and I find it difficult.
Noises in the hallway. They disturb me. I need silence. I need to maintain the illusion of being alone. Somebody might call out my name. I promised one that I would ring three weeks ago, but I cannot pick up the phone. Let me go to the mountains. Let me live there forever. I could lie quietly and try to deal with the gushing wound in my head, this poisonous hypnagogia. Christ help me, conjure up a dream to calm my soul, as if I could sing another world into existence, and in some sense be there, and save myself.
One grey day, in Thurrock, 20 years ago. I pulled up at a technical college to sell books on accountancy. So many clouds I remember: An ashen slate spattered with shades of mud and dust. Variegated dead embers, like the sky had burned out, and there would never be a Sun again. No doubt some black birds flecked the scene, or some seagulls.
The college was a Fifties Orwellian epigram with an aura of dirt and fear. Old glass in the windows, probably made in purgatory.
The land, that Essex land by the estuary, was flat and barren, as bad as it can be perhaps.
But I felt tall in this nightmare. It was Friday, I believe. I remember the sense of urgency to get back to Staines, perhaps Hollywood. They were different days, dangerous in their way, but I could keep the world at bay for a while - we all could. Here, like Heracles or Demeter, I was just passing. There was another life...and when I drove West the Sun often set right before me. And Freedom. It could be honeycomb.
Funny, how you feel you saw the writing on the wall, 20 years mostly underwater. Wrong though. You fight to win the only war you can.
Photos from last Monday...
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For
ten years in succession I was one of the triumvirs for the re-establishment
of the constitution. To the day of writing this I have been princeps senatus
for forty years. I have been pontifex maximus, augur, a member of the fifteen
commissioners for performing sacred rites, one of the seven for sacred feasts,
an arval brother, a sodalis Titius, a fetial priest.
- Res Gestae Divi Augusti
...A quiet, thriving community. I was born and brought up there. I lived well away from the main road.
- The Birthday Party
I was researching Sarah Silverman last night, for fantasist purposes. Naturally I was drawn to all the usual sources. On Google and Usenet I found a selection of images. On YouTube some videos. On Wikipedia her bio and data. I noted her age - 37. Born December 1 1970.
That confused me. I knew I was 44. I had known I was 44 for months. Indeed, it was my birthday about six weeks ago. Someone asked me only the other day how long I had to go to 50...
And I had said six years.
I was born in 1966, so if Silverman was born in 1970 I had to be four years older than her.
But Wikipedia said she was 37.
I racked my brain with the arithmetic; recollected the past. Of course: I was 40 in 2006 - only two years ago. I was at The Green Man, and I awoke late after a night shift with people singing Happy Birthday in the marquee on the other side of the field for someone else. I had a shift that day too, and I told no one. And when I heard that singing I had smiled. I wanted to be alone. I wanted no one to know.
Back to work tomorrow, after three months of sick leave. Coffee from the high street; cigarette off Church Street, by the theatre; through the door and up the stairs. Game on, come again, and will I die or no.
What next, mistress? Whither? And why?
Don't worry yourself with why.
I'm finely balanced now. Not in any professional sense, I can't think that way. And obviously not in any physical way, other than perhaps between life and death. What I mean is that I am poised. As soon as something comes I'll be ready to jump. I need a thing. I need something.
Her
voice grew huskier, the words rushing out of her mouth pell-mell. I haven't
the slightest recollection now of what she said, nor do I think that she herself
knew when the flood broke from her lips. She talked wildly, frantically, against
a fatality that was overpowering. Whoever she was, she no longer had a name.
She was just a woman, bruised, badgered, broken, a creature beating its helpless
wings in the dark. She wasn't addressing anyone, least of all me; she
wasn't talking to herself either, nor to God. She was just a babbling wound
that had found a voice, and in the darkness the wound seemed to open up and
create a space around itself in which it could bleed without shame or humiliation.
All the while she kept clutching my arm, as if to verify my presence, she pressed
it with her strong fingers, as if the touch of her fingers would convey the
meaning which her words no longer contained.
- Quiet Days in Clichy
I have been reading Kingdom of Fear by Thompson, Gold and The Astonished Man by Cendrars. I read Quiet Days in Clichy again. I found myself drawn to those five pristine volumes of the Nexus Journal sitting on top of the amp and read with interest Lieberman's essay on Miller and Otto Rank in Volume Two. Googling Miller idly, I stumbled on photos of the Villa Seurat deep in a site I already know well...
I have been gripped with ennui. I slipped further into a low, losing part of my mind in the process.
A man who tried to rape a young woman down the road got four years. In sentencing the judge said: "You appear to be someone with an inability to form long-term relationships and, at 30 years of age, you lack sexual experience."
I knew the woman. Local barmaid. Canadian.
I go out during the day to buy victuals. There seems to be some kind of world out there. I don't know what to make of it.
I am sitting here wearing black jeans, an extra-large black t-shirt with a gold pentagram emblazoned on the front, and a blue hoodie - with the hood up. There is no heating, the jet stream is fucked, my arm may still be broken, bla bla bla - with the emphasis on the second bla.
So much time off work - about nine months so far, out of the last twelve. How could it happen?...and on full pay? Well, there are reasons.
Yes, the hood is up. I am in touch...
A British hooded cloak was evidently regarded by the Romans as a superior garment, for in Diocletian's Edict of Prices issued in A.D.301, the price of the British cloak was the highest on the list, with the exception of the Gallic.
And the acoustics seem better, with these eight speakers within arm's reach, seven of them in my field of view. A Coral Room plays. Such beauty. It saved me. But take the hood off now. Yes. Breath easy. You won. You have everything: Not least, two more Peronis. The fat is in the fire. The checks are in the post. The lights burn late at the farm forever, bless you Doc, and all the guns are loaded. I favour the .40 calibre. My rifle of choice is the Sig. The old Sig; the 510-4, the AMT. Shit, it reminds me of Bushy Park. The sun slated the clouds on some days. I walked everywhere, never to work again, and one time visited the archery shop on the other side outside in some other world. It was a big place, that park, and I imagined that we could all live there in the future; under a sky where everyone goes to college and eats organic free-range and falls in love aged 12 and speaks the first truths true enough under nurtured and husbanded leaves. There would be hot-air balloons and salads with olives and empty wooden halls with replicas of ancient artifacts which seem so close. We would go geothermal and no one would smoke anything.
Out at the farm you take your life into your own hands. Here Hunter, here is what I bring...
Here hare here. I nip from place to place. You cannot catch me, for it's a dream, an illusion. You cannot reach out, it is too far away, the truth too true to be bearable. Besides, sometimes I walk with The Princess, and she is always more interesting than me.
That's right Doc: The time has come for me to Blow you. Hot, eh? We're all Gay really, at least in part, and like any man I know the spot. No, wait - that can't be it. Help me Doc; my brain is fried. It was all that talk of you being a teenage girl inside.
You were Right, of course, and the others were always Wrong. Young girls projected their Astral bodies to you from the beginning. It was only a matter of time before you absorbed one. You had a cunt, Doc. And that makes it OK. You were the last of the great Americans, for all I know. There may be nothing left now. You should see the shit we are in these days.
Sober.
As a matter of course I think all my heroes would dislike me. To Terence McKenna I would be a mossback, to Hunter S. Thompson a wimp, to Henry Miller; a 'divided man'. Some punishment; to imagine yourself hated by the ones you admire the most. Welcome. To misery.
I'm done now, dead out of life. There is another life somewhere. I wish I was there. The past seems so long ago it has warped out of shape. I must have killed it. We are old men now, those of us still alive. What a weapon - to keep the enemy in a permanent holding position! Not even Satan himself could think of it. Well, bend the past out of kilter, so it jars and topples like a crippled gyroscope, so that thing - the thing itself - becomes a living death - a paradigmatic parody of itself - then you are alone with the now - forever. Yes, there was music once: But look how shallow and cacophonous it feels - how it hurts the ears. Laugh at it. It's easy to laugh. And people will always laugh with you. There was a smile once, there was a morning, there were nights, dreams, tears - nothing left. Not now. Your head flaps around in insane fast forward. You want to beat it against the wall. You can watch the same film over and over, listen to the same record. You are looking for a hook, over and over, in your own mind. Be it another life: Be it with Hunter at his place at night in the mountains of Colorado. To drink whiskey with the Doctor, to shoot into the darkness, and see no one. Or with Henry Miller at the Villa Seurat; to talk of life, to be far away in every sense, and see no one. To look up close to Terence McKenna's face, or Philip K. Dick's, and just see them, and see no one else. Or be even in the mountains of Canada; plenty of firewood; all the doors triple-locked. This is my house gun...my wives are fascists, but they think I'm Jesus...not a bad tooth among them...look at the tits...it will be a long winter.
Yeah, well...fuck you...and fuck those desert towns with Val and Earl and old .45 revolvers. That town nearly killed me. I watched that film on a loop for two weeks - my heart dying.
Even when she came, the one from the night class. The single mother.
I keep thinking it was in the old flat: That is to say; 30 years ago. But of course not: It was right here. How could I think that?
What memories of that night in ecstasy, lying in that same corner, her so vivid and true in my soul and me breaking the laws of physics? Those astral nights slipped away; all those astral days slipped away. For to remember you need to feel a pride in the meaning of the times, your style of life...your weltanschauung. She's as real to me now as Virginia Bell.
So? No one said it was going to be easy. Pound them Charlie, pound them.
Now, now I move through these days, often with a camera, often through the woods and parks and gardens and by the river. No, not the Paris of Brassaï, my...
On the street a Life, but not the life of the undivided.
Crashing noises in the night. I had my head out of the window to smoke. Things are looking good on all fronts. Excessive even.
It sounded like one of the garages being broken into, or maybe Iceland.
She took a drink from the sports bottle between the seats, one of those bottles with a pop-up nozzle.
"Would you like some water? Help yourself."
I reached down and brought it up to my mouth. I could feel a slippery wetness around my lips from her saliva. This is what a kiss must be like, I thought.
So runs the squeezebox. The cards make a pattern, and often you feel you can influence their placement. If only you could deal the deck without knowing it - in the same way we dream, without really being there. It seems there is some essential part of ourselves missing, yes? So I see the rolling scrim backdrop of this place with heat waves of turbulence around the edges, but I know not to look straight at the ripples - they won't be there. I just imagine them, as though they were the distorted edges of my perception when I am pressed between two glass slides. It's as if there is a horror and a madness all around you - just out of sight. It haunts your life. But look; I am alive. I am right here.
late-time
impulseFor we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.
- Genesis 19:13
Ah, the old tears, the old and blinding tears
I gave God then,
When my town fell, and noise was in mine ears
Of crashing towers, and forth they guided me
Through spears and lifted oars and angry men
Out to an unknown sea.
- The Iphigenia in Tauris
Rumbling noises in the flat at around 11. The upstairs neighbour has his window
open every night.
I have seen him once or twice, I think. I don't know them now, our neighbours. Not like the old days - with the ones from the olden age.
They had all been through the war. Some through both. They laughed and drank and had nephews who were bishops. They had done service, climbed the Eiger, had OBEs, written books, heard bombs fall, dined in country houses, went to church, been ordained, lost ranks of loved ones, buried the dead.
It was posh, not just expensive.
Few had children. One died aged 104. They are all dead now, bar one. Six flats. Seven deaths.
There are three of us left here. I'm in the room at the end; hermetically sealed, rarely showing my face; wired up. There are 14 plugs in three extension leads. Two empty sockets.
Dreams come readily now, and I can sleep any time. I dream of different places. Glastonbury. Holloway.
Goddess, may the days and their rude illusions fall away from me now. May the rattle and clatter leave go and something else rise up through. Look - I'll draw on the memory of the sky. Do you see it? Do you remember? The fields. The blushing nights. My Father came as a raptor. He was free and watching over me.
The room must have smelled. There are no pictures.
The sky was bigger then, it got bigger every day. You could feel it wrap around you, so tall you were. And in the end the moon got very close, and it came right near as if to touch me, and the sky made thunder and lightning - as if with great travail - and two cats fought on drapes in a window opposite Jo's room - where I came down. It was a world rendered in mythologies. To cast your senses on a scene was to draw a card from The Major Arcana. Life drew near...and fluttered as a swarm of butterflies could beat you with a magical cloud of silk paper alae.
Now the days roll by, in the death trance, à la Villa Borghese, in a lock step until the door closes, and no construction. I think of the sky because it seems so small and yet so far away and unreal. It's a tacky photograph to me now, one I barely notice...for all I know; a mawkish enhancement by a life culture spirit peddling shit.
Well, you know the story. Cast thy net and ye will find the fish of the waters. What the ocean gives no man may say, and verily, he spake unto them...et cetera - ad infinitum.
To live beyond illusion, or with it? that's the question.
Alae.
Observation of the evening: I wear brown so I can blend into the woods when civilisation collapses.
I can't fight a war from here. I've tried so hard to dream. I thought about seven women, then 12, then 25, my mind is 'fracted and corroborate'. I slaked a spade at the ashes of Deckard's apartment, on the 97th floor no less, after seeing that hell come true for three minutes on the morning news from the other side of the world. I recorded crazy metaphors, similes, analogies...; George Bush having a bull's penis grafted to his forehead so he can impale young Baptist girls and wash his face in their blood. Seven swank swans crazy with love. Nursing a broken arm on a submerged U-96 (the curtains on my bunk affording some privacy). And a thousand other sordid things; because the dragon can do anything.
I've had my fill of what was to hand. It turned to dust. It's dry bones now. As the dipsomaniac cried in the Mexican stew; 'It's never enough!' The light does not shine here more brightly, there is no great notion, the notes die with a dying fall, the films that get delivered every morning go unwatched, the memory unused, the shit piles up to a morning impasse, Malvolio's nose is no whipstock: my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses.
The ghosts are laid to rest. And I am lonely.
So much so. How do you draw on this life? Do you award yourself the highest honour? Make the numbers up? Too much maybe; absolute power corrupts absolutely; but it solves a lot of problems.
Yes, the dragon then - the Weredragon. With just 36 witches, I could conquer the world. Splatter the tyrants and the killers.
How about the farm? Give me the twelve - Earth Goddesses everichon, through and through.
...
I took a walk down to the Green Futures field early on. I familiarised myself with it. It became a favourite place.
As I said, it must have been early, long before the gates opened, when I found myself sitting in the central area, near the Small World Stage. The surrounding venues - the cafés for example - were superb. It was the real deal.
The sun was shining, it was a beautiful day, and I was a little stoned. I appreciated it when drumming started up nearby. It was slow, very slow.
I cast my eyes in the direction of the beat, and noted with interest three young men performing what looked like some kind of dance. I walked over and stood nearby, facing the performance. There was no-one else around. I was the only spectator.
The drummer was crouched down by the entrance to a big circular tent; inside could hold around 70-100 people, I guess. He looked important, this drummer, like he was in charge, and the three guys were his students. He seemed to project approval at their routines.
The three guys were all dressed in blue, as I recall, and they were not dancing. They were young guys; early twenties, all fit, good-looking, clean looking. One was dark, one was blonde, the other was Asian.
There were the moments when they assumed positions. They limbered a little, sometimes shared a silent joke, walked to their spots and froze...
...in a tableau.
They held the position for some considerable time, to the drum, then occasional smiles - a kind of corpsing, relaxation, then together they moved, swaggered even, like confident, healthy young men, to a new scene.
The tableaux had a consistent theme: they were usually composed of two of the men together, in opposition to, or in command of, the third man, who in turn was often suffering, struggling, squatting, begging, running, suppliant, alienated. One or two times he was throwing grenades and the like, as I recall. Sometimes two men were in conflict, with the third looking on - in shock or reproval, for instance.
I was rooted to the spot, soaking it up. Physical movement of this kind - with a deliberate and calculated motivation - puts me in a spin. With the drumming (and the draw) I was in a trance. A pretty woman in a dress, with long auburn hair, came gracefully out of the tent and stood close by. She was smiling.
"What do you make of it?"
I paused.
"I find it...fascinating."
"What do you think it is?"
"They're tableaux...with a common theme..."
"What do you think the theme is?"
"Subjugation...and...oppression..."
"That's right."
We talked for a while, about what they did, what they believed in, when the first performances were due. She said there were going to be regular talks in the tent.
She smiled: "Maybe you could give a talk?"
I told her I couldn't do that, that I didn't have the confidence. I added...
"Maybe in a couple of years..."
Days roll by with this damn broken arm, days imbued with a geist of endeavour and expectation. The summer seems past, resumed; the kingdom of rains. I'm locked in a northern city - "so vast and so strong", one of the richest peasants in history. They fight and toil in my name. I am alone.
"I
am haunted by no phantoms. It is rather that the ashes I stir up contain the
crystallization that hold the image (reduced or synthetic) of the living and
impure beings that they constituted before the intervention of the fire. If
life has a meaning, this image (from the beyond?) has perhaps some significance.
That is what I should like to know. And it is why I write."
...You've shown me how vast the world is. I never suspected it. You have opened my eyes. You know, I think about all sorts of things here. You have never laughed at me. Art is not a paradox, nor is it a witticism or a more or less amusing fashion. It is not a pose. It is a profound, obscure reality, a need that must be satisfied, like hunger, like love, and yet it is very difficult to satisfy. It is a phenomenon as complex as life itself, and in order to live one must toil and love and suffer.
- Blaise Cendrars
Come and sit with me.
Let me talk to you.
I finished reading Nina Rootes' translation of Dan Yack. It's as close a thing to perfection as I know. I looked on in wonder - occasionally wept with laughter.
I broke my arm two weeks ago. I slipped on a ramp outside my office and broke the left humerus in half at the middle. My arm flapped around crazily. It was quite a sight. I went green.
The arm is interesting now; A sling, stained, the tan, the paler sun motif left on the back of my hand by the henna tattoo I acquired before Glastonbury, the massive black and ochre bruises, the brace with the little soldier's star molded into the shoulder. They gave me Co-Dydramol.
The Exile has moved, and Gary Brecher gave a radio interview. He is at the top of the game.
I am cold now. The fire is on. It might as well be winter. I feel cold after I take Warfarin. I feel cold after reading Dan Yack (the shack on the island, the ice floes, the crumbling and capsizing bergs, the ocean spray which freezes mid-blast on the cables with a hiss and crackle). Dan went to the Somme, as Blaise. And Blaise went to Champagne afterwards and got his right arm blown to bits. He held a gun to the surgeon's head at the field hospital, as a incentive to save his life, and they amputated the arm. Champagne was one long party...
Don't let it worry you. It all makes sense really.
Ah well...
This is the world. By that I mean right here. This actual moment. I'll drink and smoke and take the pills, and come back. I need these black scratches now. And I have all the time I need.
A long time indeed.
Rise up Old Slasher, and play out your part...
The old strains play. England falls away. I sit like a statue made of mixed media. Skills and memories. Friendships and family. Possessions and allegiances. A set of commitments...reference points...
One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.
Open the Pod Bay doors Hal.
There was there. The chair outside the marquee where I looked down the hill. You could throw a filter and hit the bar...a small acrylic duster would have made the food wagon, or the shoulder pad from my brace. Nuts were on the job again. Even the coffee was outstanding.
She was not there. I guessed she wouldn't be, and I didn't look for her.
That was that.
But sometimes I still think about her.
She's real.
So I'm sitting there, wasted. The sun is shining and I have finished my shifts. There is a bloke sitting nearby I am liking. Never seen him before, not to remember, even though he's clearly been around for many, many years. We have a mutual friend - Terry - but I don't know this bloke's name, and I never find out.
The first time I saw him was at the party the Earlies threw on Saturday night. It was a spontaneous affair. We were camped outside the fence and couldn't get in - all 400 of us. Vehicle Gates were open of course, but, as someone said; 'The Ped Gates need to be running - and we're running the Ped Gates.'
So there was fire, a big circle, and it got heavy.
I remember passing him a joint. I have a feeling it wasn't the first time I had seen him that evening. I had already noted the general tenor. He seemed pure festival material; country type, heavy tan, used to manual work, years of abandon. I knew I could never be like him - though the thought never coalesced, as such, in my mind.
Some time later I left the circle to take a piss, walking past the showers on the way. They were communal - women on the left and men on the right - handwritten cardboard signs hanging over the respective entrances signifying which was which. Between the two, a narrow corridor, leading nowhere it seemed, but both tents were part of the same structure. There was an aluminium beam over the gap.
Just as I'm walking by I hear a voice calling me in a stage whisper. It's the
bloke. I can just make him out waving me over, crouching in a corner by the
hog roast tent, he has a piece of cardboard on the ground and a big pen in his
hand. He points to the signs over the entrances...
"Men."
"Women."
Here he points to the gap between the tents and holds up the sign so I can see
the writing...
"Terry!"
We both screamed with laughter. I was already having trouble walking, and I
waved him away and staggered on to the toilets, laughing hysterically. I was
still laughing on my way back, where he was putting the finishing touches to
the sign. When I saw his smile at me through the gloom I shrieked again and
walked on, out of control.
So I'm sitting there, and this guy is close by, and he is plainly stoned and drunk, bibulous - probably worse than me. It's the classic booze and blow scenario all round, again. I think this time it had been running for me since the day before. I can't remember what time it was, even if it was morning or afternoon: But it was day time.
A guy caught my eye, walking towards me, I remembered him from Womad in '06; he was supervisor on the shift after mine. I handed over to him a few times. He had raved about Leeds, thought it was the best, underrated, etc.
He was square-jawed and stocky - healthy looking. Certainly not a smoker. Intelligent, caring, he wore on his face always a look of concern. Occasionally he rippled with what looked like a deep feeling of regret, which you could only see up close. You thought he might become a priest. He would be perfect. Women would go insane. He asked me how it was going.
"Well. I have to say I'm slightly toasted at the moment..."
"When did you get here?"
"Saturday. I finished my last shift yesterday. I've been on a bit of a
bender since then. I've had about...sixteen hours of smoking, with the booze
providing a steady baseline."
I heard a ragged voice say 'Snap!' beside me. It was the bloke. We
started laughing.
I blathered on in a drunken way and eventually asked the would-be priest...
"So, how's it going for you?"
The bloke next to me shrieked at this. I cracked up again.
"I see you're both pretty much out of the frame at the moment. You even
look like each other," the priest said, laughing himself, "Maybe talk
to you another time."
"Yeah," I said, gripping my knee and trying not to cough, "this
guy doesn't help."
"You both look wasted."
"Yes," I gasped for breath, "We go to work in half an hour!"
The would-be priest seemed suddenly shocked, his face clouded over...
"You're going to work...?"
I calmed down. A young woman with braided blonde hair piped up nearby.
"Guys..." she said reprovingly, but I caught a hint of something
else, maybe it was the blow.
"No...I'm kidding...I finished my last shift on Monday, that was...yesterday,
I think..."
He left, and after only a moment me and the bloke had lost it again. I couldn't
stand it, it was getting too intense, perhaps too close, and I berated him for
making me laugh and got up to leave.
"What's this...," he said staring at me, his eyes having focal problems,
"...the Giggle Police?"
On a later occasion he told me about the 'tour' of the site he had given two
young women, preppy types high up in the organisation. One of them wanted class-A's...and
he took them to the Stone Circle and cut a deal with a Scouser. She thought
she had been ripped for a while, but half-an-hour or so later she was off her
tits. He had to get her and her mate back across the site. He smiled in his
easy way as he finished the story...
"It was hilarious."
Give me five more years.
And here I am. Hermetically sealed, blooded bodies and wailing women on the silent TV behind me, the flat screen in front, the Thirties fan rocks and clatters a little on its roll. I must have the fan on. It is very important.
Deckard.
I want the night to go on. To play on the edge of The Fall. You are Man's man now. Play their game during the day, but play it out of focus, to shake it off the more readily. Here it is different.
It
slipped away from me again. The meaning. What happened? I don't know. I took
some notes. I can't face them. Surely it was another failure.
Smiling faces outside. Chefs and a giant chicken. Part of a dance performance at the gallery. Smiling faces, as I say, all round.
I tried to smile earlier, but it cracked, like a wince. I don't see the joke anymore. Goddess help me, I'm flat lining again. I can't cope with this. In the aftershock the faces round the fire on the backdrop of deep blue and black cloudscape and ocean waves of artificial light and campfires - well, that image means nothing, because I meant nothing to every soul there. Where I was, someone else could easily have sat, and with no difference, only perhaps it might have been better.
A woman just walked in. Jeans and a black leather jacket. Heavy round breasts under a white woolen top. A brunette. She paces slowly around the walls, looking at the patchwork of photos by homeless people. Her son comes through from the café - and hops on the stone floor. The husband enters. He is handsome, thin, with a look of concern and confusion, and carries a near empty bottle of Pellegrino. They join the crowd outside to watch the second performance. Clapping. The sky is brooding. It may rain on the performers, including the chicken. The weather was good for Glastonbury. I couldn't have asked for more. I came back alive - but empty to the core. I'm tired now. I've had enough. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to retreat behind my dark-ringed eyes and watch myself run out of thoughts. I would be relieved if no one ever spoke to me again.
And Goddess help me, a heavy session last night. It got messy. It could have been worse. It could so easily have been worse. Just normal people - well, no, rogues really, whooping the sauce down their gregories and sucking on smokes. Talk of a nine bar, infra-red cameras, well known criminals, forging prescriptions and tits versus legs.
So-so.
Back in the roost. The white screen of despair. But hark! An angel sings...
In milky silky water
We swim further and further
We dive down... We dive down
The last blast then. Everything you can imagine is real, Picasso said, and I can just scratch enough dirt away to see the flashing axe-blade, made of mother's milk with filigreed black runes.
Hearing that rum went well with peppermint tea, I headed for the Tiny Tea Tent. I sat down next to two women, cracked open my flask of Old Pulteney and poured a healthy dose in the cup. I got out a small paper to roll a micro-joint with the skunk I had acquired ridiculously cheaply. The program was out. I really did need to check something. It was Thursday.
One woman left; the other I talked to.
She worked in medicine and wrote for a feminist magazine. She had children and had toured with a Salsa group years ago. She wore a low-cut top and had good breasts. Her chest was brown from years of sun, but not too brown. Her hair was short - rusty deep red, like dragons blood. Her teeth were in good nick. There had been some work. It was excellently done.
After a while...
"Are you single?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever had a relationship?"
"No."
"Are you a virgin?"
I paused here, and looked to one side and then back at her with a sad and nervous
smile.
"I would rather not say."
I made it sound like a question.
She looked down.
"I'm sorry. No. Of course not. I shouldn't have asked that. Sorry."
"It's OK."
Pause.
"But if you were a virgin...women would find that interesting."
Pause.
"Why do you think you've never been with someone?"
"I don't know. I've...speculated...for a long time. I've had all
sorts of theories."
"Like?"
"I used to think that I was unattractive to women. I still think that really."
She sat back a little in her chair and looked me up and down...
"Mmmm, I don't think so, I think you would be OK..."
We swapped numbers. She didn't smoke, but was eager to get hold of some cakes or truffles. I was swimming in blow by this stage and offered to help her out. We exchanged a few texts over the next 48 hours and there it ended forever.
So-so.
And on, as the blackness calls, and another dream of being on site.
I
am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
- Job 30:29
No dragons here. No owls probably, although I heard them once, and I saw the dragon in my mind long ago; a black-hooded man-form as shadow on a stone bridge. No: It's tight and bare in the crystal of cultural convention, and I can only see grey skies through the paste. In this light you cannot get contrast. Words again fall flat. They fall as flat as the days and nights, because the dreams seem dry, and the dragon flew west long ago.
Glastonbury in less than three weeks. I expect it to be rough, but I feel pretty good now; physically confident. We have a small party on the Saturday night for the Earlies, and a bigger party on Tuesday, when my work should be finished. Then I'll have six days to fill the SD cards with photos. Six days, hopefully, of transcendental tent episodes, warm cider, fresh salads and square pies. I'll try to see some bands.
So I'm down there for...what - ten days? And I hope the weather isn't bad again. I really do hope that.
I've been sitting here looking at this screen with blurred vision. Eleven scratchy lines of nothing. But there is nothing. The cards over and over, the boards again, the bottle and the smoke.
Nothing. At night I call for the dragon. I call for its help. My mind dances in the dark on the tip of a dagger. Twenty years ago it was war, then it was women, now I grab for everything and anything because every single thing morphs to a nothing. I play the games over and over, but even when I win I lose. It isn't right. Winning feels like cheating. Something tells you that the heroes' feast is wax root on the other plane where your double dines. The women never seem real, hard as you try, and the money is old chocolate buttons and foreign change...and someone else lives in the big house, a dry man in misery. You are in the dark dreaming of the light: One day this; one day that; and when you die you may meet Hunter Thompson in prison on the other side and make him laugh at a joke of how fat you are going. To make the Doctor laugh would be something, but you know in this life only what they tell you: that now he is a memory that cannot change; his day is done. How, in a way, I envy him such knowledge.
Another day looking after the gallery, long gone into yesterday. A day off tomorrow, which is to say, today. It's nearly two, and I feel I want a solid wall, like the flat side of an axe blade. I feel I can breathe life into the old dragon, make it take a few steps further. If I can make a wall, a wall of words, that is, then I could sleep easy: Get the stains off the homepage; the dead memories. Reorientate myself, reengineer the enjin, reforge the blade.
Not so easy, as the day unfolds and night casts its hand over me again. Just more words to momentarily calm the alarum and hoo-ha for the wired morning after the espresso and the cigarette and the boot-up into the daily charge. But it's only 19:00 as I type this. Five hours at the forge to get old muscles going, to get the blood moving.
I see yellow from the duster, yellow from the light dashed highlight around this line of text.
Times. There was a time of me as a boy in Camac Road. That time has gone. I remember sliding doors, falling down the iron stairs, the outside toilet and the German Shepherd who chased a fly out the window. I can see the sea of maggots in the bin and my mum bathing me in the kitchen sink. I remember the old man in the basement who made me a sausage sandwich, dents in the bread where he had pressed his thumbs, and a boy swimming in The Dip after rain, and the girl with curly hair who jumped me to the ground at Archdeacon and kissed me on the lips.
And the last day, when my mother drove us away.
Then the estate. Butts Farm. Seven years. No, more like nine years. Nine years of mostly hell - until the end, when I made it to the tertiary college to recover my failed education - and my world opened up.
Work, and then Uni. And freedom. A life I will carry with me to the grave. The more invisible they are, that band, those times, the stronger they grow in my heart. One day I may try to put it down again, and make more than a pothook.
Then recovery, work, uni again and more work.
So many times.
No owls, but the parakeets chirrup behind me on the riverside. A moment ago I had my head out of the window to smoke...and a drop of rain hit my face. Heavy rain tonight, they say, and storms. I hope so. Sleep tonight, but not in her arms. When I was the dragon, I could sleep with anyone.
Blow on the coals. Move your hand over the embers. Watch the ash riffle and purl. Watch the time flow away from you. In fact, watch the universe die.
Geese now, calling out, and flecks of rain at the edge of the storm.
A sunlit stream leading down to the beach. I walked the sandy channel and spoke in my mind for the first time.
The airing cupboard where I used to hide, invisible, silent.
A bridge over the road in the west. I sat there after I had seen her, after the police and security had thrown me out. I was blown away and penniless, waiting for my parents.
It's dark here. Talk to me if you want.
Blue
silverWhen my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see.
- Twelfth Night
I am in a tent, a Vango, an identical one next to me. We have bought them on
the Team, but now we are at a festival, possibly Wychwood (a Wychwood,
at least). The weather is good. I lie in the porch and talk to folk-types. I
go for a walk. It is pre-festival. I see a young man eager to get served a burger.
He is too eager, too hepped-up. What is his problem, I think? I am smoking a
joint, wandering around. I begin to overtake a group in front of me. A young
chap is tailing at the back, also smoking a joint. Here, I say, and
we do a swap. He has hash, I have skunk.
"Which university?"
"Edinburgh. But I was going to Cambridge."
"Which college?"
"There was no college. It was a secret area. A hidden part of the university.
We were to work on top-secret projects."
Now I notice he is massive. He is towering over me.
"You in a boat?"
He smiles: "Yes, the Edinburgh crew. Do you want to try something?"
"What have you got?"
Here he gets out a small tin containing what looks like crushed brown crystals
and a tiny ceramic ashtray.
"Dried Reindeer Urine."
He puts some of the crystals in the small ashtray and hands me a gas lighter.
Suddenly, briefly, I see what looks like my mother walking past, but it isn't
her. I light the crystals and lower my head to inhale. A young woman joins us.
She wants some too, but I have burnt it up and inhaled everything.
I have half an idea to carry on with the porno until it reaches a conclusion. I want Jeremy Paxman to recover after I have fucked every female participant of Newsnight and the Newsnight Review. Then, at the climax, he is on his push bike in town and gets splattered by Peterbilt tanker which hits him at a speed of at least 150mph (perhaps rockets on the back) and then crashes into the Houses of Parliament killing nearly all of the MPs and the whole cabinet, including Gordon Brown, in a huge fireball. I'm in the stern of a Hymer nearby, rimming Emily Maitlis and looking over her back out the rear of the bedroom cabin. I can see Jeremy on his bike, and know from the ferocious speed of the Peterbilt that he barely had time to glance to his side before he was spread over the front grille. At that very moment I come into Kirsty Wark's mouth.
It's a rum deal, but somebody should do it.
Well, whatever. It's the gallery again. And she turned up again. I showed her my book.
Oh...you got Henry Miller in there. He's one of my favourite authors...
Cue the hole in the floor. I have just been hit by the Yamato.
I gave her my last copy.
Night-time. I sunk five bottles of Peroni and went down the pubs - hunting for the crew. I found two of them, drunk. Big Bill didn't do the sauce justice; not with St John, or Sir Toby, or Feste. Not such a dark place as it is. Why not treat it lightly though? After all, look at the Hell-side...
But here I am now, and I've learnt my place
And everything's just as it seems
And the colour of wonder drains from my face
And the whole wide world's up on screen
But I've see no more more than that little boy saw
I've certainly seen nothing new
The Thinker stands on the brink of eureka
Dizzy with déjà vu...
Nice one Chris. I like your face. I like your smile. You are the man now.
So much for this Sunday night. Sometimes it goes left-handed. And then you need help. You need the moon.
Yet
sit and see;
Minding true things by what their mock'ries be.
- Henry V - Act 4
Stables Gallery again, yesterday now. Exhibition by the London Disability Arts Forum. Disabled artists. Some severely disabled visitors, even when we had just opened. The brochure accompanying the display is moving. So much suffering. It makes my blubber and yellow teeth look...
Later I read about Action T4.
I feel the need to confess, to say my heart is 'fracted and corroborate'.
Hippos being ferried across the river in rowing boats. A crocodile scrapes my arm. Its claw is like a parrot's beak or an elephant's toe. I move away. It's too dangerous. It is the apocalypse. A friend must kill his wife. The forces of evil must find a boy. They send a well-groomed matriarch to do the job. I lose track of her. The world is falling apart. It is in ribbons - paly, no less. There isn't even any television. We must move with legerity, but everyone is too bloated or soft to fight for themselves.
Half way through she walks in. I am floored. Who is this woman? Why is she talking to me? More specifically, why is she talking to me about art and The Wasteland? Why does she seem so nervous and so beautiful? When she leaves I find myself paralysed. I sit there staring into space. You do not play for a woman like that. She toys with you. She breaks your legs in the first minute.
Much later. I cannot sleep. Night wraps around the living city bringing the illusion of clean air. In the distance a truck. CCTV scans the embankment; there is a camera just outside my window. I know some of the people who work in the control room.
Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
It's hard now Bill, what with the street lights and the traffic and the cameras. I'm wired up to the hilt; the mobile, the land line, broadband, dial-up, the television, at least three radios...
It's not like the old days, when the boys used to play in the fields under the stars, when Sir John heard the bells at midnight and woke to the gadflies playing in dappled sunlight and loped to the earliest inn to begin that awl-like thrust into the pitch of dark again. It was night all the time for old St John. We are fucked now, plugged in to every hell and madness on Earth twenty-four hours a day. Good evening, here is the news...
Night time again. So soon. I have done nothing. Another week beckons. And another bad night. There is nothing I can do to stop that. You cannot escape by thinking.
Eliot seems as dead as dry bones. Rat's feet on broken glass. It was a time of high manners, and he read too much, too much of what was already dead, sucked bloodless by the straw men. Move away from him. Move into music.
Enough.
A
twelfth [spell] I know;
when I see aloft upon a tree
A corpse swinging from a rope,
Then I cut and paint runes
So that the man walks
And speaks with me.
- Hávamál
This being the twenty-seventh day of April in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ two thousand and eight.
A grey day in the stables gallery. Quite a few people now. It's Springtime Safari day!; I am a volunteer invigilator; there are tents in the grounds; the Ice Maiden is here; people come and go...
...speaking of Michelangelo.
Actually, no. Definitely no Michelangelo here today. Pen and ink, fibreglass, ceramics, multimedia. I'm looking after the stables, as I have meant to do for the last four weeks. It's a chance to get out of the flat. I'm back at work during the week, copywriting and editing for a two-thousand page government website. One of the best of its type in the country apparently.
The Ice Maiden cometh...
How's it going? Have you been busy?
Yeah, it's been OK.
Many people?
Well, we've only just started.
I'm sure that shouldn't be here... And she takes away a microphone stand,
presumably used by the minister for culture at the opening a few days ago.
Yep, I'm feeling better thanks. I'm not sure what happened, but they say it was viral. I was feeling ill and depressed for a long time. Then I got a cold and it got worse. I was off work, and then back, and then off again. A couple of women in the office joked about man-flu. My doctor told me to stop wasting her time, but the virus was attacking my heart and my liver, I was vomiting and coughing, and when my ankles swelled up like balloons and my cock swelled up like a Hoover tube the second medico told me to get down to A&E - right now, and the doctor there asked me if it was always like this and he wanted to check me for HIV and alcoholism because the first rule of medicine is always to shift blame onto the patient. Then they did an ultrasound and freaked because 90% of my heart had stopped working and my liver had stopped and then two junior doctors, they all look the same, they all look a little like you but younger and even thinner, tried to put a direct line into my heart and it was pure slapstick out of Catch-22 or 1984 and I'll never trust those fuckers again. Five weeks of being prodded around, molested by wandering fruitcakes, 85-year-old hags trying to get into bed with you, kleptomaniacs trying to steal from you - every day - and succeeding quite often. Nutters screaming at you that they want to smash your head in. Shit on the floor and blood in the toilets, the worst food you will ever eat, nurses who speak in Filipino and squawk and shriek and laugh in intensive care all night and no sleep at all. And the sight of those clean, middle-class junior doctors and their stethoscopes makes me puke now. What a fucking shower. I wanted to sue them for £174,791,263.52.
But I'm getting better now thanks, and I really wish you would talk to me, even if it would be difficult to keep my eyes off you.
Or maybe it would be difficult to look at her.
How converse.
Two months since I published The Gate. I have not sold a single copy, though a few people told me that they would buy one. I feel blessed. It would be a tremendous achievement to not sell even one copy, and if it was just one copy part of me would be forever fear-paranoid over who bought it. My ultimate ambition is a to have a whole portfolio of work that absolutely no-one has ever read apart from myself. Then I would like to get cancer - preferably lung cancer - and die in my own shit in a fly-blown NHS Hell-hole.
As the Lord is My Witness, it would make me feel wonderful. And Godspeed the half.
sahyluhns
awl enjins...sometime he angers me
With telling me of the mouldwarp and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,
And of a dragon and a finless fish,
A clip-wing'd griffin and a moulten raven,
A couching lion and a ramping cat,
And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff
As puts me from my faith.
- Henry IV, Part I
Put a Toad to the Woman's breast,
that she may suckle him 'till she die,
& he become gross with her milk.
Atalanta fugiens - Emblem 5
In the walled woods by the river...a dragon in nocturne. Its belly distended
after the gorge, its concubines laying about it in tranquil, naked and obeying
sleep, it drifts in a waking dream. Inside outside it moves here and there;
a slinking cat with inner eyes like moonlit lances, a trotting fox consuming
the rolling scrim landscape, a hovering fish in dark and primal suspension,
an angry and timid rat taking a wall like a cultural historical torpedo, a fearful
child looking into the shadows of the cupboard, an innocent lurker who fears
for his eyes lest his hate destroy them on impulse, a lonely, solitary soul
breaking through the night with a scab of fatalistic remorse, a skittish robin
dancing on nature's memory like the tip of an epee in the hands of a terrified
fool, a queen bee buzzing with her short-circuit brain, her hive wrapped around
her like a hairy womb.
By the river upstream it finds another mind - a mind in a false repose, and yet like its own, in partibus, but crucified - and it senses death. It sees that the lower astral plane nymph is blocking the third eye. It is the Hanging Man. Images flicker like a cinematograph showing random fistfuls of film from the cutting-room floor. Petty vendettas and paranoias. False judgments, cries for help.
'Help me.'
The dragon plants a seed.
'Eat and kill.'
Eat for pleasure. Eat for sleep. Eat to make your enemies hunger. Kill your mind. Kill your ideas. Kill your worries. Kill the world. Kill yourself if need be.
The dragon is chaotic neutral. It feels only for the self. But it sees in this mind the germ of chaos...to be set to roam free.
Back to work. After six months of sickness following viral myocarditis. Glastonbury is confirmed. This year I have the lowest possible expectations. For the first time ever I am not bouncing off the walls in anticipation. I fully expect it to be bad...again. But it must be done. Back on the sauce of course. Highs and lows. The lows are pretty rough now. The highs are just me feeling normal and not thinking too much.
I Dream. I am in a hospital, very sick. Trev (my old boss) enters waving a wad of paper - a job offer for Bill (my uncle). How much? I ask. Fifteen thousand a year. Are you crazy! I shout, he's already on twenty-eight thousand a year! Trev walks across the room and throws the wad out of the window. Suddenly I am back in the Civic Centre. I walk into a lift with two young women - an overweight Aussie brunette and an auburn-haired English type - the kind who would have been a prefect at a low-grade Catholic girl's school. We take some seats - there are rows of plastic seats. They sit behind me. I feel a needle go into my right arm - near the shoulder - right through my tweed jacket. On the way out of the lift I quiz the Aussie - saying that I felt something go into my arm. The Aussie fesses up, and says she has been going round the Civic injecting people with vitamin K - as a health measure apparently.
We are walking back to their department - Environment. I'm angry. Who is your boss? It's so-and-so, but he's off today. Then who is your boss's boss? It's so and so. The Aussie is upset now. She and the prefect are on the other side of the office. There is a kerfuffle. The Aussie is crying 'cause she knows she's done wrong. She should have been open. She should have asked me to fill in a form. She thought she could get away with it in my case - just slip it in and tick me off the list. I feel a little twang of regret and sorrow. Her life is pathetic and she will probably lose her job.
I go into the chief's office and spill the beans. He is a typical prick of a director, smiling me down. Do you know the amount of gear I am taking? I reel it off; furosemide, bisoprolol, ramipril, spironolactone, thiamine, warfarin, folic acid, trifluoperazine, my anger rising. This guy is screwed. He needs to cover his arse. He is smiling me off. I leave and return to my own office. My boss is there and we begin to play around with antique telephones. I pick one up, holding it at arms length, and to my surprise hear a voice on the line. I hand it to my boss.
It's people from the department. They want to meet with us immediately. Suddenly the room fills with suits - petty executives who would have a hard time passing a Turing Test. We engage in argument. One of them makes an off-hand comment (which slips my mind now) and I tear into him. He replies matter-of-factly; It was just an ad-lib spontaneous impulse. Ad-lib spontaneous impulse! I'll give you an ad-lib spontaneous impulse! - and I begin to rant.
After the rant I stomp out of the room and then I find myself outside, in car park at night by an unfamiliar building. I enter the building and see that is some kind of working man's fitness club. I must climb upwards. I enter a circular stairwell and find it getting narrower and narrower until I am nearly stuck. Suddenly I am in the basement car park of the Civic Centre. I take a lift to ground level. It is still dark and I am on the streets. I begin to run through the night...
The Brother is hot & dry, & therefore very Cholerick. The Sister is cold & moist, having much Phlegmatick matter in her. Which two Natures, so different in their Temper, agree best in fruitfulness, Love, & Propagation of Children. For as Fire will not easily be struck out of the hardest Bodies, Steel & Steel, nor out of those brittle Bodies, Flint & Flint, but from the hard & brittle, that is, Steel & Flint, so neither from a burning Male & Fiery Female, nor from both of 'em being cold (for cold is the unfruitfulness of the Male) can a living offspring be produced. But he must be hot & she more cold than he, for in Human Temperament, the hottest Woman is colder that the coldest Man, supposing him to be in Health, as Levinus Semnius, in his book of the Hidden Miracles of Nature affirms. The Sister, therefore, & Brother are rightly joined by the Philosophers.
And the dragon sleeps on...in statu quo. It paints the face of a tyrant in the guise of a clown and cuts his heart out by the molecule. It snuffs out a lonely soul and enters the mind of a young girl. It stands segreant in her room, its pizzle extended and rampant, and offers the heart, its arms arranged in an odd contortion. It moves on her and rapes her till she flashes with lightning. It kills a sick baby, moves a man to suicide, kicks the rat off the wall, makes eddies on the water, licks the face of a raven, breaks the toe of a dog, ruffles the leaves, fills the account of a risker, drugs the cup of a priest, sucks the milk from a goat, drinks the blood of a child, plants the seeds of war and the hope of peace. Dream on dragon. You mean nothing to me.
Dear
Henry,I hope and believe that this is the last time I will talk about you in such a way. Several things have conspired to drive me to the conclusion that you are beyond the usual analysis, and therefore beyond The Academy.
I'll use your words freely, as they were meant to be used, but let your secular life, as such, slip into the shadows - or the light, as it may be.
Some months ago I was invited to write an article for the Nexus Journal, which, as you may or may not know, is devoted to your life and work - from an academic perspective. I sweated on the subject for a while; thinking that I might write a prose poem, or a letter to you, and then, finally, a passage of doggerel on the subject of how unclassifiable you are. The title was to be along the lines of Henry Miller and The Eclectic Dialectic: Towards a Post-Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist View That The Academy Stinks Like a Rat's Arse. You can see how doomed it was.
The editor of the journal had seemed to offer me a modicum of praise for my college dissertation on The Rosy Cruxifixion, written some ten years ago. I had always thought it was shit, and said so clearly on my website, but now I began to doubt my own instinct. I removed belittling comments from the introduction. Then I went 'on-line' and bought all five volumes of the journal, having them delivered from the States a couple of weeks ago.
It was a mostly depressing and painful business, reading what people said about you. But I read with great interest your own, previously unpublished, words. In your letter to Gershon Legman in '38...
I write fast, when I write, and I seldom correct. I cut largely and sometimes completely rewrite, but I am not a fiddler and a plumber.
For me the clincher came from your letter to Kate Millett in '69...
In the past I was gracious and foolish enough to take the time to read dozens of theses sent to me not only from America but from other parts of the world. I no longer do. I discourage any one attempting to write a thesis. To my mind theses have no value whatsoever.
I gave up then. It was over. But you were still on my mind. I still had a feeling, again; an instinct, to reveal and disgorge what you did to me, to understand myself why you are so important to me.
I began with an abortion. I moved away from my immediate life and thoughts and reeled off a thousand word piece of fiction written in the first person perspective. It was a burlesque episode about an absurd sexual encounter with an unlikely minor celebrity. I chewed it up and spat it out. It tasted like shit. To Hell with it, I thought. Go back to the roots. Go back to the within.
Then, back to the self and the soul: It's five-twenty a.m. here now. I woke at three. Satre said that three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. But things may have changed since then. The world clock has got weirder. Now it's five o'clock which is too late or early, or nothing at all, or every hour of the day.
You draw from life and the inner life, and from your eyes and ears. This is what you have to offer - yourself. No sleight of hand, no homage to form. There you stand, and here are the words. There can be no greater power, it seems to me, than to express the act of being, and not a fiction, or a form, or a genre or convention. This is what so much poetry does - it draws from within. You used prose, the most amazing prose ever written for all I know, to shatter the frozen walls within us. What reward for such a man? How do we remember him?
In the same way you are supposed to remember any great man. That is, by letting his expressions enrich you...and so guide you. In your case with the world of art. Somebody once asked a modern seer how we can fight the tribulations of the world. His reply was; By creating art. I knew at 17 that I wanted to be a writer. It wasn't until I read you that I began to see how. I found a copy of Tropic of Cancer while working at a library. I knew nothing of you or the book, but I felt immediately that it would be the greatest book I would ever read. Can you believe that? That moment is fixed in my memory. Afterwards came Capricorn, and then The Rosy Crucifixion. As for the latter, well, I can't see how any other written text could better prepare a young writer. You made the process, the transition, seem like apotheosis. And you evoked the ghosts of Van Gogh, Gottfried Benn, Arthur Machen, Mikhail Artsybashev, Oswald Spengler, Knut Hamsun, Dostoievsky, Sherwood Anderson, John Milton, Mikhail Bakunin, William Blake, Jacob Böehme, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Élie Faure, Anatole France, Issa-San, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Occam, Albertus Magnus, Gogol, Hokusai, Wilhelm Reich, Strindberg, Lady Murasaki, Miguel de Unamuno...
Just a few, really, just a few, and a veritable army of ghosts. I was electrified, moreso because so many of my fellows and co-workers had never heard of you, or misunderstood you when they had. I had discovered a secret.
I began to laugh a lot, hysterically sometimes, as I poughed through the books. In much the same way, I confess, as I used to laugh later at college when I discovered Marijuana. I laughed because it seemed so preposterous - and staggeringly wonderful at the same time.
Henry, it's time for me to move on - back to myself. It's day now. I slept badly, fearfully (I seem to be coming down with a cold - a situation which nearly killed me a few months ago). I woke fitfully, not really sure that I had been sleeping, then slept again. I had a dream of the most sordid kind: I was an onlooker at an orgy of Latin men and women - and deformed cupids. Men and cupids walked around with erections, occassionally sucking each other off, and the women were twenty-four carat sluts. Watching one performance from close-up I found myself with a ferocious hard-on. Then a slut pulled down my trousers and took my cock out. It felt like it was going to explode. Suddenly the glans became massive and red, the neck very small, and it extended into the shape and proportions of a dog-cock. The woman laughed and began massaging and teasing it. Slowly, it reformed into a normal shape, though still large.
A strange thing happened: The woman became invisible, and only then embarked on sucking me off. I was frustrated, as I so much wanted to see the action, but I could see nothing but my cock swaying to-and-fro, although I could feel her mouth and tongue working me.
It was too much even for me. I awoke in a shock. I took a handful of various tablets and vitamins. My physical presence disgusts me. Many's the time I feel like a slave: Taking my Soma like a good citizen - just as in Brave New World. You can see that I appear to be a weak man - no pugilist or soldier here, no Blaise Cendrars. But I can be strong and brave, like you, Henry. I can bend in the wind. Every day I plot my crime. And one day I may join you.
So long Henry, I'll leave you now.
...
DecoherenceI have wished in some way to sketch these ornaments in the figure which each one may reproduce according to his own fancy. It is a condition, however, that you do not commit any fault, however small, against the mystical symmetry for fear of introducing by your negligence a new discipline into these hieroglyphic measurements; for it is very necessary that during the succeeding progression in time they must be neither disturbed nor destroyed. This is much more profound than we are able to indicate, even if we wished to do so, in this small book, for we teach Truth, the daughter of Time, God willing.
Theorem XXIII, Monas
Hieroglyphica
- John Dee
I thought I might write to Henry Miller, even though he is in the realm of the dead. Dead or not, it would be better for him to read this without such a conceit. I wanted to tell him what he perhaps already knows: That the world, if anything, has gotten even worse, that Larry and Alfred died ten years after he did. I wanted to tell him about physics, about 9/11 and the War On Terror and the War On Drugs. I wanted to say that his daughter and his son still loved him very much. I couldn't pull it off. It seemed unnatural. Forced.
I was lying in bed a few weeks ago when a voice came into my head. It was the voice of Terence McKenna. He said: "Whatever you told me wasn't true."
They come to me now and then, you see, sometimes as words and sometimes in dreams. Mostly Terence and Henry. I wonder what kind of world they live in now; from a state of pure oblivion, to a dream state, to a firm régime like the hotel in Wings of Fame. Perhaps the afterlife is as corrupt and fallible as the earth we inhabit. Perhaps it has yet to exist. Perhaps they are still building it.
Forgive me, but I've been reading about Quantum Mechanics...to expose myself again to the new thinking. The book was a piece of shit - one of those 'dummies guides' type of comic book. I noticed it cost £6.99 (I got it from the library) and other books in the series included introductions to Freud, psychology and post-modernism. More bullshit, I thought. I spent my time between the pages, Wikipedia and another website. I felt that if I could at least grasp something of the nature of the subject it would move me to a clearer understanding of how untenable my current position is. The collapse of the wave function seemed central - to the human question, that is. But the implications are largely ignored. Physicists shy away from philosophy. Is the role of the scientist now not dissimilar to the role of the sage? What then, is the role of the artist? And is it not true that the role of the mother remains the most unchanged?
That was all going through my mind.
But it isn't Art.
I'm back to the chattering idiot stage, with a weak but recovering heart, walking occasionally, taking photos, spending too much time on-line...
I watched a snail...crawl along the edge of a straight razor...
A drink by my side. The music dead. Tears sometimes. Dreams are flat. Sleep is difficult - charged like a dead live wire with white noise in repose on a cold, stainless steel counter, the cries of the suffering and dying boxed up, men raping women boxed up, the final moments boxed up. Each moment breaks down with a transient whimper and you spasm and throw yourself on the next episode. To go or not to go; you can't stay here for sure. Look at yourself. Disgust. Despair. Distract the eyes. Every song sounds like a broken faucet or the rattle of bones. Every moment you touch is broken. Roll on then - to better days. And bring out the big guns.
The mystical sign of the Ram, composed of two semicircles connected by one common point, is very justly attributed to the place of the equinoctial nycthemeron, because the period of twenty-four hours divided by means of the equinox denotes most secret proportions.
This I have said in respect of the Earth.
Secret proportions.
At last, the rain comes. A double dose tonight. Storms to follow and more life. A Robin or two flits around the exterior view...
As I lay deep in Faerie Castle, crucified at bliss on a circular bed in the domed chamber, looking out on the Oort Cloud through a diamond cupola, pots of scented and physic incense filling the room with membranes of intoxicating mist, C and N enter gently to touch.
How empty. Better by far to hold her while she vomits, to watch her eat, to feel the soles of her feet. A little fart perhaps.
Don't even mention the sessions...
Where are you now, Henry? On your own or with the ancestors? Whatever it is it's not what we know...not what we can know.
Soteriology. Transmutation. Modulation. Variation.
Gaia. Miracle.
To this Claude replied: 'You're essentially a man of faith. A man of great faith...'
Eschaton.
Sometimes I think I'm an artist. Once in a while I even think I may be a visionary, but never a prophet, a seer. What I have to contribute must be done in a roundabout way.
Eros.
The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams...
Adyta.
Sunday now. A temporal division towards the end. Shadows cast back in time. But 2012 will come and go - and Terence will look like more of a fool, even after his prediction for '95. I look to the future. If a hand reached out I would die.
The
Gate seems finished now. At least, I can't face it any more. It's a little
shy of 20,000 words, so in the Novella territory, which is nice.
It's 100% pure, guaranteed filth. I think you'll find that it's the most vile and disgusting piece of literature you'll ever read.
You can buy the paperback at http://www.lulu.com/content/2074501, or just print off the page for the price of the paper and ink. Hopefully it should be OK with a screen reader. The text is exactly the same, but the paperback is an easier read for the sighted. It's best read stoned for sure, and when I'm better I plan to revisit it after a smoke.
I designed the cover in Photoshop. It's simple, but I really like it.
Nothing much else has been happening. I've been ticking over. I published some new photos over at the Falstaff site. I feel a little tired. Expect to be back at work within the next few weeks.
My friend Feithy has started podcasting about Paganism. She has selected some cracking songs. One band that blew me away was Gaia's Consort. Especially the song; Change The Way Things Are (MP3 - 4.26MB). Like Seize The Day, this band have made all their songs available for public consumption over the Net. Beautiful.
That will be me surviving then, waiting for the rain.
Blood pressure back to normal. INR at optimum. Pills are good...
Been watching Roads over and over. And Unchained Melody. Also Jefferson Airplane's Saturday Afternoon and Crosby, Stills and Nash; Suite: Judy Blues Eyes. Also listening to the songs of Seize The Day. Who needs television?
Broke the 15,000 barrier. Bracing myself for the end. Need to start again soon. Been thinking about The Lady of The Flowers a bit. Valentines day soon. Idiot. Whatever...
I've been walking every day for the last few days. Yesterday I walked to Richmond Lock, and again today. I took 331 photos. Only two are usable. This is one of them...
I'm feeling better. Gate thing progressing. Much to think about. Big fugues. Reality bombs.
I charged the mobile up earlier on, half expecting to find myself back in hospital by the morning. Bad dizzy spells. Probably low blood pressure. I'm knocking the Ramipril on the head from now. See the doctor on Wednesday. Heart sounds 'clear' to the consultant. He cautiously said I might make a full recovery from the damage caused by the virus - or whatever it was.
No man is a hero to his valet. And there are no atheists in foxholes.
The story is stalled temporarily. I have another 5-10,000 words to write, but at least another three weeks off work to get it done. I've re-read and revised the thing so many times now that...well, familiarity breads contempt. I can only see a flat surface at the moment. I really need to be high, or in some other form of fugue state, to appreciate it now. I need someone to tell me it's wonderful perhaps.
I've been watching a few DVDs recently. I've seen all of them before, bar one or two: Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (a little too narrow and pompous perhaps - but still 'charming'), If (revels in its time), Rogue Male (an interesting curioso), The Natural (for cheap thrills), Sherman's March (couldn't make it through), Sitting Ducks, Ed Wood, Amadeus (spoiled with the directors cut), The Final Cut of Bladerunner (mostly pointless and detrimental alterations) and The Elephant Man - mainly for the shining genius of Freddie Jones' performance as Bytes. The scene at the beginning of the film where he takes Frederick Treves into the filthy garret to view Merrick puts me into a trance. It's fine work by Freddie - everything; the blowing out of the match, the self-conscious and penetrating smile, the slow walk, the lowering of the lamp to warn Treves of the step down into the room, the movement of the eyes away from the gas light after he has raised the flame, the angle of the arms as he starts his spiel. He was at the top of the game.
I still feel that if I go to bed I might not wake up. So I conjure them - the women - in my mind, as a last stand, as it were. Tonight especially, I'll be thinking of biting the bullet. If only I can avoid dying in hospital. That would be something. And then? Another flicker towards the concrescence, I guess. Transformation into a memory, a tear, a pile of ashes. The web sites disappear after a while, a few people at Glastonbury wonder why I didn't show. My parents try to deal with my debts.
Enough. Of everything.
I took some photos a few days ago. The weather looks to be good on Tuesday. My new CF card should be here by then and if I'm still here I'll take some more. The pain makes me wonder.
I broke the 11,000 word mark today. Broke the 10,000 word mark Sunday morning. I'm not feeling so hot. All my fault no doubt. I need some help.
I'm
sitting at the back of The Old Anchor. In the garden. I've just found out that
my old friend Big Mac has died. He died on Boxing Day after taking his mask
off, removing the oxygen that was keeping him alive. He had stomach cancer and
it had spread to the lungs, and other places.
I had met him in The Clubhouse about 2 years ago. He used to annoy me by coming over to my table at about 6.30, every evening, and chatting to me. I principally wanted to be left alone - with my Russian Solitaire, Outlook and TextPad. After a while I learnt to switch the laptop off as soon as he walked in. I had begun to look forward to the conversations. He was a feminine conversationalist, which is to say that he segued seamlessly from subject to subject, keeping the undertone quite light and keeping you on your toes. He was opinionated, intelligent and experienced - he had done everything from run his own business to working as a waiter - and everything in between. In the sixties, from the age of 15, he had worked as a bouncer on Eel Pie Island and from there, it seemed, he had gotten involved in the music business - working festivals, driving musicians, delivering sound equipment. He ended up running his own business, which went bust, and got into IT after that. From Mac I got to know the crowd of people I drink with now.
He took his mask off. Removed the oxygen. Brave Boy.
Life goes on for the living, which is one of the enduring mysteries we face.
Mac was into photography, along with a lot of other things. These are for him because it's all I have to give. So long man. Join you soon enough.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
