The Date (dream)

Emerging from grey gates into a rainy phantasagorical Edinburgh full of drips and ripped billboard posters and afternoon.
I went through grey gates into an anxious colourful crowd. Some moustached and dark businessmen rushed by. Some teens in bright bi-coloured sports clothes, shellsuits or ski-jackets, brushed me.
Though contrary-wise to the lonely rush of the crowd, and their angsty eyes seeking and suspecting me, as if to say "loner weirdo and has no business in the city, up to no good standing on streetcorners." I felt good and proud because i was waiting for my date, and therefore grinned in an old-fashioned way, reproaching their blank glances.
It was in a perfect grey paranoiac Edinburgh, full of January dankness and sexual shadows. I wasn't sure whether my date would show up, and was scared and pleased, stood rigidly with a moritified grin.
But when the girl finally showed up i was happy as if i was justified to the swelling crowd of passers-by. Truly i had something to prove and here i was vindicated by girl on my arm.
But the girl who dashed up and seized me by the hand with a surprising earnestness and urgency seemed to have been crying. A big goth girl with a grey doll face and downward-looking eyes, neat mascara smear down cheeks. She had a heavy frame and dark clothes, and was sturdily-shinned, but with a curiously blank and panicky face, as if frozen into a china doll expression by some trauma. Her hair was a great ragged mass of dark dreadlocks as if woven from wool.
She pulled me with her gasping as if in an unaccountable rush to get away. Did not explain or justify this but merely pulled feebly at my hand. We walked off over wastelands of ruined cement into more purple horizons of cities, a memoried Oakley or setpiece Glasgow of tenements. We walked over a great expanse of cracked and dirtied ice, strewn as if with old garbage and shattered breezeblocks.
Treacherous industrial ice puddles lay underfoot. And halfway across the girl went right under the thin ice which cracked and gave way beneath her. Bobbing at the top of the ice-hole, among waste of dirty city ice, was her great mass of tangled dreadlock, thick and strong, which i grasped with my hand in an attempt to draw her full weight up from the water.
But she drowned. I reacted to this news almost in the third person, as something seen in an arcane New York movie or read in an old newspaper headline. It seemed a simple and dispassionate death.

In the Movies 2

The great yellow movie come-down; the most beautiful part retrospectively, emereing into the already night-time street, a peep of blue night-time intruding, as you move down the stairs from your artificial world of light and shade, sci-fi acid blast, all the great romances and ghosts, all the funereal love of cinema smells, whispers, anguished laughs in the back row.
So in the anxious lobby there's nothing to do but traipse out onto the pavement, halting outside for a while, murmuring to each other, movie talk giving way to silence as you ponder the walk home through grey-scuffed streets. The swishing trees, the shut-up shops. Back home to lamp-lit bedrooms and TV, bright-coloured comicbooks, cotton sheets.
Who says there is no sacrament in our lives when we can emerge from the movie house into blue evening, stark yellow lamplit, with full and melancholy hearts, replete and utterly satisfied with the knowledge of our own deaths, in a soundless heel-scuffing moment. Who can ever look at us and say we have no knowledge of love, if we only experience that moment, though we can never speak of it, though we can only watch and know. You take your salvation where you find it. Always deep tinges of death in beauty.

In The Movies

And on the scarred, fag-laden road
Still soft with evening dreams, molten lamp-light
Gentle haggard sidewalk.
Outside cinema where in afternoons the kids would gather
In long worried lines, buzzing all doleful excitement.
Sweet-shop next door, sleepily guarded but open,
Sunday afternoons the best, innocent leaning against hoardings.
We were innocent; i insist on that.
Soft and anxious for inside, inside.
There were kids wrapped in bright sports clothes,
Soft and full of lust for the movie.
Carpet hush inside, the spirit flickers and filters on the threshold.
Smell of hot-dogs on a lazy Saturday, yellow electric light in one cloistered discreet window. The proprietor, a bespectacled Englishman, calls out, shuffling businesslike to grey pavement.
We went sallow-faced after buying ticket up grey stairs, carpeted and winding to the secret summit. Oh plastic whiteness, oh unthinking technicolour. Eyes affixed on screen.

post-election

"What we need is a total revolution of the heart. What we need is honesty and open hands, fierce truth in new voices.
I have no country but myself, my country is my body, my nation is my mind, my parliament is peopled by dreams and legislates desires and acts always unilaterally. Everything is potentially acceptable to me, everything open. I will forget everything, everything, everything, and renounce it all except for a few key, lasting, burning, painfully pure principles. There are no countries, there is only what is present. I am inherent, persisting, immanent; god and the devil have fallen silent, fallen far behind, i remember them like figures from an old, sordid pantomime, a cheap cartoon, a Punch and Judy show put on for imbeciles. This is moral, this contains all morality, this moment, and all time is within it, all thought and fantasy.
I have no country other than the ground i happen to stand on. All the flags are beautiful fluttering thoughts, and all of them are irrelevant and insipid, and all of them are nonsense. Vulgar, vigorous, lovely, like children's games. Must i become what i am represented, expected to be? Let's get rid of these idiocies once and for all. I happened to emerge somewhere in this foggy, dew-bedecked, forsaken realm. I never think of my origins, only of my destination, and the journey along the way."

after the banquet part 7

Wandering, M and his friends had come to the main school building which loomed dark above them. In front of them was a large, open room used for storage, dark-flagstoned, its dim walls covered in graffiti. M had dreamily traipsed inside, not quite knowing why, and his friends had followed, sniffing, all of them remembering this strange empty room, this draughty alcove, as their hang-out in years gone by, where they would spit green snot on the ceiling or try to shatter dark frosted windows.
The place was cemented, grey, and most like a prison cell, except for the dank draughts that swept in from the playground chilling the kids in winters past, and a grim blue door set in one of the walls which led to who knows where, interior storage rooms full of dust and skeletons probably. This had been the gang's hang-out where they would read magazines and fight, huddle up against the cold, sniff and cry out...

So, after the banquet, he had wandered with his friends, not speaking, across the flagstones of he old school building in the moonlight. The school building had been abandoned long before, and now lay empty, its windows vacant. M could still see, as he strolled aimlessly along, old broken apparatus in the science room windows, rusty sinks and cracked worktops, which reminded him blankly of the science teachers that had taught him, dumpy suburban men in ties and shirts who had graduated from dull universities in the seventies. Now all their classrooms were empty. M's friends walked a little way ahead of him, talking amongst themselves, planning some ragged-haired crime.
They walked up into the shallow basin of the school-yard itself, which resembled at this hour the bottom of a dried-up lake, with the sound of their heels scuffing the gravel echoing among the empty windows of the steel and glass buildings looming up around them, door like gaping mouths, panes of glass reflecting nothing. If the place itself, the playground and the surrounding buildings, had been montaged from sandpaper blasted grey, or with a ghostly kind of fatigue and decrepitude worked into the gritty pebbles and moon-blanched stone, had been erected vacantly, as a junkyard or a monument to failure, it could not have looked more hopeless. All the blood, semen, snot, spit and coughs of a million schoolboys had been spattered on the midnight walls there, all the ghosts of murdered teens still lurked there behind the pillars and in the piss-smelling alcoves, the dirt-flecked vomit of foul-mouthed goblins had been wept over behind the trees and vacant lots of the smoker's hangout, until darkness itself had dreamed of brick prisons, and made in its image, a high school.
There is not a curse to express its ugliness.

After the banquet and all the festivities had ceased, and everyone had gone home across the fields, so that the great hall lay abandoned and dark, just filled with the low light of smouldering embers and the smell of old candle wax.... The banquet had seemed to end with no conclusion, nothing gained. The room had become stuffy even for its size, the awkward schoolkids had pressed in upon one another, goading each other on, embarassed and sopascrubbed. Crowds of rich relatives had arrived with stiff propriety, and spoilt the moods of the young lovers.
Crowded in at the corner of the table, M. hunched his shoulders, with no appetite. He had gazed at the princess with her red cheeks burning in the candle-light, he had seen her awkwardness and embarassment, her cool grace in spite of it all, and it attracted him. He was troubled by his sickly-faced relatives and the stuffiness of the great hall, nauseated by the gaudy colours and the strong food, the restrained, school-classroom atmosphere in which nobody knew quite how to behave, yet everyone was afraid to show it.

Maybe her discomfort is feigned for fun, maybe she's simply an alternative girl with a point to prove, and if not in this outfit would be in doc martens and a t-shirt and with her hair messy, ready to laugh in a hoarse-voiced joke. For now she is subdued and looks downward, as the balding butlers argue good-naturedly about whether the next course should be fish or meat, and whether brandy is suitable for sipping by the fire.
She had come in at first, dolled-up but wondering why people were staring at her, through an ornate wood door, introduced by a butler who yelled out her name, past the blazing fire, sat down embarassed at the long table. A chalice of wine was placed at her elbow....

On the right side of the table sits the most beautiful of the maidens. She has long, straight hair of the darkest, richest, nut-brown, blue, sparkling eyes, and a quietly smiling red mouth. She is a proud, distant-eyed girl, about seventeen, popular, humorous, down-to-earth. She occupied her chair like a throne, she casts her eyes about gracefully, like a truw queen. Her right hand caresses her left. She laughs prettily at the joke of some acquaintance, puts her hair beyond her ears, every now and then casts her eyes down sadly and reflectively. The dress she is wearing is of the palest, most delicate blue, and the front of it is minutely overlaid with gold-silk thread. The front of her hair is tied-up and restrained by a delicate tiara, but the rest of it cascades splendidly over her slim shoulders. At her elbow is a chalice of wine. At closer range, she looks less self-assured, and anyone close to her gets an intimation of her as more introverted, even less pretty, for there is something in her face, perhaps the arch of her nostrils, or the configuration of her eyes, that is somehow displeasing and could even be accorded ugly. It is plain she is uncompromising in her presence, almost masculine as she looks down, with a bashful kind of worry, so that she could either be a great genius or a great whore, or both. It is clear, at first sight of her, that she lives to laugh and to cry, but to do both with all her heart.