White Hole

POETREWS

2010-05-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

AND A QUICK LOOK AT TODAY'S NEWS FROM THE POETRY WORLD:

* * *

In a surprise move, Tar Paulin has declined to comment on something;

... another setback for the very concept of spontaneity as Clam Ayres, poet-in-residence for Glade Nice Plugins, has been snapped in a shit dress making exactly the set of gestures you'd expect her to fucking make while near some plants;

Oxford professors rejoiced, a bit, today, at the latest shipment of Geoffrey Krill; three crates of him were extracted from a whale washed up in Henley-on-Thames;

Over in Cambridge, the city centre rose a degree above freezing today, after the discovery of an early work by J. H. Bynne which does not contain the word 'vantage';

SHOCK! Something in the wider world actually impacts upon British poetry, as climate change means carburetor-poet Simon Hermitage is now almost entirely below sea level, versifying "like a seal tiddlywinked by a tractor tyre just to keep his hair dry";

Still on sabbatical in the bee-gardens of Buckingham Palace, poet laureate Skep Ann Duffy is reported to be working on a dramatic prose piece commemorating the 300th anniversary of the rounded bevel;

AND FINALLY! -- further upset from technicians at the forge where Glandrew Notion's verse is extruded -- they claim that since losing the laureateship he is now "usually sesame paste" at room temperature.

Eugene O'Neill

2010-04-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

2010-04-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

[read by a Macintosh]

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

HAT DWEEB A TWIRLED AN OVEN THYME THUS COIN IS LAID YOU URN OAK RHYME OUI WOODS IT OW NUNS INK WITCH WEIGHT WHO WALL CANNED PARSE HOWL ON GLOVE STAVE HOW BUY THIN JUNK ANGIE SIGHED SHOE DREW BEES FINE DYE BUY THAT I’D OF HUM BURR WOOD COME PLAY NIGH WOOD LA FEW TINNY EAR SPIFF FOURTH OF LAD ANT DUE CHUTE IF HUE PLEA HIS REVIEW STEALTH IRK ON FUR SHONE OFF THEIR JUICE UM I’VE ETCHED A BALL OFF SHOOT CRAVE ARSE TETHER NAME PYRE SAND MORSEL OH ONE HUNT READY EARS SHOOT GOAT UP RAYS THY NICE ANT DON FIVE HORRID GAYS TO HAND WROTE WHO A DOOR REACH PRESSED PUT FUR TEETH HOUSE HUNT HOOVER REST URN AGENT LEE STEW IF REAP HEART HANDFUL ARSED EDGE SHOED JOEY OR ART FULL EH DUE DISS HER FIST ATE GNAWED ISLE OF HATTER LOW OR EIGHT BARRED ADAM I BAG ISLE WEIGH SEARED I’M SWING ITCH HARRIER TARRY IN EAR RAN JOHN DRAWL BE FOR A SLIDE IS IT’S OFF ARSE TO TURN A TEETH HIGH PEW TEA SHELL GNOME ORB IF HOUND GNAWING MIME ARE BALL OF HAUNCH OWLS HOUND MIRE COHEN’S HONK THEN WARM SHELTER I’VE HAT LUMP RESERVED FOR GIN AND TEA IN JOKE WAYNE DONNA TAINTED US TEND DIN TWO HASH A SAW MILE LOST THUG RAVE SOFA IRON AMP ARRIVE AT PLAY SPOT NUN ICE SINGED WHO’VE HAIR IMP RAISIN OWL THEY’VE WHORE WILES A YOU’VE FALL USE ITS ON VICE KIN LIE COME AWNING DOONE TWINE THEY’LL ILL INK SALT RAN SPIRE SAT IF RAPPORT WE THIN STAN FY AS AN OWL ETTA’S PORT AS WHY ALL WE MAIN OWL I CAMERAS PURRED SERVE PRAYER HALVE ERR AT ONE SOUR TIE MUD OF HOUR VAN LANGUAGE SHIN HISS LOACH APT POW A LETTERS ROW ALL HOUSED RINK THAN DOLL HOURS WHEAT AN IS A PINTER WON BULL ANT AIR ALP LEISURE SWIZZ RUFF STRIFE THREW THY HUNG EIGHTS OF LIFE US THOUGH WEAK ANNA’D MAY CAR SUNS TANNED AS TILLY EAT WEEVIL MAY KIM RUNG

INSTRUCTING MANUEL

2010-03-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

Thank you in selecting that device for years, of not troubled, and peace—minded usage, in the office or house or equal hygienic proofed (is recommended) places.

Instantiating:

1) Simplicity re- attach part labeled (1) along part labeled between ‘ankle L shew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages in page 3 of this pamph let) and ‘between ankle R shrew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages, in page 3 of this pamph let) keen one’s wrists past the fetlock-foam to trowel L (nominated L) and Right (nominted Right);

2) Sat down to your chair, doff recalcitrate your shoes and encourage the button ’ SLUICE ’ (see page 2 of this pamph let)

3. Dail on the left of that device is for the infreqeunt usage to be tended and Never arrived to ‘dozen’ (12).

2010-03-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

FOOTAGE WHICH IT WOULD BE LOVELY TO TRACK DOWN SOMEHOW

1. There's a set of clips in an old documentary on the pyramids of Giza -- I forget its name -- cut from an interview with I. E. S. Edwards, a well-respected Egyptologist who died in 1996. His The Pyramids of Egypt was a favourite book of mine as a child, full of gentle awe and restrained wonder, and to see and hear the man talk was a joy. He was round-faced, old, white-haired, at this point, sat comfortably in a comfortable chair in a comfortable, book-lined room, in a position which made him seem neckless without being particularly overweight. His voice was delicate, without a trace of the Welshness I was expecting from someone called Iowerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, slightly crumbly and croaky, ever so posh. The programme strays into the territory of people like Robert Bauval, a "pyramidologist", a probably self-coined term for practitioners of a more fanciful realm of totemic theorizing and pseudoscience, understandably viewed with an amount of distrust and scorn by Edwards and his rigorously academic cohorts. The sight and sounds of Edwards, during this interview, mentioning that these people are sometimes referred to among the academic Egyptology community as "pyramidiots", chuckling at it, and then struggling to continue, just because of how amusing he clearly finds this quiet pun, is one of the most delightful things I've seen on television.

2. Along similar lines, there's another documentary I remember on the Nazca lines, which also treads the dodgy path between rigorous anthropological (and, here, mathematical) study, and the slightly batshit work of people like Erik von Daniken, who published about a million books asserting that the enormous trapezoids on the flatlands of the Pampas were constructed as landing strips for alien crafts. There's was a fascinating woman, Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who ended up spending the last few decades of her life living on these flatlands, studying the geometries of the various shapes there, and campaigning to keep them protected (from human intervention, not from weather -- thousands of years have passed and the trapezoids, lines and pictures have remained unaffected by the latter). There are small clips of archive footage featuring Reiche herself, staggering across the flatlands; or sat in her small hut, wizened into resembling an actual Nazca shrunken head, or a figure painted on pottery from the period referred to as "Nazca 5" (stylistically more gruesome, grizzled, warlike, due possibly to severe drought), poring over unimaginably complex mappings of an unimaginably sophisticated, still-unexplained system of markings from thousands of years ago.

3. Yet another documentary, which I actually remember the name of -- basically any scene from Rannoch The Red Deer, which followed either the whole life, or the final year in the life of, this beast in Scotland. Every scene was gorgeous.

4. The Rotten World About Us was a fascinating and genuinely perturbing documentary on fungi, which must have been repeated a few times since it was apparently made six years before I was born; I've definitely seen it, though. Most of it is incredible, but the clip I really want to find somewhere is time-lapse footage of the 'Octopus Stinkhorn', Clathrus archeri, expanding from its egg into its full form, which presumably takes a few hours. Speeded up it's like the hand of some angered Moloch, springing out of the earth and hooking his way out of hell. Over Christmas, actually, I discovered it's amusing to get extremely drunk on whisky, do a google image search for these organisms, and stare at the page, convincing yourself that every one is the Devil incarnate; not a part, but each one the whole, containing every conceivable threat and warning in solution. Remarkably easy to do, and really quite frightening.

5. Slightly more cheerfully, Les Dawson did one particular performance of his "blowing out the candle" joke which I think's funnier than all the others I've seen, and typically it's none of those which are online.

6. Kenny Everett strides onto a stage covered in scaffolding with green and yellow lights strangely placed, and what looks like dissipating smoke from a special-effects explosion. He's wearing a torn tartan kilt, I think, and a tartan beret which he keeps adjusting. "Hello. I'm Barbara Cartland, and you're all under arrest. I'd like to read you an extract from my latest romantic novel. When Lady Penelope swoons, her bosoms pop out like balloons. The butler stands by with a gleam in his eye, and pops them back in with warm spoons." It's fucking brilliant.

2010-03-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

SOUNDS LIKE RAIN

Bacon frying. Sustained applause in a school hall. Seven hundred games of Kerplunk being lost. A basmati spillage on a slack kettledrum. A high-ceilinged warehouse of underpaid pistachio-shellers. Esther Ofarim shaving Abi’s back. Whatever mechanism it was that powered the organ in St. Michael The Archangel Church in Alcombe. An amplified anthill. A hundred or so fruiting bodies of the coprophilous gasteromycete Sphaerobolus stellatus, launching their spore-filled projectiles across Fuller’s laboratory in the thirties; one, apparently, hit his ceiling. As few as four gulls walking across a perspex roof. Dan’s friend Ewan running his double-bass bow through his hair again. A stadium of damp football rattles. The thoughts of a greyhound being dumped. A Besson B-flat piston-valve euphonium full of warm spit. Brown noise, apparently. A chevron-painter in Herefordshire stopping for a sandwich. Eight thousand eggboxes flashmobbing at Kilburn tube. When the stylus skips too far and your turntable starts ‘playing’ the paper label.

The steady pink-pink-pink of a can of Coke Zero that was opened at least an hour ago and has been standing forgotten ever since, while through the oblong window Bruno Lawrence wrestles with the theology and identity politics of finding oneself to be the last man on Earth. The tidal susurrations of all twenty-seven checkouts at ASDA in full service as twenty-seven trolleys are unloaded by the fistful and a further twenty-seven are re-loaded by PVC sacks that sort of hold uniquely unstable arrangements of carefully selected groceries and household goods. Thirty-nine handheld air guns connected by semiopaque tubing to a suspended array of 3/4" pipework in the two minutes or so after the hydrovane compressor is powered down for the weekend. Drumming steadily with fingers on the mattress and one's ear laid on it, stifling pillows pushed away, feeling the sheet creak against the thirteen-year-old ear, cool and smooth, pressing back, much like Antony's chest had felt in the stillness of the afternoon just gone, not having dared to push any further, but now in the certain night, there where he was not.

Sealing Wax

2010-01-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

Tad hated wearing his seatbelt. Its purpose never seemed to sink in for more than a few seconds. The people who ran the minibus had stuck four A4 sheets near his seat (the one on its own, at the back), all of them saying, in large Arial, "SEATBELTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES!". These were completely ineffectual, and he'd unbuckle himself as soon as he thought nobody was looking; if hindered in this, he might get slightly aggressive, and start jabbing at things with his stick. You were never sure whether he was genuinely forgetting, or was selectively doing so becuase he did, after all, forget everything else, and thought it might go unnoticed. He was ninety-eight, and these trips on the minibus were really the only occasions in any given week on which he left his house, despite his energy and general good health. He could probably have outrun you only a year or two ago, you thought. Certainly his dexterity with a safety buckle was extraordinary.

Ivy, who sat in the seat across, was less well; she was over ten years Tad's junior, but looked like a drawing of Silas Marner, giving "the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube". She was tiny, hunched. Her favourite phrase was "bugger, bugger, bugger!", a catch-all expression of good-humoured but deeply-felt annoyance, usually at her body's inability to move at the speed of her mind.

Occasionally, with Tad, there would be a brief moment of clarity. You vividly remember, once, noticing him staring at Julie, who brought the Kenco and the PG Tips, for an oddly long time, and not at all vacantly. He had suddenly turned to you, saying, "she's a kindly soul, she is. Such an unmagnificent lady, but I don't altogether think it will matter."

On one occasion, the first morning you met him, he developed a sudden sprightliness of manner — oddly, posturing himself deliberately more decrepit-looking; more compact, stooped — and, twinkling, he leaned conspiratorially over, and said: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

Then he tailed off. He would, always, tail off. You realised, or were told, that this was something he did every day, often more than once. There would be a pause, and he would tell you where he first heard the poem. He was about ten — "no, nine", he'd say, "and ten months", slightly irritated — and his father had taken him and his family up to Landacre Bridge, on Exmoor, for a picnic. He told you the course of the river Barle, and described in detail the stonework around the five arches of this bridge. They had crossed the river and walked to Cow Castle, a large Iron Age fort on a steep hill. They'd clambered down the other side and swum in a pool; a stiller, wider part of the Barle — you can't remember its name now — and then had sat on the side. You later recalled, though you weren't quite sure why, Nell, struggling to remenisce about a springtime rowing trip to Lake Como, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame: "It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So white. So clean."

Tad and his family had walked back over Cow's Castle, back to Landacre Bridge; and they had scraped the insides from reeds and rolled them into small off-white balls, or wrapped them round the thumb-tip and pulled them tightly, so that the seedheads flew off. They'd eaten sandwiches. And Tad's uncle, scouring the riverside for good skimmers, had looked up at him, saying: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

And then, Tad's whole face, from the chin to the scalp, and beyond, into his ears, would break into a bright, glowing smile, and he marked each weighted syllable with a bouncing index finger in the air, as he recited: ... of cabbages— and kings! ...

"No," after a pause, he'd say. "No, thats's not right. There's another bit. Something comes in between."

The first time you met him was the first time you'd heard the poem, so you couldn't help. But he could never remember what it was that came in between, however many times he told the story. Once people caught on, it became a great game, particularly for Ivy. He'd lean over and tap her on the shoulder. "What is it, Ivy?"

"Ooh, I don't know, Tad. It's all a bit higgledy-piggledy in here, now." And she tapped herself on the forehead, giving a knowing grin to somebody nearby. She could recite more than this line; you later discovered she had the entire poem committed to memory. "Is it clogs, is it? Something to do with dancing, or— or walking? Like a walking stick, or a pair of shoes."

Tad would clap his hands together, and keep them together, tilting his head toward her: "Shoes! To talk of many things. Of shoes... of shoes, and..."

Sometimes, he would remember ships on his own; sometimes it would take a further twenty minutes of steering and easing from Ivy. Twenty minutes, at the lower end, deliberately so. Ivy dragged it out as long as possible; she'd figured out that remembering this line, the one thing he could never do, was just about his favourite thing to try to do, even while he weakly feigned grumpiness about it. Sometimes he would be skirting near the word ships (or shoes, or sealing wax, depending on the day's progress); and sometimes, he would even suggest it and then discount it: it was somehow a blind spot, like the signs about the seatbelts, something he simply wouldn't or couldn't see.

—

You felt he was right about Julie having no magnificence to her. The fourth time you met him, he was telling the story again, this time to an old lady from Alcombe called Jean. You saw Julie roll her eyes, entirely affectionately, and without a hint of any real exasperation (this was reserved for the seatbelts; Julie had, as she often said, "done health and safety"); and when Tad reached the inevitable stumbling block in the story, she bumbled over. "Oh, come on love. You always remember in the end! You've told it so many times I know it myself now!". She plucked a piece of paper from her pocket, and wrote in biro, in block capitals:

SHOES AND SHIPS, AND SEALING WAX

"There. You keep that," she smiled.

Tad had thanked her, full of genuine delight as ever to have recalled the line, and she taped it up on the back of the seat in front of him, moving a notice slightly to the right to do so. Whether or not he'd have taken it in or not, or even noticed it at all, didn't really matter: within a few minutes he'd forgotten all about his story and was gambolling out of the bus; it had arrived at a layby near Dunkery Beacon, highest point on Exmoor, and it was time for morning tea or coffee. Tad had mumbled something about custard creams.

Ivy mumbled something to the contrary, also about custard creams. She frowned, pursed her lips, took down Julie's note as delicately as she could, and put it, screwed up, into her pocket.

1. Landacre Bridge, photograph by Catherine W. Barnes, in
Snell, F. J., The Blackmore Country (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911);
2. Cow Castle, photograph by Keith Stuart;
3. North Hill, Minehead beach, and Blue Anchor Bay, seen from near Dunkery Beacon

Taped over (1)

2009-12-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

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

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

One point on a map exchanges places with another.

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

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

Echo Unvisited

2009-12-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

INTERLOCUTER B: In his bedroom he’s got (.) he’s got this (0.2) a CD (.) it’s a stereo really (0.5) in the shape of a (.) of a jukebox and a (0.8) on the wa:ll there’s a err there’s this clock and it’s a an electric gu(h)itar (laughter)
INTERLOCUTER A: [Yeah?
INTERLOCUTER B: [it’s like yeah it’s like that game they play on the radio (.) only (.) you know (laughs) only it’s one thing in the shape of another.
There are those that we cannot love, those that we will not love – the unloved and unlovely. Upon such things, let us for a moment dwell. My intention first of all is to draw to mind a common scene, a British high street in the early part of the twenty-first century. It is important that you try to picture the thing I’m describing here, the herringbone bricks of pedestrianization buckled by two decades of wear; seasonally-blighted hanging baskets mounted from lamp-posts at intervals along the street. This is not London, though it might be; this is not any of the major cities, though it might be one of those equally. It is common, it is everystreet, but it is best depicted in the provinces where scale and ambition are smaller. 

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

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

Be Yarrow Stream unseen, unknown!
It must, or we shall rue it: 
We have a vision of our own;
Ah! Why should we undo it?
The treasured dreams of times long past
We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!
For when we’re there although ’tis fair
’Twill be another Yarrow!
It would be simplest for me to give you a picture of the kind of building I mean. A photograph could be found somewhere on the internet, and linked to, and you would know instantly what sort of thing I am talking about. I am not going to do that. I am not going to do so because I trust the argument given by Wordsworth in the passage above, which is a stanza from his poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’. The poem, composed during the poet’s tour of Scotland in 1803, imagines a visit to the Yarrow Water, the river that ran beside Walter Scott’s house Abbotsford much detailed in his writing. Wordsworth did not visit the Yarrow that year, and would not do so for another decade. Dorothy noted at the time that they ‘debated concerning it, but came to the conclusion of reserving the pleasure for some future time’, and so the visit was not undertaken and it is not in the poem either. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


                              Dusk                          
                           Above the                     
                      water hang the                               
                                loud                              
                               flies

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

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

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


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

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


                                  as                          
                           if a swan                             
                              sang

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

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


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

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

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

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

He feedes a hope without cause why. For like a foolishe noddie 
He thinkes the shadow that he sees, to be a liuely boddie. 
Astraughted like an ymage made of Marble stone he lyes, 
There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes. 
Stretcht all along vpon the ground, it doth him good to see 
His ardant eyes which like two starres full bright and shyning bee. 
And eke his fingars, fingars such as Bacchus might beseeme, 
And haire that one might worthely Apollos haire it deeme. 
His beardlesse chinne and yuorie necke, and eke the perfect grace 
Of white and red indifferently bepainted in his face. 
All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather) 
Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather. 
He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede.
The emphasis is placed upon the body parts, the ‘ardant eyes [...] like stars’, the ‘beardlesse chinne and yvorie necke’ produce in the poem a potently erotic image of the boy. Reflection is about detail, in the way that the post office copies accurately the Georgian fanlights it admires. Echo’s fate is different, she suffers because she is robbed of bodily form reduced to just a voice that resembles that which she admires:

Ay readie with attentiue eare she harkens for some sounde, 
Whereto she might replie hir wordes, from which she is not bounde. 
By chaunce the stripling being strayde from all his companie, 
Sayde: is there any body nie? straight Echo answerde: I. 
Amazde he castes his eye aside, and looketh round about, 
And come (that all the Forrest roong) aloud he calleth out. 
And come (sayth she:) he looketh backe, and seeing no man followe, 
Why fliste, he cryeth once againe: and she the same doth hallowe, 
He still persistes and wondring much what kinde of thing it was 
From which that answering voyce by turne so duely seemde to passe, 
Said: let vs ioyne. She (by hir will desirous to haue said, 
In fayth with none more willingly at any time or stead) 
Said: let vs ioyne.
Echo is without detail. What we read of her is only her responses to the words spoken by Narcissus. She is reduced to simple resemblance that we might mistake at first for something else, and as such is defined by her lack, the thing that she is not. In a sense this is the fate of our 1980’s building – it is a shape that resembles something, so we do not care to look at its detail. We think we already know it. Hollander in writing about Echo, notes that:

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

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

June—

2009-10-26T04:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

She catches him later. Joe, she says.

His eyes are red like flecks of bacon.

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

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

It is you then, she says.

I just phone my June, he says.

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

Oh, he says.

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

Oh, he says.

It has to stop, she says.

He nods, he mostly ever nods.

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

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

2009-10-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Counties made easy

2009-09-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

Preparation M

2009-08-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful vocab

2009-08-12T01:04:00.000-07:00

Useful vocab

2009-08-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Lancelot

2009-07-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

THE BEARS OF THE OLDER COUSINS

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

LANCELOT IS A FAWN BEAR. HE IS 43cm TALL

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

Put short, he was the best kind of bear.

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

He was only imitation mohair, after all.

THE BABY AND THE BEAR

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

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

THE STOICAL BEAR

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

‘I love you.’

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

‘I love you, Lancelot. I love you.’

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

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

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

SEPARATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SAME OBJECTS ARE BEFORE US

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

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

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

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

PATTERNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is often just enough.

Kedges (1964)

2009-07-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

Knock Knock

2009-07-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Franky and Jimmy

2009-07-27T02:26:00.001-07:00

2009-07-25T06:06:00.001-07:00

2009-07-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

Where once you saw waxwings

2009-07-23T03:13:00.000-07:00

“I know a secret,” the old man says.

“What?” you ask, “what?”

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

“Where!”

“– in the Summer.”

“Where? Where does he keep it?”

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

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

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

“Please can we? Please can we go?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And here it is!” he announces.

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

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

You nod. Of course he does.

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

You nod.

“Yes,” you say, “here it is.”

The old man grins at you.

“Aren’t you getting in?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why won’t you play?”

Don

2009-07-14T06:56:00.001-07:00

Franky and Jimmy

2009-07-13T13:29:00.001-07:00

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

Hi-De-Heidegger

2009-07-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

Home Improvements

2009-07-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

The Denham Commuter Network

2009-07-10T01:03:00.001-07:00

Out Now from Black Queen:

2009-07-09T23:57:00.001-07:00

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

- Geoffrey Hill

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

- Harold Bloom

The Tally

2009-06-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Every year, George would give them each a spaniel for Christmas. A generous gift; but George was a man of give and take.

Every year, George would give them a spaniel for Christmas, but without fail by St. Valentine’s, all of the dogs would have mysteriously vanished.

One would run away on Boxing Day night, homesick for its mother; a firecracker would startle one on New Year’s Day. The January frosts took most; they would go out walking and most probably they had fallen through the ice.

The Mill Brook Lake had taken 43 dogs all told. That’s what they said – the bottom must be dog deep.

But every year, George would give them all a spaniel for Christmas.

It would not be the same spaniel; that would be reckless. For such an operation to work you must rotate the dogs, otherwise folks would get suspicious.

“George,” they might have said, “you said dog drowned Mill Brook Lake, Handsel Monday last. Now you give dog back. Why you do this, George?”

But George rotated the dogs, so each would receive their neighbour’s dog of the previous year. Nobody was any the wiser, though occasionally one might say,

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

Or one might think, “the dog at my neighbour’s house is the likeness of poor Rex, who burned straight to ash.”

Every twelve years or so, George would have to buy new dogs. This was the part of the plan he hated most.

Devices

2009-06-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Oxford, 1997.

When was the last time you climbed a ladder? Do you remember how it feels, when there's no-one holding on to the bottom? That's part of the problem, really, how it started: sometimes there just isn't anyone to stand on the bottom rung, and you still need to get to the top. There's a fire, or a cat, some damn thing or other. There's always a reason.

I had made a bad mis-step about eight feet off the ground and for a long sickly-sweet instant I felt that feeling, the feeling that means the centre of your mass has shifted outside the limits of your body. There's nothing quite like it: out there it goes in one swift motion, as if a faith healer has hauled it out in his fingers, and you become weightless, and what used to sit inside you does not, the stone pulled from the date.

There isn't time for this reflection, naturally. Something settles over you, something makes a smooth concession to the abominable state of uncertainty that surrounds you, a presence in the mind that says everything is in control. Not 'under control', but 'in control'. Everything knows what's going on. You don't, necessarily, but that's fine. Objects of notable mass are subject to accelerate due to gravitational force in the absence of an equal and opposing force. Specifically, they fall right out of the fucking sky, sunshine.

At the open end of the twenty-first century, before everything winnowed down to a point, I took a deep breath as the hated mass of my fat body fell apart in the sunlight. Joints separated cleanly and painlessly, the shroud of skin gathering in loose folds and spread smooth in taut planes as lipids smudged and shifted heavily about the anguished skeleton. What business remained was brisk and efficient. I passed into history like the birthday of a dull child.

As I lay dying, I could hear music on the breeze of that summer afternoon. A melody of sorts, ringing and chiming. It put me in mind of a church in a pleasant mood, and I smiled to think of the green-and-blue church by the river I'd promised to take her to. Why hadn't I done it? My skin prickled with tears. How gently these things become so vital, become the edges by which we trace and fumble out the shape of our lives.

Before now it had bothered me, the thought that my last thoughts might be of her, that those last thoughts might make the stuff of my life between those points all a terrible lie. If I sat on the staircase and put my head on my arms in that warm, lonely light and waited for thousands of days. Do you ever stop needing people, I had shouted, was it pre-ordained that you had to hate that failure to be truthful to the next, or the one after that? I had been certain that I was a liar. From host to host, tabletop guitar and broken skin, shadow to sunlight. Priest. No message between these lines.

For some, the day will be unexpected and devastating. For me, losing the images meant losing everything. Yes. Absolutely.

I made very sure of that.

Moving in

2009-06-17T05:07:00.000-07:00

00000000: 00 FF FE 00  00 00 02 06  00 00 03 D6  00 00 03 DE
00000010: 00 00 03 E6  00 00 03 F2  00 00 03 FA  00 00 04 02
00000020: 00 00 04 0A  00 00 04 12  00 00 04 1A  00 00 04 26
00000030: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000040: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000050: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000060: 00 00 04 32  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
00000070: 00 00 11 26  00 00 02 00  00 00 0B 10  00 00 02 00

The remainder of the first block is intentionally blank:


00000080: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
[...]
000000F0: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00

Subsequently, certain important information is disclosed:


00000100: 53 45 47 41  20 4D 45 57  41 20 44 52  49 56 45 20
00000110: 28 43 29 53  45 47 41 20  31 39 39 31  2E 41 50 52
00000120: 53 4F 4E 49  43 20 54 48  45 20 20 20  20 20 20 20
00000130: 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  48 45 44 47  45 48 4F 47

Which is to say:


|SEGA MEGA DRIVE |
|(C)SEGA 1991.APR|
|SONIC THE       |
|        HEDGEHOG|

The majority of the remainder of this block is also left blank. Afterwards things necessarily become human-unreadable:


00002660: 0E AE 0E 4E  08 08 0E A0  08 00 00 00  06 26 0A 2A 
00002670: 0C 4C 0E 8E  0E EE 0A AA  08 88 04 44  08 E0 02 60
00002680: 00 EE 00 88  00 44 00 0E  00 46 00 00  0E EE 02 20
00002690: 04 42 06 64  08 86 0C CA  00 44 00 EE  00 0E 00 0A

Consequently:

2009-05-28T09:07:00.001-07:00

Omne animal triste post coitum

2009-04-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

It was generally agreed that Toby’s was the best entry, even before the judges had arrived. He stood with his shoes polished and together, looking it over on his section of the long row of trestle tables that ran from beneath the window of Saint Kentigern to the noticeboard with its appeals for bric-a-brac and Darfur.

The tops of his socks gripped tightly around his shins. He felt the prickle of sweat burrowing through nylon. He felt the tinge of embarrassment as grownups would pause for a moment and examine his entry on the table; and he would watch their expression alter as they attempted to comprehend, take in, adjust themselves to the thing that they were seeing. He had expected this, of course. He had wanted it; desperately sought and dreamt about the examination of his capability by adult eyes and minds. Yet now – had he had any help from anyone at home? – as he stood – was this his first year exhibiting? – beside the table – had it taken him a very long time? – receiving this realisation of imagination – it was ever so good, they were sure it would win – this fantasy of praise; he found he had not prepared any responses for the comments, and so he blushed and burrowed fingernails into the fleshy cushions of his palms.

It was ever so good, was Toby’s. They couldn’t understand why he had not entered the competition before.

Only that, thought Toby, was the very point of the thing. He could not have entered until he had been sure. He had been to the event in previous years and had strolled along the long U of trestle tables, hands behind his back, silently observing the other children’s projects. If he were to tell anyone that, then they might presume that he had entered because he thought the other entries were no good; that he’d seen their standard and had known he could do better – but nothing could be further from the truth.

Toby had come here year after year – silently; never speaking – and he was of the opinion that the other children’s entries were excellent. He had been in awe of their production, of their skill and their attention to detail. He had imagined that if he were to enter he would, quite simply, be laughed out of the competition.

But he had also longed for the praise. He had watched successive children stand on the erected little stage and receive the tiny silver cup and have their photograph taken for the local evening newspaper. Toby could sense how that would make him feel. It was a feeling that was real and potent and forcibly equal to the pain that would touch him if he weren’t to win, if he was laughed at and made to realise that his dream was not for him.

It was no absurdity to imagine the laughter. Though there were many entries that were truly brilliant, there were also those that were not. He had heard the judges’ whispered comments as other children had suffered their disappointments: the glue was not applied very tidily. There was not enough string. The piece was imaginative, but was not to scale. It lacked scope. That bit there, it was rather askew. What if Toby was one of those children?

As each year came, he resolved that he would enter that time. In the weeks before, he would lie in bed, his back on fire against the mattress as his brain reawakened his single plan for what he would make to display at the competition. There was only one idea: the same plan year after year. Only whenever it was time, the imagined pain of not winning would present itself and his back would become cold again, and he would realise that the competition was not his to be won. The plan was never realised. It was for better children, more talented ones.

So this, it appears, is our story. One year Toby overcame his shyness (for that, if we’re frank, was all it was) and he entered the competition. We might infer a moral – that once he received the praise that he so desired, he did not know what to do with it, or it did not satisfy him as he thought it might.

Only this is not the story at all.

For while it’s true to say that Toby only ever had one plan of what he would make for the competition, the thing that he entered was almost unrecognisable to the initial dream. Successive years of frustration, of disappointment, had contrived to adapt his vision. He knew that if he were to win he would have to create something so astonishing that it stood out far beyond the entries of the other children; something so technically perfect that it would halt the judges in their tracks.

Only that is not the story either.

For Toby’s entry did not grow out of a spirited sense of competition. It was a development of frustration. As the years passed, successive failure became a comfort to him. He began to trust the mellow hopelessness of not putting in; of his silent tread about the trestle U, examining the other children’s entries but not his own. Whenever he came to imagine the thing – that leap into the air, that burning fear – it could all be comforted by the dampish sense of failing to fly. He knew what to expect from failing and would cuddle up to the unmade thought at night.

It’s a tricky business growing up. Talents mature, and failure for a boy like Toby became harder to achieve. He became more skilled with his fret saw. He learned how to solder neatly, and found easier methods by which he might wire the mechanism to the stand.

As much as Toby wished to build something that would defeat the other children’s attempts, he also longed to build something that would defeat himself and bring that delicate salve of frustration. So the plan, though there was only ever one plan, grew more intricate, more hopelessly baroque, more likely to fail. Until finally he failed at failing.

He boiled the bones himself in his mother’s milk pan. He used a dentist’s drill (obtained with his own pocket money from the back of a homeopathy pamphlet) to bore neat holes through each epiphysis. Through these he ran green silk threads to attach them to the central cog.

He cleaned the brass rods with methylated spirit which he applied from the end of a cotton bud that later proved invaluable for lighting the little burner beneath the glass dome of condensed rainwater. He placed the snails into the glass tube one by one and coaxed them to glide further into the pressurised funnel with a corner of iceberg lettuce.

With a craft knife he scored away the many oblong windows of the telephone box doors, which he had modelled with perfect accuracy in white metal at 1:42 scale. These he left unglazed and hinged them to the boxwood frame so they could flip open and act as vents for the steam to escape.

Using a tiny needle he stitched together the swatches of grey leather, and attached them to the starched fabric he had formed upon the reproduction death mask of Napoleon found in the art store at his sister’s school. The bulbs he painted black, and screwed all twenty in by hand; and around these he pushed pheasant feathers at alternating lengths into the ox-blood putty that he had moulded about the vertical sheath.

The trumpet was the trickiest part, but it was attached to the bellows with a minimum of tape, and gripped by the skeletal retort he had positioned, reaching with deathly stillness from the arm of a 1920s dinner sleeve.

It was ever so good was Toby’s.

All who saw it admired it and said he had done so well making all that in so little time.

Only, Toby thought, it’s taken me my childhood to make this thing. Years of worry have resulted in this one object. So many thwarted attempts to enter have conspired to produce something so unlike the thing itself – magnificent – but fulfilling only by frustration.

And the mechanical fingers whirred; and Napoleon’s glass eye swung round upon its silver spring to face the many judges; and the trapped skylark, tail feathers nailed to a little wooden cross took fright and finally began to sing; and the plaster lips parted as the trumpet struck up: this is heartbreak, this is heartbreak meanly felt – but the thing admired was not how Toby had dreamt it.

In recession

2009-04-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone I went to school with passed along the wall in twos or threes behind the rope barrier. What light fell into the chamber fell through the shivering of the bead curtains at either end of this passageway. I felt rather than saw their shifting gaze, sensed rather than heard the shuffling footfalls – here a pair of trainers, there office shoes, now again trainers, expensive ones – a set of motorcycle boots, even. After the first few months my exhibitors laid an anti-electrostatic pad along the walkway, which intensified the sounds I could no longer detect while distancing the vibrations I could. I can remember the carpet in the room where their obliging arms laid me to rest, can remember its patternless field. I am glad they’ve seen fit to protect it. It bodes well.

I still knew a few things about my self, and prize these shreds of knowledge like talismans. As my skull has steadily softened in the darkness, my eyes have grown, now many times their original size. Blind and opaque, they register only the dimmest distinctions in a broad field of unchanging blue. In early life I might have called the sensation that at times overwhelms me ‘skin-crawling’ – the great expansion of the surface area has led (indirectly or otherwise) to a remarkably increased sensitivity in its registry of sensation. ‘Crawling’ is not it, though: it puts me more in mind of a harbour or a sea, a crystal sea. It is like the motion of wind through a vast cornfield. (In the midlands of the Transkei, or in the fields of Oklahoma. How soon such images are so cheaply forgotten.) Clearly in my mind I can see the landscape of a deep harbour endlessly shifting, each instant a fractal landscape that came so close to never happening. In this way I am at peace for months at a time. Though I would guess my outward appearance became horrible or freakish a long time ago, I suppose I am rather like a plant. A cactus, perhaps. I always admired trees.

The room is in darkness. I feel rather than see those shafts of light from the room beyond, where the assembled can bear witness to the projected memory of every thought that has struck through my mind. Every dream, every aspiration, every sinful thought is registered. Eager graduates synthesise untrodden philosophies from fantasies of debasement that to me have long become mere amusements. Emotional biographers step outside in tears, overwhelmed by scrying fugues of pain and thwarted need that I lost the ability to hear decades since (“I call this one Five-Part Invention for Wounded Father, op. 32”) but whose turns and deliberations I can remember with fond affection. Compassionate physicians swaddle their terminal cases in blankets and chairs to audition pleasant daydreams recovered from ribbons of magnetic tape that would circle the globe.

I’ve welcomed this sense of departure, ascending confidently if slowly from the anguish of the flesh into the harmonic mechanisms of pure language and mathematical systems. No more the mean temperament, the guilt-ridden attachment to anaesthetic routine. My future is a blue heaven, and I may decorate or empty it as I please. I am not alone. There are others. I cannot see or speak to them, but they are everywhere, and they are glad that I am with them.

Reflection

2009-04-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

I HAVE NEVER found out if my Great Aunt Judith’s calculations were correct. Being a spinster living alone in a small seaside resort, she had much spare time which she divided between philosophising, and preserving broad beans by blanching and packing them in rock salt in the hundred or so Kilner jars that dotted her kitchen. At both enterprises, she excelled, and she theorised that if we were to take a small reflective disc – the mirror from her powder compact; or, I suggested one of the countless CDs that came free with her Sunday newspaper – and if we were to take her large magnifying lens (supplied to her free of charge by the county library to compensate their under-investment in large-print editions), and we were to go outside and stand between the hollyhocks in her front garden (which overlooked the cliffs high above the rest of the resort), we might spend a most pleasurable afternoon permanently blinding any people using the coin-operated mechanical telescopes on the central promenade. Unfortunately she died before either of us was to test this theory, and I am too much of a sentimentalist to undertake the proposal without her. And so her thinking goes unrealised and I am left with only the broad beans to mark her life’s achievements.

Clothes Moths

2009-04-05T14:34:00.000-07:00

April delivered clothes moths, and one Sunday Daniel was tying cinnamon, and ginger, and cloves into the square envelopes he had cut from a bedsheet to hang in the doorless wardrobe in his room.

‘You’d be better off just getting a door put on it,’ I told him.

‘No, what I really need is cedarwood.’

‘Or a heavy curtain, something to stop them getting in.’

‘Cedarwood’s the best thing for repelling them, I read,’ he repeated, his thick fingers fumbling with the twine.

‘But if they can’t get in–’

‘You know, it’s not actually the moths that do the damage,’ he said, pulling the cord tight around the neck of the cotton bag, ‘it’s the larvae.’

‘But if the moths can’t actually get in with the clothes in the first place–’

‘That’s what the spices are for,’ he said, ‘to deter the moths.’

He was finding the knots difficult; his hands hardly made for such delicate work. Stooped over the table, he struggled on, bag after bag until all eight were sealed. Eight pomanders to fend off the countless moths.

‘There,’ he said with a satisfied grin upon his face, ‘that should do it.’

He showed me the holes a moth had made in the jumper he was wearing, right in the middle of the front.

‘That was last year’s,’ he told me, ‘last year wasn’t so bad for them, but the year before that! You should have seen them! They’re a nuisance more than anything. Just little holes they make, but they ruin a perfectly good jumper.’

He made us tea. He made us tea in the brown-glaze teapot that is missing a lid. He stomped about the kitchen, unable to find spoons, and cups, and finally the milk, and I said it was fine because I could take it without milk, but he said it was annoying because he was sure he had bought some the other day.

‘And how is work?’ I asked.

‘Work?’ he said, ‘work’s fine,’ he said, and he looked at the floor.

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘it’s been going fine.’

‘That’s great.’

‘Only–’ he said, and he looked at me with those big empty eyes, he looked at me with the helplessness of a child who is lost and appealing to be saved from the world, ‘there’ve been one or two incidents lately,’ he said, ‘just little things, but they’re bugbears all the same.’

I nodded. I understood. I thought I understood.

‘The first,’ he said, beginning to tell his tale, ‘happened a few weeks ago. We’d had some German visitors in. It was all top brass, but they showed them round. Introduced them to us all. They were very interested in the work I’d been doing, and they complimented me on it, and I said that I couldn’t have done any of it without Karen, my assistant. “Karen’s shown me such devotion,” I told them.’

‘Devotion?’ I repeated. It seemed a funny word.

‘That was just it,’ he said, staring glumly at his cup, ‘she was there, and I think she probably heard. It’s been very awkward since then. I’ve not known what to say.’

I nodded. It was hard, I said, but it probably didn’t matter. It was a silly thing to get worked up by.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘there was the incident over the minibus.’

‘The minibus?’

‘They didn’t send one. Or rather they did, but they sent the wrong one. They sent us someone else’s minibus and they got ours by mistake.’

I nodded again. I didn’t understand.

‘We were going to take some of the seniors out for the day. There was the floral show on. We thought; floral show, pub lunch, we could have them back before their tea.’

‘It sounds nice,’ I said.

‘So we ordered a minibus for them. Minibus and driver. For the day. There’s only ten of them, but that’s too many for two cars. So we booked this minibus and the chap to take us there and back, and it was all sorted.’

I sipped my tea. I was listening, but I’d become distracted. A clothes moth was walking across the table, brazenly weaving its way in and out of the stacked bags of spice.

‘Only when he turns up, it’s the wrong minibus. He says “Minibus for Lurch.” I said, “There’s some mistake, my name’s Rudd.” I said, “I think you’re meant for somebody else.”’

‘No–’ I said staring at him in disbelief.

‘I sent him away. Clearly this Lurch fellow ended up with our minibus for the day–’

‘No–’

‘But I’ve had no explanation–’

‘No–’

‘No account for why we were left without transportation for ten senior citizens.’

‘No,’ I said, appealing for him to understand, ‘it was a joke,’ I said, ‘the driver, he was making a joke.’

‘A joke?’ he said.

‘He was joking,’ I said, ‘when he said Lurch, he meant –’

And there was no going back. I realised only then that the thing had to be said. That for him to understand it could not be unsaid. The hole began to unwind around him, to grow ever larger and swallow both of us inside. I looked away briefly. Perhaps he would get it on his own. I looked away, and only then saw the milk bottle on the dresser half obscured by an untidy sheaf of newspapers. There was no disguising it; it had to be said.

‘He meant you,’ I said, ‘he was calling you Lurch.’

‘It was booked under the company name. There’s no Lurch that works for us. I made the booking. It would be under my name.’

‘From The Addams Family,’ I told him, ‘the television programme from the sixties.’

‘I’m aware of it,’ he said.

‘Well the butler, the big lumbering butler, is called Lurch.’

And only then did he get it. He hadn’t known, I think, that that's was the character’s name was; but he knew now all right. We sat there in silence watching the clothes moth trip and dally about the table. It crept across the pomanders and then took flight only to settle on them again.

We watched it and neither of us said anything, until finally it took off one last time from the table and I pushed it firmly with my thumb into the wall.

‘Don’t do that,’ Daniel said as I pulled back my thumb to reveal the dead insect, flattened, surrounded in a halo of silver dust on the wall; the scales of its wings a smudged imprint of its final moments, ‘the marks,’ he said, ‘they never come out.’

The rope.

2009-03-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

I say that I remember, with complete clarity, how and where I stumbled over it. On a warm self-absorbed Saturday in April, I was on my knees in the Toc H bookshop near the Hythe Bridge, searching through a fourth or fifth box of tattered paperbacks with that special kind of tenderness that the book-lover reserves for the old and infirm.

(True romantics, of which I count myself one, can never pass up the untold possibilities of an old shoebox or orange crate parting at the seams with dozens of blanched dreaming spines, but they soon learn, as all romantics must, that care and caution are the real safeguards. All of us have at one time or another left most of a book’s cover adhering to its neighbour, or had a particularly thumbed specimen discorporate over one’s shoe. Suffice to say that if I ever do happen to make myself a paper doll... well, nevermind.)

I’ve found all manner of things, kneeling beneath trestle tables or at the feet of overstuffed bookshelves, breathing in that low-key dream smell of cheap paper, old ink, mould and spores. The Death Ship by B.L. Traven. Barrington Bayley. Gerald Kersh. Elisabeth Bowen. All messages in bottles, all drifting in the pale tide. It’s one reason to worship the moon, I’ll say that much, to be grateful for the tide.

A.L. Curtis was not a name that I recognised, but I never can resist someone who has the advantage of me, especially when his words come in cloth covers. The cloth had lost most of the title a long time before I’d gotten to it, so I eased his book free and laid it carefully in one palm. It opened a little too easily, and I shifted to steady myself. No sudden movements: very well. I turned the endpaper back. A.L. Curtis, it said, A Study of Recent Progress In Rope & Knot Magic. First printing. New York, 1926.

Sometimes one cannot help but recognise the hand of serendipity. Moments before it smacks you in the teeth is always a good time for this, so that as you stagger back spitting out blood and splintered enamel you can at least form the outline of a knowing smile. I had something like that smile on my face as I crossed the river. The book was wrapped in vinegar-paper under my arm, fat and weightless in the way that truly old books become.

But one of my main complaints with contemporary society, while I have your attention, is the simple poverty of expression afflicting many of our young people. People of A.L. Curtis’ generation had standards and reservations, what used to be called common courtesy. They did not parade the streets forcing unwelcome intimacies on strangers. They did not, as a rule, even drink to excess. But people these days, generally speaking, you understand, people these days just don’t know how to be nice. At the Toc H bookshop that was never a problem, I should clarify, but other places... other places I had come to feel less and less comfortable with.

Here is what A.L. Curtis had to say on the matter of other places:

It can be seen that even the most perilous entertainments developed by the American illusionists pale in their characteristically base impact when considered with the infamous so-called Rope Trick of the Indian fakirs, whose young male assistants are frequently dismembered or otherwise disappear without trace at the climax of this dubious entertainment, which, as I have found, is equalled only in its questionable taste by the conundrums it presents to the aspirant performer and by the numerous unreliable accounts of its exact proceedings. [Curtis’ emphasis. He continues:] Many Western spectators appear to have wilfully confused memories of what may, considering certain reports, be an intensely distressing spectacle.

This last passage had been underlined in pencil and marked approvingly: ‘Yes!’

I fancied I could detect the influence of imperialism here, but perhaps it was just the armchair. It was a high wing-backed thing that seemed to exert psychoactive influence over whatever I read while sat it. Once settled in this munificent work of furniture, books would read as if the sun had never set on the empire.

(At one point in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the emperor and his narrator settled peaceably in hammocks, conversing without speaking, as if each might only exist in the other’s imagination: what I am attempting to suggest is that this chair was clothed in the same cloth. (For all that I know, it still is.))

So, in any case, I got up and walked around the room. As I passed by the door for the second time, I picked up a large plastic bag with string handles, lifting it with some difficulty, and spilled its contents out onto the dining-table among all the maps and pamphlets.

Nothing that looks like rope looks should be quite so heavy. But rope does, or is, and in spite of my distrust--not helped by the braiding of royal blue and hot pink--I had been assured that this was, in italics, the quintessential stuff. I picked it up in one hand. It was wound in a fat figure-of-eight, sixty metres of it. Rope.

As anyone who has ever held a snake will tell you, holding rope of any kind feels nothing whatsoever like holding a snake. A snake feels alive--unless it is dead, that is--and beneath its scales, the thing will yield and shift about your touch without so much as your say-so. Snakes have their own agenda. Rope does none of these things, but there is something similarly uncanny about how it weighs in the hands, something that fouls the senses. I imagine one gets accustomed to it with regular exposure, fits of metaphysical introspection at 15,000 feet being unwelcome, but I have not, myself. And then--well, here is what happened:

At five o’clock the following morning, I locked the door behind me and climbed the stairs as lightly as I was able to the highest landing, where a small doorframe set into the wall admits the intrepid into the lower parts of the roof itself.

With care, one can almost stand up straight here, although I have never lost my terror of slipping from a joist and plunging one great clumsy hoof through the ceiling below. (At one time I had this recurring nightmare of falling a very great distance through space: losing my footing, I would find that the plaster and lath yielded not to a room but a great inky darkness through which I would continue to fall. After a matter of minutes I would crash through a tiled roof, into an attic, and just as quickly into darkness again. In my dream, this fall would last so long that I became able to mark birthdays since it began.) However, at the end of the building, where the roof descends to meet the floor in another meeting that makes the eye ache with wrongness, there is another door, a door fastened by a pin on a chain.

Outside the roof levels out for a few square feet at the end of the building. Friends of mine have used the place to get high before now, following some complex reasoning that the ideal environment for consuming intoxicants is the cold place spattered with bird shit that rewards the uncoordinated with an eighty foot drop onto pavement. A steel box resembling a newspaper dispenser holds a rope ladder, for emergency use. (It occurs to me, writing this, that I have no idea if it is still there: by now it may well have been used.)

In any case, I had brought my own rope. I'd loaded it into my wickerwork laundry basket and dragged it up here alongside me. It seemed to weigh as much as I did.

It occurred to me at or around this point that I had devoured A.L. Curtis' book, or the parts of it that interested me, in the space of a single weekend. By my standards, this counted as uncommonly swift.

Let me be clear: what I mean is that I had sat and read the twenty-one pages of his account and theory of the Indian rope trick, making thorough notes, and when I was quite satisfied that my preparations would be adequate, I had cut the pages from the binding of the book and methodically sliced them along the diagonal into thin regular strips.

(I have found that diagonal cuts are most effective at encouraging the fibres to separate, especially with older books. It is very important to ensure that all of the words are divided. It's a symbolic thing, I suppose, moreso than a practical consideration, although I cast a blind eye to the indefinite articles. A little too much like hard work, that. Betrays a lack of faith. Symbolic things.)

In the wreckage of my kitchen, I had then filled a stockpot with water and set it to boil. Once it was on a fine, rolling boil, I added two sliced onions and five tablespoons of vinegar before feeding the fragments of manuscript in a handful at at time, stirring slowly. By this time it was around two o'clock in the morning: there is an ovoid alarm clock with radium-green hands that sits on the kitchen counter which I inherited from my grandmother. I had figured that I would have around two hours remaining. It is important to keep stirring. After twenty minutes I saw that the fragments had begun to pulp and bloat, and I reduced the heat a little, putting a lid on the pot.

Over the next hour, I reviewed my notes and sat in my armchair, practicing knots. There are two in particular that Curtis emphasises, one being an implausible and seemingly pointless variation on the standard double sheet bend that he nonetheless is absolutely insistent about; I found that my hands kept deceiving me with vacant facility into tying the normal sheet bend, and so I kept practising it until I was quite certain of its movements. The second, he explained, should not be tied until the trick is underway, but I could see its movements clearly enough. It was an elegant thing: no arcana here. It didn't look especially dangerous.

Context is everything.

After another hour had passed, I had returned to the kitchen and inspected my word broth. The water ran thick and opaque now, and when I raised a forkful of fragments from it, I saw with satisfaction that they had become blank, flensed of whatever meaning my knife had left there.

I strained the contents of the pot into a bowl and set aside the pulped paper. It would harden and be spooned out into the waste disposal later, if I remembered. I laid a clean dishcloth over the bowl to draw out the worst of the steam. I couldn’t help but remember the first time. The memory caught at my chest like a boathook, and I had to sit down, at once, before I could die. At such times, gentle reader, it can be hard to maintain a sense of humour about one's past.

But it passed, as it always does, and when I returned to myself again, sitting by the empty litter tray among stunned clouds of newspaper, somehow I got up and carried the bowl in with me to sit at the dining table where I had left the rope. I sat back in the hard-backed chair and took a few deep breaths. The force of the memory had cowed me, and for a moment I felt like tipping the bowl out over the carpet, or emptying the thing from the window.

When I felt strong enough, I looked down into it. Whatever had existed of A.L. Curtis' thoughts on the rope trick gazed back up at me, swimming in its brave new ocean. In the words of that famous song, it was now or never.

I lifted the bowl up to my lips and drank it all, in steady patient gulps. When it has been prepared correctly, one doesn't taste the acids. They disappear. What you taste is just unlike anything else. It doesn't taste of paper, or ink, or any of the things you might expect. It's warm, and it's clear - well, fairly clear - but it's also heavy, but not in the way that honey is. It doesn't burn. It pushes its way into the body. It has the forceful weight of history. One might as well imagine what it feels like to swallow a month.

1926. Christ. I'd really done it this time.

And here I was, back in the now, still doing it, really doing it. As I stood and watched chalk lines were stealing out across the surface of the city, gable by gable, eave by eave. The Hythe shone brightly in the middle distance, refusing to belong. I felt unreal.

I zipped my jacket up across my chest and checked my feet. I'd worn the usual dusty trainers out onto the roof, but they had to go. I shoved them off one heel at a time and bent to pull up my stockings. Padded soles and arches. I rubbed a toe gingerly against the roof.

If everything was right, that is, if I had read and understood everything correctly, this should be fairly sensible. Esoteric, certainly, but perfectly straightforward in its own (hopelessly imprecise, perilous and unaccountable) fashion. What I couldn't entirely decide was why I was doing it. I seemed to move without motive.

I took a knife from my pocket and opened the basket. From the top of the coil I cut an arm-length, and then a second. These two I tied into an approximation of a loop - it had to be an approximation, Curtis had been very clear, not a loop itself - using the knot I had been told not to tie.

I closed my knife and studied the thing. It lay on my arm like nothing much in particular. I picked it up in one hand and swung it through the air; a cataclysmic event of staggering import did not happen. Very well.

I proceeded as planned. There was a tautness gathering in my stomach and my pelvis, but I took the severed lengths and tied them to the remainder of the rope. I had to stop myself halfway through, finding the usual knot beneath my fingers again, and undid it slowly, counting my steps. One, two. Three. I gave it a sound yank in both hands and set it down, satisfied, on the edge of the basket.

Curtis had mentioned that from the moment one completed this, it was important to be on one's guard for the unexpected. I did not remember this warning until several moments after I completed the knot, which is why I was not on guard when the end of the rope gave a jerk and shot straight up into the darkness, uncoiling from the basket so quickly that it crackled. Somewhere along its coiled length there must have been a hitch, as with a sudden choke the basket burst, most of it pinwheeling and sailing in splinters over the edge and into the empty road below.

The rushing stopped.

I looked up.

Curtis hadn't said anything about this.

The strange loop was now completely vanished from sight, not even a dot, while the remaining length of the rope described one long straight crawl up into the darkness. The other end trailed by my feet, hanging an inch or so above the roof.

(Once more, I found myself thinking that anything other than hot pink would have been a better choice.)

I looked around me. The city seemed darker now. I had barely heard the basket land, and I crept toward the edge just to see that it actually had, and had not simply acquired the taste for levitation from its contents. A sudden wave of vertigo rushed into me as I took the next step, and I felt an implacable push in the centre of my chest. No. I just couldn't take another step. It was the wrong direction. I could feel my stomach reaching for my mouth. I stepped back.

My head cleared with a few deep breaths, and it was a moment or two before I realised that I was leaning on the rope for support, one hand gripping it quite tightly. I looked down at where it rested, swaying lightly with my grip, and gave it a hard tug. It held.

I have never been scared of heights. When I was a young girl, for instance, I used to love to climb trees. Passionately, that is, and of course I wasn't supposed to. I'd fall out, now and then, and it would hurt - once I broke my thumb - but it was all so terribly worth it for that sensation of hanging in the higher branches with the swarm of life all about me, carried by the air like a spider. You can get a similar feeling in the water, swimming I mean, but it really isn't the same. Water has a certain quality to it, it has something akin to mass, one suspended in water is buoyant. Being in the air is really nothing like it, but most people have never had experience with it. Air will let you fall.

No sunlight where I was going. No swarm of life ecstatic. Or so I thought. I looked up again. It occurred to me then that predictions are fallible.

My jacket has deep pockets, and in one of them I had sealed a bottle of talcum powder and my gloves. I dusted and clapped my hands until they were ready, and strapped on the gloves. I tugged at my socks again and looked up. The boathook caught me again, blunt and deep. What was I doing?

For a certain amount of time I felt this deep, important ache push through my belly. I don't need to say that it felt like the summed total of every mistake, loss, frustration and disappointment that I'd bitten off and swallowed in my ridiculously brief life. I mean, people suffer, don't they? It just isn't news. It's not even especially meaningful. It's hardly, this is what I mean, it's hardly a matter of principle.

Oh, I thought, that, that’s what I’m doing, and reached out to grab hold of the rope. It swung just a little, enough to work with in any case, and I hauled my legs up off the roof and planted my feet against it.

There's nothing like it as a sensation, really. If you ever want to be assured that the material substance of your body is more plastic, heavier and far more separable than you ever supposed it should be, hanging from a rope is it.

I closed my eyes and reached up, inching as my feet struggled to seat themselves. You forget how, at first. This wave of panic settles in as you try to figure out how the hell to do it, choosing which limb to move at a time, which means choosing which limbs are left to hold you up in the air. It's painfully slow, and for a moment you are horribly tempted to look down, but you don't, because you don't want to see that you are all of four feet above the ground.

But this is it, you know. To a certain extent, that's how climbing works. You don't look down. You don't look up either, if you can help it. You merely dangle and climb as best you can, limb by limb, inch by inch if necessary. You understand that I make it sound easier than it is.

I won't try to explain what happened when I caught up with the loop. You'd never believe me, and besides, in the greater scheme of things nothing did happen: "I kept climbing, somehow." Things do drag at you. Even simple homesickness, looking down as one eventually can't help: all those sunlit dreaming streets, for instance, or the way the waters of the earth seem to lie still: it looks so whole, so benevolent, so detailed.

I could let go and give in at any time, should my spirit flag. As I have made my ascent, I have become quite blind, so that now I tell day from night by the warmth of the sun alone; but this much remains clear to me. The flesh can only do what it's told to, after all, and knowing in its chambers what we pretend we don't, it surrenders readily enough to the higher will.

This will be the lone achievement of my skill and knowledge, as a tree is the achievement of a seedling, and though I have long passed the point where I can see the world I leave behind, my memories seem to become clearer with every handhold. The air does not hold me aloft--it never will--but it does soothe. It's a condition to aspire to, which itself is something to do while waiting to die.

So I really do not exaggerate when I say that I can remember precisely how I fell forever through ceilings and rafters suspended in the darkness oceans of time apart; or that dear Marco's Venetian fables remain as vivid to me now as the unfortunate colours of the braid between my fingers; I do not even, as I have said, declaim to secure your attention when I tell you that I can remember with complete clarity how and where I stumbled across the book itself.

The book: I am sorry that I excised the pages, now. I am sorry, for that matter, that I left the kitchen in the state that it was in. When I say I am sorry, though, there is an abstraction at play here: it is not that it pains me to have done and not done these things. I suppose what I am saying is that I see simultaneously how they were necessary, in the immediate sense of the word, and not necessary, in the sense that a sense of perspective is not necessarily the same thing as a sense of scale. All of us go up the rope someday, of that I am certain: we all go climbing up to the moon.

I could have waited; but I was tired of waiting.

Public Writing

2009-03-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

A story opens at the nape of Alec’s neck. It winds its way across the skullish hump of his shoulder down into the soft cleft beneath his arm. In the morning light, beside him in the bed, I sometimes study it. I trace the unfamiliar words as they weave themselves between follicles. Commas sprout unsuspecting hairs. I try to make sense of the story as it grows across his body, but the words – some of the letters in fact – are unfamiliar to me.

Some people conceive of themselves as a unitary part of a greater being: Alec is experimenting with public writing. Earlier today, in a second-hand bookshop, he encountered a well-thumbed architectural guide to the smaller churches of Zürich. It was a surprising find. Two aisles away, I was attempting to justify the purchase of a seven-volume edition of Burke’s essays, but I heard his exclamation through the shelves. He had found amid the swart, sanserif text pressed out in two dense columns, large black and white photographs of places he had known. Until that moment, he had not realised he had ever visited Zürich.

Sitting, as he is, in the café with his laptop; Alec has become the thing that disgusts him most. Sitting at one of the tight, red tables, vaulting inwardly out, fingers to the keys he is proclaiming he has some purpose in the world. Some point of being that is not only reasoned, but addressed. By sitting here, Alec is declaring himself. He is an object: a spectacle. Though nobody can read what it is he writes, he feels a certain guilt in this act. Like the words hidden beneath his t-shirt upon his body, he feels the admonishment of eyes both seen and unseen. Mainly they are unseen eyes. For those about him in the coffee shop do not look at Alec. He is just another person at a laptop. Alec is just another one of those guys.

One of those churches – he wishes now that he had bought the guide – one of those churches in the book, he had stumbled upon quite by chance whilst looking for the house where Joyce had lived while writing Ulysses. He remembered that now. There had been a museum in the house. A museum, or a library, and he had not gone in because it had been raining. Or it was closed on Mondays. Something like that.

He had gone inside the church, however. It had been obscured from the street by a high privet hedge, the dark leaves glistened – that was right, it had been raining – and he had entered and sat in one of the rows of pale wooden seats; dining chairs, really. He had sat there for an hour while he made up his mind what to do.

The difficulty, Alec tells me, is that there are not enough places where one can sit. As a rule he has an objection to cafés. He sees the requirement of buying a coffee as a tax upon solitude. Churches are as bad, he says. In this country, churches are mostly closed, or the larger ones request a donation. Out of guilt – or politeness I suggest, though Alec argues that politeness is a symptom of guilt – he estimates that he has spent over £100 this year in visiting the major English cathedrals alone. This is despite not having any firm conviction or interest in faith.

Churches have another disadvantage, Alec says. He has noticed a tendency for the staff in churches to come and speak to him. “Where are you from?” they sometimes ask. “Have you come far?” The subtext is Christ, though they have a guilt – a politeness – about raising that too. Sometimes they tell him about the history of the building. I know all this, Alec thinks. Alec wishes they would leave him alone.

Cafés have the advantage in this. The staff in cafés rarely speak to him. They have little interest in making him feel welcome because, solitary drinker that he is, they are generally anxious for Alec to leave. He takes up too many seats; he claims a table for himself; and he never buys more than one coffee. He cannot afford to. He usually cannot afford the first coffee alone.

There are also libraries. Alec is not sure about libraries. To look at him on paper, he is a man designed for the public library system. He is predestined to grow into the thick, bottle-bottom bifocals of the reader in Periodicals. He should, were the world as he imagined it, be happy amongst all those books. He should fit in with the dispossessed that congregate there. He could grow old with a creased lending card in his wallet and die knowing the furtive pleasure in keeping books overdue from beyond the grave. Only Alec is not sure about libraries. They have the advantage of being free. Their staff is generally unobtrusive. Only libraries suggest a purpose. Libraries are there to be consulted. You go to a library, Alec says, in order to consult books. He has no need for books right now. Books stop Alec from writing. The exposure to books make Alec realise the world of things that he should be writing, the duty to the wider subject, the great expansive fullness of the world; and they make him realise his own diminutive stature: an ant attempting to write the universe. If he writes in libraries, he feels guilty that people will see him doing this. They will see him ignoring the world. His back turned bluntly upon all those Roman histories, snubbing everything else for his own ends.

In libraries he finds himself contriving excuses for his presence. He finds himself constructing alternate narratives for being there. Should anyone ask – which certainly they would never do – he likes to have reserved some alibi for why he is there in the public library. “I am just working on…” he is ready to say.

Alec has never got to grips with his local library. He has never fully worked out where things are, or established where likeminded people – for surely there are others like him – go to sit. He has wandered around reading the bright yellow labels sellotaped to shelves, and he has read them off – local government, business studies, law – and he has known them all to be inapplicable to him. The only place Alec has found to work in the library, the only reasonable place where his presence would not have been too obtrusive, his alibi not seemed too false, has been amid the Marxist criticism, for the desks there are large and the subject is reasonably within his ken. At the library he sits, with three books chosen by weight from the shelves, one of them propped open, passively ignoring the contents; and this, this might seem a suitable place for Alec in the world. It’s not where he is, but this, one might think, would be a habitat he might fit into. Only the section is walled on one side by plate glass, etched with the council’s logo and optimistic tag-line, and Alec has realised he is overlooked there by the people who use the vending machine. Nobody comes in to read Das Kapital, but there is a reasonable expectation that four times in every hour, somebody within the building will want a Twix or Um Bongo.

And so, Alec finds himself here today, sitting in the café at one of the tight red tables. He is here because I am next door having my hair cut. I had suggested that Alec had his hair cut too, but for the last ten years he has taken care of his own hair, keeping it short with electric clippers, unaided by a mirror. I have seen him sometimes in his flat, crouched naked upon the kitchen floor, feeling his way around that unnatural nut like some ancient philosopher scratching for truth out of his skull. He knows every lump upon that thin fleshy surface, the soft brown ponds of moles, the brittle ridges and craters of the bone beneath. He shaves himself hairless with his eyes tightly closed, blotting out the reality of his furtive occupation, blotting out his nakedness, his shame. Alec cannot have his hair cut by other people. He cannot live out the passive conversation that strangers require him to deliver.

I have asked him about this on occasion. He has a preference for machines and for solitude. Yet, though he claims to be unable to survive the hairdresser, every month or so Alec subjects himself to the tattooist’s needle.

“Alec,” I have said, “surely that situation is the same, is more intimate; the penetration of ink beneath your skin invades you more than the scissors’ blade against your hair.”

“It is not the mechanism,” he says, “the tattooist only writes what I tell him to write.”

After he had left the church he had walked through the rain. His guidebook told him that one of few places open in Zürich on a Monday was a museum of printing in the university. He had thought about taking the tram, but resisted. Alec does not like spending money. The museum was situated at the end of a long corridor, and he was not entirely certain that he was supposed to be there. It felt like he was intruding, bursting into an academic department that had somehow found itself listed in a popular guidebook by mistake. There was an exhibition of expressionist lithographs of the 1950s. He took it in and promptly left.

Every month, the story gets longer. Does he know how it will end? As I trace the words wending themselves across the divots of his spine, through the thick rivulets that arch between the ribs across his flanks, I ask him how much more there is to go.

Alec shrugs.

“It is just a story,” he says, “it’s no big deal.”

“What is it about?” I ask him.

He shrugs again.

“It is my story,” he says, “it is mine, and in my native tongue.”

Some words repeat themselves. Some appear to have capitals. I wonder if Alec will one day run out of room.

“No,” he says, “that will never happen.”

By an arrangement of mirrors, the woman is showing me the back of my head. It is not how I had imagined it. I had not realised how my head tapered into my neck. I have quite a thin neck. It seems vulnerable; obscene. I am anxious to pay and leave. Alec is next door, sitting with his laptop and he is experimenting with public writing. He will not be finding it easy.

The Boy Lunt

2009-03-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

As a child Cameron Lunt was conspicuously proud of the fact that he could walk quickly; a point which, had it been remembered would have seemed ironic, when aged twenty-two he was knocked to his death by a reversing ice cream van. Nonetheless, the Boy Lunt could walk quickly. Walking quickly was his thing. He would practice at home; an uncompetitive child, he would practice in the sitting room with the curtains drawn. I can walk quickly, thought Lunt, this what I excel at: the pace of my gait. Circuit training around the three-piece, pacesetting by the pirouetting mechanism of the Windsor mantle clock. It became an obsession. This is my greatest endeavour, thought Lunt, this is the thing I can do.

Though it was, of course, not his thing; it was not a thing at all. Nobody in real life actually values that, there’s no need or reason to be able to tread a course around a suburban sitting room at high speeds. Many people would actually consider it a disadvantage in life; a risk; a danger to the Waterford Crystal and Doulton ladies in their perpetual curtseys. “Cameron,” they would have said in later years, “Cameron, what are you doing? Cameron, stop doing that. Just sit down, Cameron. Just sit down.” Cameron Lunt did not have a thing, that was his thing. Walking quickly is not a thing.

2009-03-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

II.

I have begun of late to think that time is not the other axis but Being, the centrality of stuff, is pitched against some other force. What forms the view when looking back is not a sense of quite how far I’ve come, but what is left there, unplundered, cast aside. And call this what you will – call it fetishism, call it delusion, thread the thought with pins to place it – I find that time, labouring deafly in the bottoms of drawers, I find that time, rusting its scarlet residue through dusty papers, I find that time has come unsprung.

This is no attack upon those brave incorporealists who work so hard to convince us that all of this is murk and dust. Or less than that: that all of this is isn’t. I am convinced their work is honourable, and I am not to argue that they’re not right. At times sitting here, aware of the silence which creeps impastoed with that tidy sense of presence – and I argue that it is only a sense we have of silence – I find myself trusting them. That, believers or not, we are still locked in the long shadow of chiliasm, putting too much weight upon bodily form; trusting that matter matters, and as a result time becomes our measure of that which is.

Donne in his pulpit in St. Paul’s saw that:

These two terms in our text, nunc and tunc, now and then, now in a glass, then face to face, now in part, then in perfection, these two secular terms, of which one designs the whole age of this world from the creation to the dissolution thereof, for all that is comprehended in this world now, and the other designs the everlastingness of the next world, for that incomprehensibleness is comprehended in the other word then—these two words that design such ages are now met in one day [1]

of which he writes of the Christian notion of the Last Judgement, of resurrection; but that sense of time contracting, I cannot but feel that that is everything, everything that is now. Notice that word ‘design’ that he uses: “one designs the whole age of this world”. What a curious task we have given ourselves that we must design our own being. That man, not content with the appearance that he exists has chosen to design himself anew.

You might argue that man is merely seeking to understand his presence in the world, but these two terms: ‘now’ and ‘then’ they are instruments of his own invention. So when Donne writes that these terms ‘design’ the world now and the world after, it is surely man who is making that design. Of course for Donne, this is simpler, for Donne there is a God who has designed all. But if we are without God then we face ourselves with a great responsibility; why have we chosen to design the world in these terms?

We have built this construct of history as a narrative; clothed ourselves with a notion of progression; liberally impastured or placed in ample cattle sheds this fatidic view that things happen. For what? Why predestine this design to end? Why, if we reject the impellent promise of a day of Judgement do we still live awaiting a future ending?

But you will say to me that it is natural. You will tell me that as our lives are finite. That as we will all die, it is prudent to build a world design with the premise of it ending. All things come to an end, you will say to me, this is our one certainty.

I am not going to disagree with you. Our current worldview is based upon such temporal assumptions. We have constructed many fixed narratives on the basis that our birth stretches far behind us at one unique point and our death awaits us at the horizon. We are ever linear, ever constant. This is our lifetime.

In Donne’s sermon, he refers to ‘now’ and ‘then’ as ‘secular terms’, by which he does not mean they are non-religious terms, but rather the word’s other meaning, that they are terms bound up with time, that they are epochal. Of course there is that other meaning too, that they are terms ‘of the world’ outside of the everlastingness promised by the church, and this is perhaps revealing; it points to that basic truth, that the world we have designed – and mark that the world exists without our designs upon it – is innated to be secular.
A series of blackouts – power shortages, I do not know what they are – have hampered the production of this text. Each time I come to restore what has been lost, I find that I write something different. Not terrifically so, the theme is the same, but the wording and focus differs. If I was of constant thought, if my mind was not but a series of particles in permanent flux, I would be able to produce the same text again. But I am continually changing, rearranging my patterns, reforming; to such a degree that I may even (as the incorporealists set forward) begin to doubt that this twitching bundle of neurons even amounts to that which might be termed ‘I’. It is no more than that; we trust in Kant that the phenomenal world is the creation of our own minds. But what minds? There is comfort in George Bernard Shaw’s introduction to The Irrational Knot which he wrote some twenty-five years after the novel’s publication:

At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot. Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since joined the majority. Fourth of this line, I cannot be expected to take any lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather. Even my personal recollections of him are becoming vague and overlaid with those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on the lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself to himself. [2]

We have developed an urgency to tell life stories to make sense of the chaos we find in our perceived Being; we use memory as a proof that we even exist. The ‘lies a man tells’ become more than tradition, they become what we are; linear narratives placed as verification of our pumping hearts and quivering sinew. They are pieced together, wired with coils of streaming copper through flesh – in sequence – our whole bodies constructed, designed out of these lies to give an account of how we came to be—yet all of this, all that we know and mention about ourselves—all of this is lies; and our compunction to lie? What causes our compunction to lie?

It is our design; our notion that we must make linear temporal sense. We must stand accountable, all of us on show, and existing; our minutes visible for scrutiny. We must construct some order of words with which to explain this conglomeratic ball of stuff that we term I, signalling off this particular bundle of atoms as important, distinct from those around it, and constant; extraordinarily constant. All of this is a fiction. Are we so grand to believe that if we cease to name our parts then they will cease to be?

The tide is retreating from Pope’s isthmus between birth and death:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man. [3]

We are placed there on this passage in a state which Pope terms ‘doubt’, and by viewing our state as being between two points we are trapped:

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much: [4]

This ‘Chaos of Thought’ that we find ourselves in is of our own design. We attempt to force our beings into rational narratives to make sense of them, even though this rationality is of our own construction. The proper study of mankind is only man if we maintain man’s dominance upon the universe, if we accept that man – man the singular – even exists beyond his atomic structure.

None of what I am saying here is new. We have known since the middle of the seventeenth century that the earth is a mere speck within a Copernican system. The universe is not constructed around this planet, and as such man’s role in the entire make-up can make only a flimsy claim on importance. Yet we have steadfastly refused to accept this fact. We have either ignored it, like Milton refusing modern science and clinging to Ptolemaic cosmology; or we have attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge to our own elevated sense of self, as in Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681). Yet with this knowledge our application of linear narratives to our own existence falls apart. As Perry Miller asked in the middle of the last century, ‘was an end of the world any longer thinkable, or artistically satisfactory’ once the earth’s position in the universe was known? Does the linear narrative of time even make sense if we are no longer waiting for a judgement day?

Yet it is a view we cling to even now. There is something of that promise of destruction that we feel comforted by. For what was offered by religion in the concept of the afterlife, in the judgement day was not in fact an ending, but indeed endinglessness. The church was structured around the promise of existence outside of time – temporal, secular – both these terms applied to the laity, but meaning ‘timely’, existing ‘of time’. What Donne describes of the Last Judgement is the point when now and then “are now met in one day”.

It must have seemed obvious to you that when I invoked Donne, that Eliot his rescuer, would not be far behind him; but as we all remember, it is here, throbbing in our collective memory of The Waste Land.

So much of our modern thought, our modern physics, is based upon this premise; that Einstein’s relativity led us to re-examine time with the notions of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ as simply that ‘persistent illusion.’ [6] Yet as a concept it was always there within Western theology, that to free ourselves from the chaos of living thought, the dissolution of time was always offered as salvation. Increasingly I am achieving this, shaping my hold upon the world as being without time. There is much that must be shed; the terminology I use: ‘increasingly’, ‘must’, ‘shaping’, ‘being’; all of these are secular terms, they are either constrained by tense, or betray a focus on progression, that there is a trust in a future state where all of this will be different. Yet it is possible, I am certain of that; as E. S. Pilkington described of his nightly meditations in South America:

I lay in this state listening to the deafening clamour of voices. We are told that our baring on the world exists only in the present, but there is this eternal noise that keeps me rigid. It is as though all voices from always are speaking at once, a dread clairaudience that cannot be shut out. Not just from the past, I hear words that are not spoken yet. We are told that the apocalypse will see the dead rise from their graves, but in the street I am aware of them, in the library they brush against my sleeve. I cannot but feel that the end of all time has already happened. [7]

What Pilkington achieved, albeit briefly so far as we can tell, was a breaking free from the present; time just another phenomenon like his atomic structure. I intend to shed this sense of self also, as E. T. Whittaker writes of copepods in his series of lectures The Beginning and End of the World:

we are struck by the fact that with them the individual counts for nothing, the race is everything [8]

It is my aim to live merely as matter. Matter indistinguishable from the matter that surrounds it and ungovern by time. Pilkington’s crude experiments in the 1930s – the blinding of his left eye with ink to restrict his perception of depth in the hope that objects might appear as one – these can be built upon. I am stuck that in these blackouts, thrown etiolated into the void, I am unable to distinguish my way around the phenomenal landscape. Syzygies collide with one another; all is equal all is same. “These two words that design such ages are now met in one day”.

[1] John Donne, sermon preached at St. Paul’s, Easter Sunday, 1628
[2] George Bernard Shaw, preface, The Irrational Knot
[3] Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle II
[4] Ibid.
[5] Perry Miller, ‘The End of the World’ in The William and Mary Quarterly, (Apr., 1951) pp. 172-191
[6] Albert Einstein, letter to the Besso family, (March 1955)
[7] E. S. Pilkington, ‘Observations on time and the past-prospect of death’ in Studies in Living Thought, (Mar., 1931) pp. 212-221
[8] E. T. Whittaker, The Beginning and End of the World, p.42

Davies On Conservation

2009-03-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

Hello. I am not the most computer literate of people so I can hope this works out for the best but that is about the extent of my capacity, so please bear with me. I have been asked to write a short introduction for your publication to a series of articles that I will be writing about my activities in the countryside, which will be educational. My name is Mike Davies and it is a privilege to be speaking to you today. Thank you for reading.

I am thirty-seven years old, but I can remember with startling clarity the first time I found myself in the wilds of England. It was an aching August morning, at a weekend, and I was walking in the foothills of the Chiltern hills, not far outside Abingdon. The trees rang and buzzed with the swarming songs of insects, drowning out the birds far above in the canopy. I had not prepared very well for the conditions: my shirt was clinging to my shoulders and my back, sweat soaking through into my fleece. I was listless and depleted. I was thinking of deserts. I was thinking of the Sahara at night. I was dreaming, I think, of cool sands, how they turn blue by twilight. I had seen snowdrifts like that in these same hills once, what seemed like a lifetime ago. I was dreaming of how my body would settle into the sand, how it would shift about me. The same swifts that span and shrieked, the birds that were hidden from my sight by the variegated blaze of greens that formed the roof of this furnace, those same birds would call those deserts home come winter, when I would be rising and falling in the darkness again.

Each footfall struck rich fermentation from the soil. Hops and fern roots, the sharp smell of browning beech leaves. Dry and whirling, this nightingale floor, arching up in lazy curves of clay clinging to chalk. I remember thinking, I feel like I'm walking through a tinderbox. I remember hearing myself say it. My mouth water had thickened, and when I spat it was heavy with gelatin and smeared across my front. I batted at it and shook it from my arm, but it had caught there.

The ground banked steeply to my left as I kept on through the tall trees. The floor was full of space, great stretches of unturned earth bare but for minute, light-starved copses of scrub and the curling dust-drifts of fallen leaves. What sunlight reached us down here was pale and touched lightly, but my scalp and skin were swimming in sweat just the same. There was tawn in the air, is the best way I can put it, and it was heavy stuff to breathe. It was a dune, I imagined. The way the topsoil gave and slid a little beneath every labouring trudge. If I fell here, I thought there might be an avalanche, and before I choked on cindered leaves and rushing ground I would be quite alone, and quite silent. It would be over, of course, the whole silly business, in a matter of minutes. There was not enough, I realised thinking this, there was simply not enough of the stuff loose on the bank to rush down as my morbid thoughts had demanded, not enough to do this to me, but I forgave it. I forgave it that poverty.

Occupied with thoughts of my forgiveness, a handful of steps found me startled, standing as I was on old cracked concrete in the pitiless glare of what they call direct sunlight. I feel like a sausage, I thought, looking about with wide eyes, I will burst.

I had come to one of the old roads, a Forestry Commission lane that wound through the hills, gated and locked at either end, barely metalled by any contemporary sense of the word. In front of me a tall, trapezoidal tunnel had been bulldozed through the bank and out the other side. The shadows were deep darkening quickly to black, and they drew me forward. Cooler air came forward to meet me as it will over running water. I obeyed my instincts. I had nothing left.

I sat down slowly, peeling away my fleece from tired back and drenched arms, shirt sticking to me here and there as I moved, and I laid my back against the wall of the tunnel. The air was still, here, and I unbuttoned my shirt. I knew, short legs spread well out in front of me, that I could sit here for as long as I needed for days if I needed it and not be disturbed or unsettled. The sun would set and the night would pass over and perhaps I would see the woods lit up by moonlight, or perhaps I would not. I had forgotten what time of the month it was, what the date was.

The tunnel was humming, I realised, in a low unvarying voice. Here the insectile chatter was softened, blurred, the stone channel doing to the buzzes and shrieks what the walls of a church do to the voices of a choir.

I lay out slowly, as my tired muscles tightened and began to pull, and I dragged the wet bundle of my fleece under my head, and I lay there for a while, gazing across the pale, shadowed floor. It was strewn with tiny pebbles and stones and dust and twigs and things, and some of them were sticking into me, but I didn't mind, I couldn't. After a while, I think I slept. I remember dreaming, certainly. Strange dreams, they were, with the blaze of life shot through.

Julianne Moore

2009-03-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

We've all had an instant Julianne Moore at one point or other. For many of us it reminds us of a childhood misspent collecting crash debris or tarantulas. Findus Julianne Moores were the height of sophistication in 1973 when they were first contrived, available in three flavours: battered trifle, honey spam and gosling. The craze for Julianne Moores led to ever moore (!!) bold experimental derivations from chemical food laboratories up and down the M1 corridor. Bird's Eye Julianne Moore Drummers, later joined by Mini Moore Kievs and the premium Julianne Moore Lattice were just a few of the products banned by the Common Market in 1978.

Yet how many of us have made a Julianne Moore at home? It could be easier and more economical than you think. To make a Julianne Moore to feed five good-sized land registry clerks you will need:

150g self raising stewing mutton or chops
6 large eggs (cubed)
Garden rice
Not runny honey. That other honey. About a handful.
Chips, to taste
3000lbs courgettes (optional)
A squeeze of nutmeg
A pinch of cider vinegar
Three tablespoons of red
Mixed peel (mixed)
Squirty clams (4)
3lbs salt
Gravy blacking
Hopscotch

Take your live mice and chase them through a bed of celeriac. Upset the eggs. Run at the nutmeg with the mixed peel, but don't let it congeal. Baste the honey with the stewing mutton or chops, and leave over day over night over day. When happy, mix through with gravy blacking, hopscotch and red. Begin the rice. Approach the chips with caution. Apply the courgettes throughout with alacrity (optional). End the rice. Pierce film lid and microwave for three minutes. Peel back the film and stir, and leave to stand.

Present in a tower on upside-down measuring jugs. Ideal with orange squash and paper hats.

And there you have it. Eat slowly and savour those memories of the winter of discontent and the rise of the National Front.

Notes of an unwritten article, erroneously published

2009-03-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

BY TED DRINKLE

Some time in or before 1956, John Betjeman noted and recorded the existence of five privately owned lampposts in London, all of them along the Strand. The private ownership of light is an intriguing concept; it evokes a sense of unnecessary greed, perhaps recalling Delos David Harriman’s bold ruse in Heinlein’s 1949 novel The Man Who Sold the Moon, and yet historically it is perhaps not so remarkable. The fact that Betjeman comments on it at all, is as a subtle jibe at the LCC for their installation of new public lighting around the city. These five remained as oddities – survivors – “all of them” he writes, “are well designed and none of them in concrete.”
It is that side of Betjeman that seems somewhat curmudgeonly. Though concrete posts did not survive well, the implication that privately owned lighting was by its nature better, underplays the invaluable importance that public lighting schemes in the 1950s had on this country.
Private lighting is by its nature, largely piecemeal in its approach, with few noteworthy exceptions. In 1824, Paris was fitted with 11,205 street lamps, their lighting franchised out to enterprising individuals who would be made responsible for the illumination of twenty-five lamps during a forty minute period. Such extensive programmes were never seen in this country, however. Here, privately owned posts were the responsibility of individual shopkeepers or homeowners, and so their operation was rarely consistent.
Of those posts that Betjeman records, it would be interesting to know how many are surviving. Certainly the first, which stood by St. Clement Danes, seems to have gone. From his description of the post, I take it to have been at the end of Milford Lane, where The Graphic had originally positioned its premises in 1860. The Sun Engraving Company acquired this building some time around 1932, during a time of massive expansion. The company itself is of interest; aside from producing such popular publications as the Picture Post, Radio Times and Woman’s Own, it was at the forefront of developing colour photogravure in this country, building upon the work of that the Rembrandt Intaglio Company (which they bought in 1932) had pioneered at Lancaster, by running three single-fed colour machines in tandem.Milford House where the company had its city premises, was severely damaged by bombing in 1944, though astoundingly work continued there for the rest of the war years, printing government propaganda thanks to a repair grant which allowed the upper stories to be rebuilt. Such flimsy construction that it was, and the company having built a large print works out in Watford in 1952, they must have abandoned the site sometime around Betjeman’s observations and it has since been replaced by a large 1970s office block.

Procuring a Wife

2009-03-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

taken from The Gentlemen's Service, April 1959

Hartsgrove Remembered

2009-03-13T04:17:00.000-07:00

That summer at Hartsgrove; you brought us tumbling through the brooding rhododendron down the flanks of the ravine, to show us the ice house mossy and dun, said to be by Adam though there’s no record of that, where in 1941 while London awoke to find the Duveen galleries the least of its casualties, James Lees-Milne took tea here with your grandparents seated on milk stools but never wrote it down, and the finances of the family was moved into children’s confectionary; a site acquired on the edge of a northern council estate that had swelled like a dormer-windowed tumour on the neck of a sleepy village by a stream, fed by Lord Reith and the 1946 New Towns Act, there on an inauspicious piece of scrub and concrete, next to a cattle market that had been there since the sixteenth century, your grandfather, realising that the world was on the cusp of change, yet trusting always in sugar as his grandfather had done – though, he would point out to you, his breath a fog of whisky and pipe shag, this was not the same sugar, this was not the same – he invested in a man named Ostler who had been a pharmacist before the war and together they set about employing the people of the council estate making bright pink sherbets and packing them into jars, and the sickly scent of the baking sugar hung with sickly scent of the drying pig shit in the market opposite, and all worked together and all was a happy world, and you said it was a shame that we did not commemorate our nation’s confectioners the way that we do our generals and politicians, and you pointed out to us the spot where Constant Lambert lost his wristwatch tickling for trout, though there were none, and the place where Nash is said to have set his easel though the accounts of it are vague, and you brought us to the end of the ravine where a Victorian gardener had envisaged a grotto should be built, but never was, furnished with sea-shells and lit at night by candled lanterns, and here we met that dog with the orange glass eyes who told us that the ravine had originally been scoured by unemployed Welsh miners, an act of family philanthropy that had resulted in unusual Welsh influences in the local crafts and vernacular furniture around Hartsgrove, and the dog, which was balding and not altogether there and mounted on a plinth that wrongly attributed it to be a Field Vole, invited us back to meet his family, but you politely declined and later told me you were tired of conversing with the taxidermy of the estate, as indeed you had done for most of your childhood, your nanny it seems having been stuffed with shredded music manuscript, which was widely supposed to be a lost plate-engraving of something by Mendelssohn, though when she was cremated, a controversial act amid the largely catholic staff, it seemed she would not burn and upon removal from the oven was found to be mostly of clockwork, and you showed us her grave which was uncommonly positioned in the centre of the drawing room, and your mother had taken to using her cruciform, marble stone as a whatnot for the display of miniature porcelain windmills, which you allowed me to play with and I justly did spinning the moulded sails about on their tiny brass nails, and you told me she had never been to Holland, and I said they had windmills in Norfolk too, but you wouldn’t believe me, and you went off to ask her, and you never came back. I let myself out.

The Funerary Role of the Corvid in English Culture

2009-03-09T02:52:00.000-07:00

Few of you will remember (youngsters that you are) the invaluable sacrifice made by corvids in the two centuries or so preceding the last. Few will have considered the thick satisfaction of their yolkless harming; absolving yourselves with that bready smear of indifference we have won, and boast, and cling to proudly like a shielding pelt. Few of you observe the common crow and think of what it, or rather what it’s forefathers, did for us – gave up for us – humbly and without flinching.

Much is made, and accepted, of the view that the death of Prince Albert marked the conception of modern mourning. We are ready to believe that the deceptive theatre of internment, the blackish gloss of jet, wore on to our common funeral rites only through the Queen’s depressive bereavement. Yet no real account is given for the many such funerals that precede that; of quite how ritual black mourning garbs were in the century before. The black-bordered letter, though prominently espoused throughout the 1860s in the practical rulebooks of epistolary correspondence, may be traced back as early as the 1720s, if not before. The black-plumed dray; kept locks of hair; Millais’ digging nuns in The Vale of Rest – all find prominent antecedents in the generation before them.

And central to this is the role of the crow. Often we will have marvelled at the chattering of young magpies in our flues; or looked upon the wan, pale eye of the jackdaw as it lays asphyxiated in the hearth. This daily event, sooty and sad, reminds us no doubt of seeing drowned Nordic fishermen in our childhood; brought ashore in their glossy, dark oilskins and lain out for identification beneath the harbour master’s clock – as if anyone could – and remembering how pale, how very nearly white their irises were. How innocent, in their oxygen-empty plum-bruised faces, those glassy marbles stood. We share this common heritage of grief. When MacNeice asks “is this why people have children? / To try and catch up with the ghosts of their own discoveries [?]” we might wonder upon the jackdaw, dead in the grate, whether we seek in it’s pale eyes some solace from those men we try to blot out – black out – upon the quayside.

Whether this is the origin of the association or not, it is hard to ignore the sacrifice. Crows have long since donated feathers to funereal wreaths; tattered drays with mourning; exposed our loss in dour millinery and feathered bunting – and if there is indeed an explosion in the burial industry in the nineteenth century, then the spark came not from the Queen, but from Coalbrookdale, and the inescapable union between the bird and chimney-pot. The chessboard rook is less a castle than a terracotta vent.

The middle-class nineteenth century townhouse, had both places for nesting, and first-floor balconies bedecked with drooling wrought iron – the practice for which was to dress such ornament in sable plumage to mark the passing of a family member in the house. The essayist Charles Caleb Colton records in the Gentleman’s Review of 1811 the sight of seeing “the whole of Fitzrovia festooned with the sable wings of birds” strung from the houses’ balconies; winding carrion lineaments of grief from windowed sill to weeping railing – all to mark the passing of the third Duke of Grafton, the former prime minister. It is said that Edith Fricker, the wife of the poet Robert Southey, was interred upon a mattress of drowsy choughs – chloroformed for the duration of the service – but which began to awaken, and flutter desperately, and peck for escape as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

It is by this simple, innocent sacrifice that we learn the crow’s humility. We may learn from it how it readily gave its life for our decadent weeping; how from busty raven to ample rook, we might follow its example and give of ourselves, unquestioningly, to the self-indulgence of others. No cry for attention is to be ignored; no feather, valued above the attentiveness to others. By corvids we are to flatter, and accept.

Robert Burns Crow

2009-03-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

For the last two years I have been in close correspondence with the good people at HCUP about the viability of bringing about an edition of Robert Burns Crow’s Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System (1780) as part of their Historical Reprint Series. As with all of such publications, the aim would be to issue a new facsimile volume of the text, and therefore the task is dependent on obtaining a clear extant edition for electronic reformatting.

Burns Crow’s book however has suffered an unfortunate fate. Its original publication by John Orme of Piccadilly was halted by the outbreak of the Gordon Riots. Though Orme himself was not a papist, the publisher had recently handled the printing of Lord Mansfield’s collection of letters on the press, and as a consequence when violence erupted, Orme’s premises were subject to much disruption; windows were broken, machinery over-turned. Burns Crow’s book underwent a short and hurried run as a result.

Though Burns Crow was at that time the Regius Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, and the book had received not insubstantial promotion in the newspapers and journals of its day, the interference with Orme’s presses during the riots led to few complete editions of the much-awaited book ever reaching its subscribers. I have located letters that reveal up to 400 signatories having paid to receive copies. It is thought that no more than 67 of these payments were ever honoured.

Further problems arose. In Orme’s hurried attempts to resume business, it appears that many copies of the text were hastily stitched together with folds from other publications – no doubt arising from papers being scattered about the floor of the workshop during the unrest. Several copies appeared with large sections of blank paper, many with the text interwoven with an unidentified edition of pastoral verse.

Of those editions known to have survived, none is complete. The task as I presented it to HCUP would be to assemble for the first time a full edition of the Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System, presenting it not as a facsimile (as many of the pages are damaged) but as a freshly constructed electronic text.

The press were initially very interested, hoping no doubt that such a project would bring publicity to their enterprise. It’s the kind of thing the Today programme might just pick up – book finally published after 230 years – and I was instructed to set about work assembling the whole manuscript.

It has been a lengthy task, which I have had to fit around other research. I have struggled to find many surviving copies of Burns Crow’s text. In total there are four, and each suffers from a unique peculiarity in its printing. I have sat up late many nights, finding which pages relate to corresponding pages in the other editions.

As time has gone on, and HCUP have received completed sections from me, their interest seems to have waned. Last week I was told that they would not be publishing the Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System but they wished me luck in finding an alternative outlet for the work I have undertaken for the last two years.

I present below a section from the book, and invite anyone interested in bringing about the publication of this invaluable scientific text, to contact me here.

A comet, containing the requisite quantity of matter, whose perihelium distance from the sun coincides with that of Mercury, and moving from which in a direction contrary to the order of the signs, will, by striking the planet convert the elliptical orbit of the planet into a perfect circle whose radius should be equal to the distance of Mercury from the sun at the perihelium. The collision of two such bodies is supposed to be oblique and matter will be rendered still more evident, by taking this case of direct collision. An equivalent case might be effected by a collision at the aphelium, provided the velocity of the burnished heart and glowing eye, she dropped her pail and felt a sigh, espoused within; to scan the sky. God’s firmament beheld her then, the alder on the dreary fen, beshook with breezes held her stare, and kept the nymph a statue there, her face like marble and her hair, would preserve the motion of the jaculatory atoms in vigour, within the substance of such gross bodies and lead to the detection of one general property required in the figures of the quiescent atoms, namely a reticulated structure.

from Robert Burns Crow, Constitutional and Mechanical Assumptions of the Material System (1780)

Error Correction

2009-03-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

In this lower spoke of the Northern Line it is not often time to buy one of those green desk lamps which TV lawyers have; there isn't enough fusty grandeur flung out by the colonnades (if there are any colonnades) to suggest the purchase in the first place. But the thought suddenly struck me and wouldn't be shaken away. I don't recall it crossing my mind that I'd have nowhere to put it. It's true, partially true, at least, in that while I did in theory have the space, I didn't have the right kind of desk (I still don't have a desk at all), or the right kind of room; and those things are a good degree more crucial. We play to these eddies, anyway, little local short-lived narrative whorls which are worthwhile, worthwhile because even a transitory spring in your step is a spring in your step, and is good and vital. And, despite being by now on the escalator and so doing no actual stepping, I had one of these, having made my mind up. It would have a brassy base, and a green shade. The switch preferably black.

Buying it, even trying to buy it, in the end, was something I fell before leaving the station into deciding against. Not for reasons of space (which as I mentioned before were really not reasons at all), nor either for the vague aesthetic problem of how to situate it somewhere suitable in my room (I didn't at the time even have a room); it wasn't even that it occurred to me (which it ought to have done) that I hadn't the first idea where to search for this lamp. It would have been around the time I pulled my travelcard out of the barrier. I strode, bashed through the plastic saloon-bar gates, enthusiastically, purposefully now, accompanied in my head by conical-bore brass instruments, timpani, that kind of thing, as well as for some reason the sensation of wearing brogues (I wasn't), and a brief desire to buy a newspaper and hold it under my arm the way a businessman would, and walk down the high street in that angular way, full of compact intent and pinstriped vigour. Thinking about it now, with the benefit of so much hindsight (and a red anglepoise), it's probably that I realised, in this case, that not even trying might, for once, in the end, be less hurtful than actually succeeding, and needing thereafter to confront something like consequences, and, most likely, their having been misjudged.

A fortnight later I was overcome with a similar momentary pang involving a leather-bound appointments diary like the one my piano teacher used to have. I gathered myself to deliberate, somewhere airy and crisp in West London, and bought one, and sat down with a coffee to write my name and address in the front with an equally new pen, a real treat of a moment, but haven't used it since, almost certainly because I never have anything to be on time for. I'll not throw it away, perhaps because it was relatively expensive, but I've let it slip to the bottom of a pile somewhere and will let it stay there. Having been right about the lamp is on the back-burner as something to admit later (if it turns out to be the case).

Fields (1993)

2009-03-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

That night there was an open quality to the sky above my house, as if the upper parts of it had been cut away to lay the dusk open to the vacuum beyond. The lights shone farther, the colours were richer, and the darkness came faster. And so it was possible to stand outside in the pool of lamplight by the screen door, looking up toward the zenith where the darkness was greatest, and think that I was witnessing the first pinholes forced through the cooling cerements of the day, as I could every night. This is what you see when you look up at the sky at night from a sufficiently remote place: you see the indifference of the universe. Although it may be that what finally meets your eyes when you turn them upward is so old that 'sight' is no longer the right word for what happens there.

It is kindly in its collapse, though. We see a face in the moon or a crustacean in the stars, and suddenly the distance is lesser because the terrain more familiar. Just the stark fact of the gaze itself, spanning light years. That much is our work—my work: I was doing it, just then, listening to the moths hitting white-painted slats, lighting and re-lighting my cigarette, looking up and clicking the tendons in my ankles and naming things. On the big codex for the taking. The shrew. The vagabond. The ribcage. The sleeping nun. The spirit level. The loaf. Something scurried past on the decking; I looked down, didn’t see it, and winced at the sudden brightness. It seemed crucial not to look back up before going back in. So I didn’t. I gathered my things, a little too much to carry, and, in three attempts, pushed the door open with my shoulder.

But this is how you get on with it, afterwards. It doesn’t matter how heavy things get, the foot goes on lifting up and sinking back down and pushing you along, one footfall at a time. To keep moving, that’s the important thing, the best thing. It might be the only thing. I was at the kitchen table now, slipping the two brimming canvas bags onboard. Voices from the radio spoke to one another at the sink where the light shone. I eased the three packing tubes onto the top of the bags delicately and then handed them down to the table. I shut the door. I walked to the sink and took a glass from the drainer. Nothing quite seemed to make it to the cupboard these days. Things just crossed from one end of the counter to the other. I wiped the rim of the glass where my lips would go and filled it almost to the top with cool, clear water. I sat myself down to drink it before I put my hands out flat and started to cry.

Dinner at the petrol station

2009-03-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

For around two weeks, I had been stopping there on the way home from work. I was doing a lot of overtime and having a pretty rough time as a result. Actually, that isn't quite accurate. I was having a pretty rough time at home, and as a result I was doing a lot of overtime.

I was living in this flat with a nurse and her boyfriend. He had a tattoo of the Alien emerging from his shoulder and was interested in home cinema and high-performance motorcycles. We got on alright, but I was absorbed in my own anxieties most of the time and so I avoided having anything to do with them on general principle.

This was the routine: I would leave my office somewhere between five and six o'clock, with the code I was writing locked away for the night, and I'd nurse some well-worn tapes on the train ride home. I would step out under the low arch of the train station with my ears firmly plugged, and walk home past the allotments and training fields in the dark. Every night a different tape. I didn't have a stereo, so whenever I visited my parents I made more. By the time I left the job, I had over a hundred. Many were scratchy tapes of my parents' record collection, which I found very comforting to listen to.

At first I'd been stopping in for a yoghurt or a very occasional chocolate bar, but after a while I began to buy most of my food from the convenience store attached to the petrol station. Cornflakes, packed sandwiches, cartons of milk, microwave curry.

I don't recall exactly when I became scared of using the kitchen. I had a couple of cupboards there where I had been storing food, and of course some space in the refrigerator. One time I almost blocked the sink, which I can believe would have been the root of it – but I don't remember.

It was a high and blazing summer that year. They began sending us home from the office after the air-conditioning broke down, as the architect had put in windows that couldn't be opened and we had all begun to cook in our cubes. Everywhere I went, my shirt stuck to my back. Appetite dripped out of me steadily. One evening, I began to successfully picture myself as a lobster. I was having a lot of strange dreams.

It was hot without mercy or interruption and now I had lost interest in cooking for myself. I had already lost interest in ironing my laundry, reading books, listening to the radio, drawing, and staying in touch with my friends. I would have retreated into my own private realm, but it seemed like too much effort. Most of the time I sat staring at a computer on a wooden chair that I'd borrowed from someone.

Food I bought from the petrol station was generally dismal and expensive, but I didn't care. I had long since given up on all but the most petty satisfactions. Besides, it meant that I didn't have to deal with the kitchen. The kitchen was too full of other people's things. My own room, which was also too full of things, somehow offered nicer views.

All the same, it bothered me somehow. After a few months, I realised one morning that it had the same wallpaper as the room where I had recuperated from measles five years previously, and all became clear.

I had been eighteen, and for most of two weeks I had laid up with my body transformed into something I didn't recognise. I clearly remembered watching from the depths of delirium as the geometric pattern of the wallpaper slipped and whirled. I had seen bombed-out buildings, fleets of swarming black helicopters, deserted streets and clouds of wasps appear within the floating, shifting shapes.

I began to wish I'd never taken the flat, but somehow it never occurred to me to look for another one. That would have been impolite. Nonetheless, my dreams were beginning to bother me. Once I was in a lighthouse off the coast of the Azores, jerry-rigging a sound-weapon to be aimed at the United States, where a lizard the size of Canada had torn itself from the earth - what had once been Toronto was what it had for a brow - and was devouring entire states at a time. Its fangs drooled oil and its hide was starred with seams of coal. I know these things because I looked at it through a telescope.

I took out the 100W light-bulb and installed a weaker one. Eventually, I reached something of a crisis point. I developed a justification for leaving my computer unplugged and switched off, and with a little stockpiled cash, I bought a stack of paperbacks and a few records, and for about a month I did nothing but read them.

For those long evenings I sat comfortably in my room, reading silently and voraciously by the light of the sunset outside. The windows opened on the little courtyard, and since the tenants of the downstairs flat had apparently just discovered Belle & Sebastian, their music drifted easily up into my room all night.

In time, life began to draw back some of its colour and salt. A friend of mine had invited me to visit, and for five days I was amongst his friends. I was invited to lessons in martial arts where I learned for the first time how to throw a punch. We relaxed in the glorious green parks of Oxford and patiently endured each other's favourite records at night.

What is it in the nature of the things we remember, that each memory contains worlds within worlds? I am trying to draw out the character of these separate places into this writing, and as I look through them each surviving memory is its own little nourishment. The petrol station was there, and the diseased patch of concrete by the garages was there, and the square of lino cut away where the cat had destroyed a bird was there...

There's just no end to it.

The First Law of Light-Hearted Television Drama

2009-03-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Front

is in everything.

Things That Come and Go

2009-03-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

Things That Come and Go was a Ladybird series of educational children's books published between 1968 and 1971.

Each book explores a different topic through the eyes of two children, Klaus and Ingrid. All of the books are small, thin hardback volumes with 56 pages, measuring 112×170 mm. They consist of text on a left page and an illustration on the facing right page, drawn by artists Harry Wingfield, Martin Aitchison, Frank Hampson, Patrick Caulfield and Francis Bacon. The illustrations vary in style from books to book, depending on artist, but Klaus and Ingrid are recognisable throughout: he for his sweeping side parting and scar, she for her severe bob and thick bottle-glass spectacles.

There were nine published in all:

Klaus and Ingrid Miss a Vital Train Connection (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Wrestle with Grief (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Push Marcia Under a Truck (1967)
Klaus and Ingrid Experience Ennui (1969)
Klaus and Ingrid are Left Behind with Strangers (1969)
Klaus and Ingrid are Wheat Intolerant (1970)
Klaus and Ingrid Learn About Mummy's Swinging Parties (1970)
Klaus and Ingrid Get Into Jazz (1971)
Klaus and Ingrid Love Smoking (1971)

The series was discontinued when they could no longer compete with Peter and Jane, who by this point were incestuous hippy teenagers appearing in a number of explicit Ladybirdsploitation books of the early '70s.

from "Fungi of London, 3rd ed." (1979), by E. C. Harle

2009-03-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

[...]

Also thought extinct but recently identified in a few isolated pockets is the Hallarmorn Fungus, or Hallarmorn's Horn (this latter appellation, along with variations -- Hallarm, Hallam, Hunnam, even Hellmann -- is, it is worth noting, both a widespread error and a tautology: firstly, the works of its supposed namesake, Dr. A. A. Hallarman, make no mention whatsoever of the fungus; and, secondly, the word itself is much older, and a corruption of alarum horn).

The mycelium is extremely similar to that of the stinkhorn families, and for most purposes the descriptions of those (see Ch. 3) will suffice. The fruiting body is of much more interest and is shown below:

[diagram]

Notable particularly, and not sufficiently conveyed here, is the composition of the stem, which always extends out sideways, widening to a maximum diameter of three inches, and curves slightly upward. Unlike the stinkhorns, it is not spongiform, but extremely 'woody' and made of long, thin fibres, in which can be found cellular material cannibalized from the host organism with uncommon veracity. This is why the base of the horn is often the same colour as the flesh of the host organism -- usually beech or birch -- as it is almost entirely formed from it. The body from there outward is usually a fierce red, while the leathery carapace at the end (the spore-producing surface) is mottled grey and yellow. This surface is slightly convex and extremely tough.

[...]

The spores it releases are unique not in that they are hallucinogenic when inhaled, but in the speed (effective in thirty seconds, often less), duration (active for up to 36 hours), and the sheer specificity of the visions produced. Accounts dating back as far as The Harley Lyrics (c. 1340) can be found, every single one of which may differ in detail but strongly features three aspects:

Vivid visual hallucinations of the fruiting body of the fungus erupting from an eye-shaped bloody aperture in the top of the left calf, just below the crook of the knee, of the person hallucinating;
An overwhelming sense of absolute threat, of which the imagined fruiting body is functioning as an unignorable warning;
The conversion of all real-world sensory data into an experience which might best be summed up as a circumscription (usually circular), followed by an eruption within those parameters; and acute panic that while this is definitely what is being warned against, it is not known why.

The most famous experimenter was perhaps Aldous Huxley, whose own account has been lost, but reproducing the responses of two of his friends, notated by Huxley on the same occasion, might help to clarify the above points:

What I remember most is the puddle of petrol, which I suppose now was just the gramophone, and the silt which dredged slowly to its edges until it formed a solid white ring. That in itself was perturbing but there was then a conflagration when I tried to approach. And, yes, that would be where I recognized just how dangerous this puddle was, not for its being on fire, but for some other, unfathomable reason. And I looked at the back of my leg and the Hallaman [sic.] was there, just as dangerous, but furious like you wouldn't believe, bright red. I felt sick that this thing visibly had fibrous bone and muscle and skin -- my bone and muscle and skin -- for its first two inches. Christ, I think I heard it creak, as well, though of course it didn't move and I don't recall seeing it grow. Sick but also I had to feel grateful, otherwise I wouldn't have known how damned perilous was this burning puddle, or the rubber bands with bubbles stretched across them (these burst in a flurry of cacti spines), or the fact that every one of my fingernails turned without my noticing into a coin, with a thick brass rim; the centres froze then and cracked, along with my fingers, the pain in my fingers was excruciating. I suppose the hallucinogens are still slightly active, my fingertips still feel like they might indeed be made of ice. [...]

-- "P. M."

And also:

... Pretty bizarre, yes. Not at all like the others. The fury was immense, unbelievable, not sure whether it was mine or -- and this will sound absurd -- the mushroom's. Not that it particularly resembled a mushroom but I was forced to think it into being one, the fact of it was far too off-kilter otherwise, it shook me entirely, that much, well, that much anger. And the anger, oh, it was deathly, not like loss... but like something impending, heaven knows what, but it turned the smallest things bitter and acid and fenced (if that makes sense), before puffing them away, usually in down or feathers but sometimes in flames, or leaves, or anything like that. The ashtray at one point was suddenly covered in salt, along its sides, and I couldn't remove it, there seemed always to be more, covering the rim, and I fussed over this for a while until I heard, or felt, or something, this thing on my leg, saying, this is bad, it is definitely bad. The ashtray then came up in a huge burst of wind full of photography film, or ticker tape, I wasn't sure, and the salt blew away. There was plenty more of this; a ring then an explosion at every turn. Funny business, certainly! Not one I'd leap to take again.

-- "A. J. E."

[...]

Eating of the fruiting body is not recommended -- the taste is mediocre -- but is thought only to be harmful within 48 hours of consuming alcohol.

[...]

this is the first verse

2009-03-05T09:09:00.000-08:00

everything proceeds from no fixed point at uncertain velocities and while we can assume constant acceleration, e.g. v = at + vo i.a., generally speaking we shouldn't do that either because it is not true.

a safer assumption might be that for a given volume of unassigned time it becomes increasingly dangerous to go anywhere because, well, anything could happen. you could set something on fire without even meaning to.

not that motion is consistently implicated in situations of peril. yesterday, for instance, i hardly left my bedroom, but i still managed to leave the oven on for over an hour and nearly burn the house down.

the physical world is a place full of peril and care.