Now cut to a corridor or something, inside the school. Upon the wall there's a big fat roundfaced dull metal bell. The sound it makes has actually been designed to be the most dreadful heartfluttering sound in the world, to the kids inside. It's shiny and fat and looks as grim and functional as a death's head, utterly dumb and the most secret and horrid of inventions.
When its glicked-up clockhead toll is rung off, the dingled fatly struck bang vibrates with such a huge and tingled alarm that it screams like a banshee a massive horrific yell of death which can be heard all over the surrounding suburb and fields like an insane call to arms, a schoolbell, an obscene invention.
The same bring summoned cattle to death in insistent slaughterhouses run by bureaucrats. Bell ringers are wideyed and panicked and run around insisting on timetables like hypermonks of corporate mechanised death, summons the doomed kids to their individual follies.
But this time the kids are glad cause it means release for breaktime, they'll squall wildly and glad in the sodden schoolyard.
Robert comes outside at breaktime, with his pale and langrous jacket and his spotty cheek. He comes out mournfully breathing smokes, carrying his bag, big red shiny bag, goes over to the hangout alcove to lean against a grimy wall. Does nothing, simply breathes fumes from nostrils. His subtly reddish frizzed and shortcut hair, maybe he's sitting on the coldstone step in his black flannelled trousers, involved in some intense and clever thought. To do with dismal fresh winter plyaground. He chats neutrally to his peaceful friends like he does every day and maybe flips out a glossy teen mag to look at the screenshots, thick numb fingers slicking the screenprint pages.
Robert yawns and frowns in his greensleeve cotton jacket, thinks of home again, glumly. Cheerful and devilish he tells his friends he's thinking of taking a week off before Christmas.
But the bell is made out of metal and set in the wall. Only has one voice. The kids are recaptured again by that same maniac awful trill. Everybody immediately knows how doomed they are when they hear that sound.
Breaktime Robert heads for his next class skinny and resigned.
Saturday 31 December 2011
School 3
Beside the school there was an immense fat grassy slope on which there grew tufty pieces of bush and there was a cracked paving stone path leading down to the burn. Big fat grass all wet with dew. This was across the lonely road from that awful swing park.
This hill rose tumultuous and dull up to a row of dumb wet trees waving half-heartedly in a little whisk of wet wind. The whole place was full of lovely greengrass sorrow and was utterly empty of anyone. No-one ever there except solemn afternoon dogwalkers who almost despaired of the place or dim schoolboys who lounged on the banks of the stream and sometimes pissed in its waters. At 9 in the morning when all the kids were in school it was empty as a desert and seemed to be weeping with drippy loneliness, o the queer and solemn humpback hill, o the trickling friggin stream, a semiurban crockashit no doubt.
There was a gap through the trees which led to the Suicide. The Suicide was where this big wide grassy slope was simply dug away, as if some colossal paw had plumbed the earth or a nameless prehistoric avalanche had hollowed out the gloomy hill. It was steep and wide and caved in and hollowed out and simply dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. In fact the Suicide was just a big cliff no more no less. A hollow hole in the head of the hill. At the bottom of it was the burn.
Green and swishy and fat plumby boom with a gaping wound called Suicide. Imagine such a gloomy name for such a lush and grassy brightgreen hump of hill, but it really was such a dripsome and awful and nameless place simply overlooked for its secret ugliness.
A carved-out cliff soaked and shrubbed in itself and bore the name of murder of thyself amen.
Winds whished over the trilly trees, grass conspired to get a bit wetter somehow. Birdies trilled in a stupid mournful shrill in the boughs, white sky whitened, rainclouds dispersed, sniffling noses sniffled, almost crying.
Nothing happened. The stream flowed glebbing to itself carrying refuse and corpses downstream, unnoticed. A heightened sense of nothingness, a breezeful wind, a sodden grass. Maybe the birds can smell the scent of the pinecones or tweet and spread guano in the soil. Maybe a trudger trudged by sadly leaking on the asphalt road.
Moods shifted windily, air tightened and whitened lofted and easily lost, all an epitome of sadness.
This hill rose tumultuous and dull up to a row of dumb wet trees waving half-heartedly in a little whisk of wet wind. The whole place was full of lovely greengrass sorrow and was utterly empty of anyone. No-one ever there except solemn afternoon dogwalkers who almost despaired of the place or dim schoolboys who lounged on the banks of the stream and sometimes pissed in its waters. At 9 in the morning when all the kids were in school it was empty as a desert and seemed to be weeping with drippy loneliness, o the queer and solemn humpback hill, o the trickling friggin stream, a semiurban crockashit no doubt.
There was a gap through the trees which led to the Suicide. The Suicide was where this big wide grassy slope was simply dug away, as if some colossal paw had plumbed the earth or a nameless prehistoric avalanche had hollowed out the gloomy hill. It was steep and wide and caved in and hollowed out and simply dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. In fact the Suicide was just a big cliff no more no less. A hollow hole in the head of the hill. At the bottom of it was the burn.
Green and swishy and fat plumby boom with a gaping wound called Suicide. Imagine such a gloomy name for such a lush and grassy brightgreen hump of hill, but it really was such a dripsome and awful and nameless place simply overlooked for its secret ugliness.
A carved-out cliff soaked and shrubbed in itself and bore the name of murder of thyself amen.
Winds whished over the trilly trees, grass conspired to get a bit wetter somehow. Birdies trilled in a stupid mournful shrill in the boughs, white sky whitened, rainclouds dispersed, sniffling noses sniffled, almost crying.
Nothing happened. The stream flowed glebbing to itself carrying refuse and corpses downstream, unnoticed. A heightened sense of nothingness, a breezeful wind, a sodden grass. Maybe the birds can smell the scent of the pinecones or tweet and spread guano in the soil. Maybe a trudger trudged by sadly leaking on the asphalt road.
Moods shifted windily, air tightened and whitened lofted and easily lost, all an epitome of sadness.
School 2
The school is as grey as a blunt knife buried under the rainy soil, squelching there under muddy boots, fertilising. A kind of weak and meagre meg of moogs. Pouting in the rain.
Meanwhile Mack is getting involved in something probably sexual back home. Forgets and pulls on his white and wondrous nose, all in the huge and beautiful aroma of his house which is an utterly indefinable aroma of soap and dinners and old jeans and ah suburbia, Mack taps on his skinny knee with not a thought in his empty head or maybe he just stayed in bed that day and dreamed delicious little bloodrush dreams. That little kid all scuffled and bagweary in the night, more pallid and sickstrong with weariness in the awesome dishdale morn. Covered up his head to sleep again.
Just slept that's all. Remembrance passeth. Blinking little fourteen Mack. Holy is the zero as he sleeps and he knows it, bummed and melonhappy born from morn.
Whatever happened to him, he just wasn't there, no school and nothing but inside or outside glum realization of December. Or a snickering redflush giggle.
Or maybe he played with his computer games.
Disappearing Mack not at school, not where he was supposed to be. Somewhere else.
All you can be sure of is that he was awake at home that evening probably clearing up a big plate of dinner sensible-mouthed with starchlet grim slacker trousers, mouthing greedily over forks, munching musclejawed and steadfast before TV. Was probably kept off school for a nonexistent illness so he could sleep breezily in the layers of sheet, perch on his big spectacles to traipse downstairs and roam, dwelling on daytime. All grizzled and garumpled fast asleep at 9 o clock in the morning on a horrible wet December morning.
Woke up slept woke up slept. Schlaft in Himmlischer Ruh. Exutlant, dead.
Meanwhile Mack is getting involved in something probably sexual back home. Forgets and pulls on his white and wondrous nose, all in the huge and beautiful aroma of his house which is an utterly indefinable aroma of soap and dinners and old jeans and ah suburbia, Mack taps on his skinny knee with not a thought in his empty head or maybe he just stayed in bed that day and dreamed delicious little bloodrush dreams. That little kid all scuffled and bagweary in the night, more pallid and sickstrong with weariness in the awesome dishdale morn. Covered up his head to sleep again.
Just slept that's all. Remembrance passeth. Blinking little fourteen Mack. Holy is the zero as he sleeps and he knows it, bummed and melonhappy born from morn.
Whatever happened to him, he just wasn't there, no school and nothing but inside or outside glum realization of December. Or a snickering redflush giggle.
Or maybe he played with his computer games.
Disappearing Mack not at school, not where he was supposed to be. Somewhere else.
All you can be sure of is that he was awake at home that evening probably clearing up a big plate of dinner sensible-mouthed with starchlet grim slacker trousers, mouthing greedily over forks, munching musclejawed and steadfast before TV. Was probably kept off school for a nonexistent illness so he could sleep breezily in the layers of sheet, perch on his big spectacles to traipse downstairs and roam, dwelling on daytime. All grizzled and garumpled fast asleep at 9 o clock in the morning on a horrible wet December morning.
Woke up slept woke up slept. Schlaft in Himmlischer Ruh. Exutlant, dead.
School 1
Faker school as sodden as old grey piss sulks, mean, as mean as millionaires, as scummy and downtrodden as a dirt, downright nasty really and all grapplefucked and grey. Seems to have been rained on especially just to make it more full of misers plus an eternal grey kind of after-rain mist which clouds about the heads of fools. This wing and that wing cluttered out of concrete and sorrowful sheet steel rusted and peeling plus dumb nightmare pebbles all seditious and doomed.
Seedy raw plastered fuckup school as cold as death. Mendacious teachy freaks mongering behind tinctured bronze windows. School is nothing but the messy bleakness of a hawknosed vulture teacher, nothing but the sound of a frightened abandoned youth weeping.
There were two sets of old rusted iron swings, a mottled cracked-up hoarse old concrete floor likewise all patched up and dumb and a seesaw and roundabout. The whole area was so immensely gloomy and drippy and crap that you felt you had a right to kill yourself there, as if all the sog and sinewed trash of endless rains would permit it. The swing frame once painted bright red but now all rusted and blotched and burned with a million leprous oxides which give it all a disappointed look of infinite neglect. The sad plastic seat of the seesaw all cracked and dewdropped itself like a symbol of anguish is a bright unnecessary orange. All the pissy grasspatch of endless guttering flow in the grime of puddlepuddlepuddle. Fagdoups and spent anguished crackpot cokecans huddled all night under the bronze and shifting clouds. Even the roundabout seems to be infected with an odd kind of rainwet addict disgust, is never used but for dumb little kids who get delirious here and vomit on the bright green grass.
As wide as a pit of shit and as toughed-up and sleazed on as so much murk.
The swingseats are made out of tragic rubber.
Seedy raw plastered fuckup school as cold as death. Mendacious teachy freaks mongering behind tinctured bronze windows. School is nothing but the messy bleakness of a hawknosed vulture teacher, nothing but the sound of a frightened abandoned youth weeping.
There were two sets of old rusted iron swings, a mottled cracked-up hoarse old concrete floor likewise all patched up and dumb and a seesaw and roundabout. The whole area was so immensely gloomy and drippy and crap that you felt you had a right to kill yourself there, as if all the sog and sinewed trash of endless rains would permit it. The swing frame once painted bright red but now all rusted and blotched and burned with a million leprous oxides which give it all a disappointed look of infinite neglect. The sad plastic seat of the seesaw all cracked and dewdropped itself like a symbol of anguish is a bright unnecessary orange. All the pissy grasspatch of endless guttering flow in the grime of puddlepuddlepuddle. Fagdoups and spent anguished crackpot cokecans huddled all night under the bronze and shifting clouds. Even the roundabout seems to be infected with an odd kind of rainwet addict disgust, is never used but for dumb little kids who get delirious here and vomit on the bright green grass.
As wide as a pit of shit and as toughed-up and sleazed on as so much murk.
The swingseats are made out of tragic rubber.
Dreams of the Polar Explorer
Most destinations lead to arrival.
An EC directive pinned on to the board.
1 proof gallon under wraps, consumed.
An Era of Hopelessness beginning.
The Churches of the Lord are still.
The shores are vacant where we stood.
The Church behind is empty-
The conquered countries yearn to sing again.
The phantoms roam behind the church.
The share of sorrow given up.
Dreams of the polar explorer.
National Antarctic Expedition, faltered.
Graham Land Expedition, met land.
The party of men crying in the snow.
The party of corpses sleeping inside.
Of their lament the chief composers
Gusted winds of their Hemisphere,
Long psalms from the Isles,
That spoke of Passage to a hidden realm.
An EC directive pinned on to the board.
1 proof gallon under wraps, consumed.
An Era of Hopelessness beginning.
The Churches of the Lord are still.
The shores are vacant where we stood.
The Church behind is empty-
The conquered countries yearn to sing again.
The phantoms roam behind the church.
The share of sorrow given up.
Dreams of the polar explorer.
National Antarctic Expedition, faltered.
Graham Land Expedition, met land.
The party of men crying in the snow.
The party of corpses sleeping inside.
Of their lament the chief composers
Gusted winds of their Hemisphere,
Long psalms from the Isles,
That spoke of Passage to a hidden realm.
Some Automatic Writing
When the ark was finished, Jericho left it six pieces of bread for the fish, late in the supermarket Tesco's with girls and boys. "Harry" he said forcefully, "find me a fishbone in yer neck at Barrent's bank building left tick". Harry complied. Necking Louise left it mary with a nine cloud baby, Gavin sold wrecked Maria's wine list in triumph over death.
Then almost negligently, something almost doomed, stopped, listened, almost broken thereupon... DEATH. LOVE. HOPE. SUBSIDED in upon itself like great leeches fools ghosts baronets, fat giants loving moms and each other's puddens.
Then next aeroplanes buildings scaremongers this great fish leapt left itself scared unfrightened at the edge of great airports scanty bras and whirlpool's last edge retreat.
Then all alf garnett maidens asleep on retrograde ambivalence hoped to find the next ark on fishguard hill beside the poppy, great poppy unloved by itself. "Happy hill" said it, nine.
The next krap feelers loved only one the ant hill curtain of dooms loves and columns in the New York Times and Alfred Solomon's mines and times and retro boys in Afghan suits achieved.
"You want what you can't have. Too many terrible fruits. And love at the end. Love at the end."
Then almost negligently, something almost doomed, stopped, listened, almost broken thereupon... DEATH. LOVE. HOPE. SUBSIDED in upon itself like great leeches fools ghosts baronets, fat giants loving moms and each other's puddens.
Then next aeroplanes buildings scaremongers this great fish leapt left itself scared unfrightened at the edge of great airports scanty bras and whirlpool's last edge retreat.
Then all alf garnett maidens asleep on retrograde ambivalence hoped to find the next ark on fishguard hill beside the poppy, great poppy unloved by itself. "Happy hill" said it, nine.
The next krap feelers loved only one the ant hill curtain of dooms loves and columns in the New York Times and Alfred Solomon's mines and times and retro boys in Afghan suits achieved.
"You want what you can't have. Too many terrible fruits. And love at the end. Love at the end."
Corpse nightmare 2
Beside the livingroom are two identical rooms. (In reality there is only one room here). I throw open the first door and hesitate, looking inside. A narrow room with a dark shadow on the wall. I remember some professor of parapsychology told me, "It has an evil ambience". Attracts evil spirits to it.
So I take the other room, at the front of the house, with a window in it. In this groundfloor corner of the house I feel a certain safety. All I remember is this: "Make no sound to Wake the Dead". This is like a heavy obligation in the air, behind it, something I am utterly afraid of. It hangs in the suffocating air.
In the room is a writing-desk and a grey, old-fashioned TV-radio combination. Outside dawn is breaking. In order to dispel the nightmares I switch on the TV. Tiny black n white screen but it does the trick, showing breakfast TV newsreaders, bright, officious and unworried. I put the volume to its maximum, blaring the radio too, as a challenge to the evil spirits. If noise wakes the dead then let's wake the buggers up.
Will they be able to withstand the daylight world, the media blare, the approaching dawn? Blaring TV and radio are my allies in that they represent rationality, the antidote to the dead spirits. I cling to them out of a desperate fear.
(In one of the rooms is a Victorian doctor who looks like Noddy Holder, muttonchops and a smug, flushed face. Bulging eyes and a leer, seems full of omniscient knowledge. Nods repetitively. "Oh yes, oh yes. How does it feel to have the gripes?" Some disease of the gums and teeth, of the digestive system, the stomach. To do with the process of eating. A horrible stuffy and diseased feeling of the mouth. Botulism, rickets, gripes, horrible diseases.
And he gives me the following very specific information: "You will become ill on Saturday April the fourth, oh yes, oh yes" This is actually a Wednesday, and the approximate time when the term ends.)
So I take the other room, at the front of the house, with a window in it. In this groundfloor corner of the house I feel a certain safety. All I remember is this: "Make no sound to Wake the Dead". This is like a heavy obligation in the air, behind it, something I am utterly afraid of. It hangs in the suffocating air.
In the room is a writing-desk and a grey, old-fashioned TV-radio combination. Outside dawn is breaking. In order to dispel the nightmares I switch on the TV. Tiny black n white screen but it does the trick, showing breakfast TV newsreaders, bright, officious and unworried. I put the volume to its maximum, blaring the radio too, as a challenge to the evil spirits. If noise wakes the dead then let's wake the buggers up.
Will they be able to withstand the daylight world, the media blare, the approaching dawn? Blaring TV and radio are my allies in that they represent rationality, the antidote to the dead spirits. I cling to them out of a desperate fear.
(In one of the rooms is a Victorian doctor who looks like Noddy Holder, muttonchops and a smug, flushed face. Bulging eyes and a leer, seems full of omniscient knowledge. Nods repetitively. "Oh yes, oh yes. How does it feel to have the gripes?" Some disease of the gums and teeth, of the digestive system, the stomach. To do with the process of eating. A horrible stuffy and diseased feeling of the mouth. Botulism, rickets, gripes, horrible diseases.
And he gives me the following very specific information: "You will become ill on Saturday April the fourth, oh yes, oh yes" This is actually a Wednesday, and the approximate time when the term ends.)
Corpse nightmare 1
In a sweltering room with others. Room is mystical and bilious as if rendered by El Greco. Greasy shadows on the grey walls, etc.
We all lie on mattresses, spaced at regular intervals. They all face north (the direction of winter). There is no wall behind me or to the side of me, giving me a somewhat exposed feeling. The mattress is the old-fashioned horsehair spring type, like you would find in a skip.
I realise with revulsion and horror that beneath the mattress is a corpse. Lying flat like an echo of my own body on the mattress. I am not allowed to move or make sound or the corpse may stir. All of us in the room are under a heavy compulsion not to become agitated lest it should wake the shadowy dead that lie beneath the mattresses.
This image of decay worries me. The corpse had a skeletal face and reminded me of two things. A, the mummified body of a prehistoric hunter that was found in the Alps, about which I watched a documentary a week or two ago. B, a mortuary photo of a murder victim. Face blotched, eyes sunken and skin shockingly white.
We are not allowed to move from the mattresses but I am so uneasy that I leap from the covers and attempt to rush from the room. The others it seems are deep in sleep. A feeling of being pursued by unutterable evil and darkness.
... (I flick on electric light, a bare bulb on the ceiling. There I see quite clearly, from beneath the edge of the mattress, horrible in the harsh light, the sad, skeletal face of the mouldering corpse. "There it is", I say, as though this confirms what I had not really dared to believe.)
I flee downstairs. A horrible feeling of encroachment and pursuit. A feeling of being fundamentally out of place.
Like in my dream of the ruined house.
The house on the ground floor is my gran's old house, a place full of ghosts. I try to find a secluded room, safe from the encroachment of the dead spirits. Desperation and extreme dread, of a type I can't even articulate. The sense of the evil spirits around me is absolutely palpable and very serious.
We all lie on mattresses, spaced at regular intervals. They all face north (the direction of winter). There is no wall behind me or to the side of me, giving me a somewhat exposed feeling. The mattress is the old-fashioned horsehair spring type, like you would find in a skip.
I realise with revulsion and horror that beneath the mattress is a corpse. Lying flat like an echo of my own body on the mattress. I am not allowed to move or make sound or the corpse may stir. All of us in the room are under a heavy compulsion not to become agitated lest it should wake the shadowy dead that lie beneath the mattresses.
This image of decay worries me. The corpse had a skeletal face and reminded me of two things. A, the mummified body of a prehistoric hunter that was found in the Alps, about which I watched a documentary a week or two ago. B, a mortuary photo of a murder victim. Face blotched, eyes sunken and skin shockingly white.
We are not allowed to move from the mattresses but I am so uneasy that I leap from the covers and attempt to rush from the room. The others it seems are deep in sleep. A feeling of being pursued by unutterable evil and darkness.
... (I flick on electric light, a bare bulb on the ceiling. There I see quite clearly, from beneath the edge of the mattress, horrible in the harsh light, the sad, skeletal face of the mouldering corpse. "There it is", I say, as though this confirms what I had not really dared to believe.)
I flee downstairs. A horrible feeling of encroachment and pursuit. A feeling of being fundamentally out of place.
Like in my dream of the ruined house.
The house on the ground floor is my gran's old house, a place full of ghosts. I try to find a secluded room, safe from the encroachment of the dead spirits. Desperation and extreme dread, of a type I can't even articulate. The sense of the evil spirits around me is absolutely palpable and very serious.
Wednesday 28 December 2011
With the Polish Girl
She asks what I'm trying to distract myself from. "Existence. Sitting in a room, breathing air. The pain of thought. Having to make decisions.
I find a lot of things melancholy that others don't. Pubs, lights in a dark street, the sound of a far away car. Streetlight on a hill after midnight. I find all these things unbearably poignant. All of them confront me with myself, with what a strange and terrible thing it is to be a man. They all seem to tell me, in a silence that speaks articulately, that man is a creature about which nothing is known.
But one must follow the promptings of one's heart even if it leads to the depths of Hell. I am an artiste, of course, a universal genius, un peintre. I followed my black little heart, and that's where it led me".
"And are you happy now?" she asks.
"God, no. But at least I do what I want. That's the main thing."
"Naprawdę było miło cię poznać. Dziękuję".
I find a lot of things melancholy that others don't. Pubs, lights in a dark street, the sound of a far away car. Streetlight on a hill after midnight. I find all these things unbearably poignant. All of them confront me with myself, with what a strange and terrible thing it is to be a man. They all seem to tell me, in a silence that speaks articulately, that man is a creature about which nothing is known.
But one must follow the promptings of one's heart even if it leads to the depths of Hell. I am an artiste, of course, a universal genius, un peintre. I followed my black little heart, and that's where it led me".
"And are you happy now?" she asks.
"God, no. But at least I do what I want. That's the main thing."
"Naprawdę było miło cię poznać. Dziękuję".
Thursday 15 December 2011
College
Downstairs there's a plush, public-friendly shopfront office which is run by a nearby college and where a helpful lady will supply you with a thousand useless leaflets plucked out from a wall display, with little helpful warmths and a "have a nice day" kind of demeanour. She works behind a desk here for a grey lumpy college building full of dim windows and the ugly clutter of concrete annexes and cold marble stairwells. Dim mature students clamber off motorbikes in the morning and wander inside with their bags to study signpainting or media studies or ceramics or some awful course like that.
The fat building swallows them up with its blank window eyes, holds them inside all day while they swill down stairwells with dank hippy lecturers into the cafeteria where they'll munch at splutters of roll and discuss their latest popculture inadequacies. Then as the November skies begin to darken overhead they'll be spewn softly out again with serious, grim, adult smiles back into the grey world of evening. Not even like honest high school kids who as soon as the last bell rings run out of school as fast as they fucking can with frenzied yells of glee. No, they with their grim beards and fashion and hateful routines have to smile softly and be content with it.
The fat building swallows them up with its blank window eyes, holds them inside all day while they swill down stairwells with dank hippy lecturers into the cafeteria where they'll munch at splutters of roll and discuss their latest popculture inadequacies. Then as the November skies begin to darken overhead they'll be spewn softly out again with serious, grim, adult smiles back into the grey world of evening. Not even like honest high school kids who as soon as the last bell rings run out of school as fast as they fucking can with frenzied yells of glee. No, they with their grim beards and fashion and hateful routines have to smile softly and be content with it.
Training course
Lounging upstairs, a bored boy, twisting his hair and lurching up dizzy from bed, clicks on TV, and sits humming. Half-shaven he sits bored with chin on palm, later he'll go downstairs slugging quick a cup of tea and later he'll go outside, open fresh the heavy back door and step out onto grim soot-marked pavements and the hugeness of droopy autumn. He'll roam anxiously around town, sniffing, plodding his boots round the cluttered backstreets, huddled in his jacket, wanders back home, boils the fat lunk-headed kettle for more vacant sips of sugary tea... Becomes the cliché of the unsatisfied boy upstairs in his room.
Sometimes they set up dull training courses for you to go on, which train you for nothing, and you end up sitting on a seat around the edges of a sad brownwood lecture-room, everything having the atmosphere of an AA meeting really, you'll sit and chew gums in your jeans and trainers, fold your arms, check out dim newspapers. The training provider is an officious and partly domineering Welsh lady in a smart business suit and tied-back hair bustling around self-importantly with clipboards and photocopied worksheets. Around the edges of the room sit the eighteen to twenty-five year olds in bleak workshy jokes after a while.
At one end of the room was a business lecture type board standing there, which the woman would use, flipping over the pieces of paper to point out the next hastily-drawn, childish diagrams or discourse for five minutes on obvious facts. The whole system of training is tailored for dumb people.
Upstairs there's an airy room with a big window looking out onto grey rainwashed cityscape roofs, and at the back a tiny backroom filled to the windows with old folders and boxes of superfluous data. Robert is sitting around the edges, practical-faced, going through all the routines like a good boy, but with that underlying cynicism always present, that dark anarchism sleeping beneath in sadistic jokes. Ticking off his worksheet, sitting blankfaced in front of the shiny computer, waiting till end of day for the highlight of the day, when travelling expenses are doled out from a steel cashbox and he can go home. He sits frustrated, grinning now and again at the jokes of his peers, flicking through newspapers, scanning rows of close-set dusty type and stealing brown envelopes and sheafs of printer paper from the in-tray.
Sometimes they set up dull training courses for you to go on, which train you for nothing, and you end up sitting on a seat around the edges of a sad brownwood lecture-room, everything having the atmosphere of an AA meeting really, you'll sit and chew gums in your jeans and trainers, fold your arms, check out dim newspapers. The training provider is an officious and partly domineering Welsh lady in a smart business suit and tied-back hair bustling around self-importantly with clipboards and photocopied worksheets. Around the edges of the room sit the eighteen to twenty-five year olds in bleak workshy jokes after a while.
At one end of the room was a business lecture type board standing there, which the woman would use, flipping over the pieces of paper to point out the next hastily-drawn, childish diagrams or discourse for five minutes on obvious facts. The whole system of training is tailored for dumb people.
Upstairs there's an airy room with a big window looking out onto grey rainwashed cityscape roofs, and at the back a tiny backroom filled to the windows with old folders and boxes of superfluous data. Robert is sitting around the edges, practical-faced, going through all the routines like a good boy, but with that underlying cynicism always present, that dark anarchism sleeping beneath in sadistic jokes. Ticking off his worksheet, sitting blankfaced in front of the shiny computer, waiting till end of day for the highlight of the day, when travelling expenses are doled out from a steel cashbox and he can go home. He sits frustrated, grinning now and again at the jokes of his peers, flicking through newspapers, scanning rows of close-set dusty type and stealing brown envelopes and sheafs of printer paper from the in-tray.
Walking out on the Corner
Walking out on the corner. To the fast street. I feel that if I am walking I am doing something. At another level, I know it is an illusion. Walk, walk, walk into the rain.
He walked, says the obituary. He strove for several years, as hard as he could, and then he perished.
To strive, to attempt, and to fail, even through the pain and wilderness. Even through the silence. To write, in place of it. When the whole world looks to you mad and senseless, when the flickering images seem like dreams that mean nothing and cannot be interpreted, when the words on the page are like ink-marks, signifying nothing. You don't see the world behind them any more. They have no significance.
You pray of course, of course you do. You want at least something, the thing you want least is to fall behind. Sometimes I listen to the silence as though it were sound, as though it contained voices of living people. Sometimes I hear echoes.
I went downstairs. I wondered whether I was normal. I wondered whether good things would come. Good, banal, simple things, that I can tell the doctor about, and he can smile willingly along with me, and recognise each crystal-clear, clarion note of peace and joy. I wonder if it will happen.
I go to the priest, and confess, perhaps. But I find warring within me, the old rebellion against the authority he represents. I find it strong in my viscera, and expanding outward. I am my own and not his. I am not another's except willingly, and I will not willingly become an object to be acted upon. That is not my way. So I petition the Lord with prayer, and I lay my raw emotions bare to him, and he knows my resentment, and how I am willing to eradicate it for a boon.
The boon shall be; that this weight and load shall be lifted from the pit of my stomach, this shadow that therein abides and this cramp upon my heart, this hatred and this palsy, this dimming of the eyes, this numbing of the tongue, that if I were an ancient I could write psalms to interpret, but since I am a modern, I can only endure mutely.
And the temptations of death linger always by my right hand, like a disgraceful secret, and at the same time like an intimacy more loathsome than the worst crime, and more final, because encompassing everything, because encapsulating myself as a corpse, as a thing surrendered, without that spirit of breath which is the spirit of rebellion.
I struggle not to become a thing, and thus I reluctantly embrace life, meeting it, though, shyly, and with reserve, and also with disgust. It frightens me more than death, the last word, because it confines itself not to finality but only reiterates and utters strings and permutations of incident, effluvia and waste of phenomena, all of it subject to frightful exegesis or mortal indifference, and in all this not an ounce of joy. And I wander midnight streets, saying out loud, to myself, I am going mad.
I struggle not to become a thing. Not to become a corpse, or a slave. I strive, then, I fight. Combine your biology, your physical form, and your intellect, and your will, with the wise promptings of the heart and the counsel, the diamond-hard counsel of your human sapience, that trait from which your species takes its name. Fight, then, but without illusion, and never declare yourself beaten, for it is impossible to beat such a combination, such a dynamic thing as a heart coupled with a head.
Tuesday 6 December 2011
Free Jazz/Church of Elvis
I can often gauge how good a record is by the level of complaints it elicits from my family. Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" has been a high scorer so far: Two trumpets, two bass, two drummers, a bass clarinet and an alto sax all improvising noisily and simultaneously for 40 minutes. I recently saw a copy of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" and was sorely tempted to buy it. Just think what havoc I could wreak in my quiet household with a double album consisting solely of endless guitar feedback/distortion! Like "LA Blues" x 10....
I have recently joined the First Presleyterian Church of Elvis. We believe wholly in the spiritual and redemptive powers of rock n roll. Some people used to call rock n roll "the devil's music", but we at the Church of Elvis believe that rock n roll is a sort of Hegelian synthesis of heaven and hell, hate and love, and that its ultimate base, from which it must always proceed, is the heart.
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Thoughts Whilst Listening to the Beatle's Blue Album
I'm listening to the Beatle's blue album and it sounds to me like something from about 600 years ago honestly.
But in a good way though.
Like abbey road in London was in the renaissance.
They didn't even have colour then. Like films. So to me its from a long time ago. I think cos its on vinyl as well.
The needle on the vinyl sounds a wee bit like the lines on films. Vinyl is usually black. An uncompromising colour.
You know how you see top of the pops from 1967 and its black n white? Like as if it could be 1605 or something.
Long John Baldry and Mick Jagger is gonna be guy fawkes. Mick jagger goes out and gets a fag and its guy fawkes working in the shop.
The fireworks plot is under way under the top of the pops studio. engelbert humperdinck is in on it.
But John Lennon's voice is so remote, like an ancient ship from a hundred hundred years ago.
If I played this to children they would think it was from the stone age, they would actually love it because of that.
You know what i mean? As soon as they had colour it became modern. it started sounding modern.
Everything from the last fifteen years sounds so fuckin digital. Like loud digital and everything, all the sounds are at the same level and there's no contrast.
It's just a loud sound in the ear. that doesnt do anything. like its made of smooth steel rather than organic wood.
somehow its just like a blank wall.
That's what i think anyway.
Friday 11 November 2011
No Big Deal
I had a job interview in the west. All my job interviews seem to be situated in a westerly quarter.
I remember that Cockney bus driver drove me all the way to Steelend that time. An ignorant man.
One day I took to walking and walked all the way to Crossford in fact Carneyhill and beyond. I was threatened by groups of boys on streetcorners.
The idea was to choose a point of the compass and walk in that direction all day. In this case it was west. When undressing for bed that night I took off my trainers and unleashed a foul stench, as of old stale popcorn in cinema seats. Due to all the strenuous walking.
These squares are like the squares of Edinburgh New Town. Charlotte Square of mysteries, Sundays waiting for a bus. At the other end, St Andrew's its twin. Ever walked round a draughty dusklit square?
My beloved Edinburgh, 20's jazz, the smell of hops....
Like the square in Grand Theft Auto you'd drive your car to... It was called "Central Park" or even "South Park"... Near the sidewalk were ringing telephones. Take an A-Z, a map of some description. Glossy.
A gardening job up in the grey country. Near villages. In Culross. "Hard landscaping", drystone walls, etc. But I really want this job.
The address is printed clearly on the document. All is glossy and user-friendly.
Anxiety at dusk. Sleek as the Old Town...
Had to stop in a phonebooth to consult my A-Z.
I remember that Cockney bus driver drove me all the way to Steelend that time. An ignorant man.
One day I took to walking and walked all the way to Crossford in fact Carneyhill and beyond. I was threatened by groups of boys on streetcorners.
The idea was to choose a point of the compass and walk in that direction all day. In this case it was west. When undressing for bed that night I took off my trainers and unleashed a foul stench, as of old stale popcorn in cinema seats. Due to all the strenuous walking.
These squares are like the squares of Edinburgh New Town. Charlotte Square of mysteries, Sundays waiting for a bus. At the other end, St Andrew's its twin. Ever walked round a draughty dusklit square?
My beloved Edinburgh, 20's jazz, the smell of hops....
Like the square in Grand Theft Auto you'd drive your car to... It was called "Central Park" or even "South Park"... Near the sidewalk were ringing telephones. Take an A-Z, a map of some description. Glossy.
A gardening job up in the grey country. Near villages. In Culross. "Hard landscaping", drystone walls, etc. But I really want this job.
The address is printed clearly on the document. All is glossy and user-friendly.
Anxiety at dusk. Sleek as the Old Town...
Had to stop in a phonebooth to consult my A-Z.
An Art Gallery in Israel
An art gallery in Israel, a museum, a shopping centre. Empty white walls round corners showing at first nothing. You wander up and in and over, seeking something. Past the pillars and collonades, up the escalator to the next shiny level, sometimes you mistakenly catch the angsty eye of a customer and see sudden pain and discomfort. Then again here are the privileged kids, that stand in small knots with serious black-haired girls at their centre, or near bespectacled tall girls in earnest conversation.
Here too there are kids who look just like Americans, gloomy boys in sportsgear with light shoulderbags and ipods, with boyband hairdos above their smooth fat faces.
I think: This country is trying to be a European liberal democracy, with all that entails, carrying on as though nothing were wrong. And, as always, to know them, I look into the heart of their popular culture.
Whenever I get to a foreign country I always check out their comics. They reveal vast amounts about the psyche of the nation, in the way that old Beanos and Dandys do about the British. The Belgians had Tintin, a pink, blond, clean boy scout, in clear line, the French had Asterix and Obelix, who were sensuous, loving, and fought and feasted. I go to some lower level where the shelves are stacked with product, a cultural centre. The Israeli comics and cartoons are actually quite sophisticated, stylish, and here are bound volumes of them, set in clothcover by some artist, someone hip and trendy who knows graphic design trends.
And what images and cartoons do the Palestinians make? Dunno. Not represented.
So go to Australia and look at Australian comics. And roam uphills to bungee jumping spots from dams and bridges merely to feel the wind in your hair. The bushy green foliage, the wet droplets of dew. Reel across the highway in the southern summer, a hot fragrant wind blowing against you, unless you surrender to it and then it would seem to carry you on, merge you with the sunlight, and you would become blond, free, drunken, your spirit enlarged. And you can tell the posh backpacking girls, "I've been in Australia!"
Here too there are kids who look just like Americans, gloomy boys in sportsgear with light shoulderbags and ipods, with boyband hairdos above their smooth fat faces.
I think: This country is trying to be a European liberal democracy, with all that entails, carrying on as though nothing were wrong. And, as always, to know them, I look into the heart of their popular culture.
Whenever I get to a foreign country I always check out their comics. They reveal vast amounts about the psyche of the nation, in the way that old Beanos and Dandys do about the British. The Belgians had Tintin, a pink, blond, clean boy scout, in clear line, the French had Asterix and Obelix, who were sensuous, loving, and fought and feasted. I go to some lower level where the shelves are stacked with product, a cultural centre. The Israeli comics and cartoons are actually quite sophisticated, stylish, and here are bound volumes of them, set in clothcover by some artist, someone hip and trendy who knows graphic design trends.
And what images and cartoons do the Palestinians make? Dunno. Not represented.
So go to Australia and look at Australian comics. And roam uphills to bungee jumping spots from dams and bridges merely to feel the wind in your hair. The bushy green foliage, the wet droplets of dew. Reel across the highway in the southern summer, a hot fragrant wind blowing against you, unless you surrender to it and then it would seem to carry you on, merge you with the sunlight, and you would become blond, free, drunken, your spirit enlarged. And you can tell the posh backpacking girls, "I've been in Australia!"
Thursday 10 November 2011
Prologue to a Letter
What is this that commands my observance and demands that my tired eyes droop down?
What is it that compels me onward so vilely and distractedly to write these falling lines?
What can it be? Mere boredom? Indifference? Ennui? Surfeit of TV darkened rooms loneliness? Fear, and telling myself not to fear?
I have simply lived too long. And that statement has force to it, and feeling, more so than if it were uttered by a man fifty years older than me.
It's my abominable selfishness again I s'pose. But left abandoned here in these rooms what are boys like me s'posed to do? After having drunk the last cup o' tea... Watch'd the last TV show... Had the final wank... Become disinterested in the next chapter of the novel, the latest record?...
What is it that compels me onward so vilely and distractedly to write these falling lines?
What can it be? Mere boredom? Indifference? Ennui? Surfeit of TV darkened rooms loneliness? Fear, and telling myself not to fear?
I have simply lived too long. And that statement has force to it, and feeling, more so than if it were uttered by a man fifty years older than me.
It's my abominable selfishness again I s'pose. But left abandoned here in these rooms what are boys like me s'posed to do? After having drunk the last cup o' tea... Watch'd the last TV show... Had the final wank... Become disinterested in the next chapter of the novel, the latest record?...
On Confession 2
Dusty attitudes of confession. The routine for confession during school hours was this: There was a quiet time allotted for us all in the sober classroom to reflect on our sins and it was understood that silence and shoegazing was required for this purpose by us the little kids. The quietly officious teacher before trudging out to leave us in our repose would hand out, kindly and hushed, little confessionary leaflets to help us.
These leaflets were impossibly worn and patchy and made out of some old grey nunnery card held together by feeble tape, but their antiquated mustiness only added to their official, pious look. The whole thing was taken with dread seriousness by everyone.
The leaflets has a brief rundown on the procedure and then a whole lot of sins possible for confession, of various categories. This was basically to help us out a bit since being little kids we didn't have much to confess. The nuns who wrote the leaflet had in fact been imaginative and encompassed a broad range of wickedness. I always tended to choose those vaguer, lightweight sins which it was hard to specifically pinpoint but which I knew I must've committed at some point back home. Such vague misdemeanours as selfishness or unforgiveness, maybe even the occasional use of bad language or perhaps a lie here or there. These sins were certainly true though kind of trifling.
And then, off we would be dispatched one by one to the confessional.
These leaflets were impossibly worn and patchy and made out of some old grey nunnery card held together by feeble tape, but their antiquated mustiness only added to their official, pious look. The whole thing was taken with dread seriousness by everyone.
The leaflets has a brief rundown on the procedure and then a whole lot of sins possible for confession, of various categories. This was basically to help us out a bit since being little kids we didn't have much to confess. The nuns who wrote the leaflet had in fact been imaginative and encompassed a broad range of wickedness. I always tended to choose those vaguer, lightweight sins which it was hard to specifically pinpoint but which I knew I must've committed at some point back home. Such vague misdemeanours as selfishness or unforgiveness, maybe even the occasional use of bad language or perhaps a lie here or there. These sins were certainly true though kind of trifling.
And then, off we would be dispatched one by one to the confessional.
Ruth
Ruth shifts her silken kneedown limbs over silk,
The silk of downy coverlets and quilts.
Her arms, T-shirted, press breastward, enfolded,
Her poor slight breasts quash nobly,
Her hips scrape, turn over, fingers dance,
Becomes a pensive noble mumbling mood,
Her ass slicks over silks to perch on the edge,
Her lengths of thigh trapped tight together,
As dark as nameless caverns that were never seen,
Herself so perfect, so little, and contained,
Her flacid weak encurled strands recline
Upon the sallow pillow.
Golden rings upon her dumb uncultured fingers,
Her feeble succoured nails,
Her legs, by custom, pressed tight together,
Like dusky battlements never to be
Scaled, engaged, attacked.
She senses such would be a sin,
And sends it on the air,
The intelligent cigarette gesticulations.
She fixes her hair,
Sighs and watches TV.
The silk of downy coverlets and quilts.
Her arms, T-shirted, press breastward, enfolded,
Her poor slight breasts quash nobly,
Her hips scrape, turn over, fingers dance,
Becomes a pensive noble mumbling mood,
Her ass slicks over silks to perch on the edge,
Her lengths of thigh trapped tight together,
As dark as nameless caverns that were never seen,
Herself so perfect, so little, and contained,
Her flacid weak encurled strands recline
Upon the sallow pillow.
Golden rings upon her dumb uncultured fingers,
Her feeble succoured nails,
Her legs, by custom, pressed tight together,
Like dusky battlements never to be
Scaled, engaged, attacked.
She senses such would be a sin,
And sends it on the air,
The intelligent cigarette gesticulations.
She fixes her hair,
Sighs and watches TV.
Social worker
Social worker: Bearded and corduroyed in flare.
Also with a female accomplice, 'nother hippy type.
In livingroom. His name is Terry.
I'm very angry at 'em. Want to remove 'em from house.
He knows too much about me.
I realise, in the hall. He is too close to the family.
And yet I'm reticent about going as far as to manhandle them. V. angry.
And how about arguments in front of them.
Associations: The '70s, floral wallpaper, brady bunch.
Pull his beard. And that chick now where did she come from,
Swallowing apolegitically. Like the prim stocktaker in the store, "30 Lambert and Butler".
Also with a female accomplice, 'nother hippy type.
In livingroom. His name is Terry.
I'm very angry at 'em. Want to remove 'em from house.
He knows too much about me.
I realise, in the hall. He is too close to the family.
And yet I'm reticent about going as far as to manhandle them. V. angry.
And how about arguments in front of them.
Associations: The '70s, floral wallpaper, brady bunch.
Pull his beard. And that chick now where did she come from,
Swallowing apolegitically. Like the prim stocktaker in the store, "30 Lambert and Butler".
Wednesday 9 November 2011
February 2
Sleep for the pallid boys inside, remembering nursery rhymes, peeling juicy grapes, lurking awhile in the dim little toilet near the clutters of spare parts and shiny mirrors, dreaming of the towering library and its granite walls.
Work for the potbellied geezer unaware of his stubble, cursing and drilling at roadsides, clods of mud on the sleeping pick-axe. The thin apprentice with his spiky hair and with blue overalls is grappling with something and thinks of sex.
Motors vibrate as dreadlock boy laughs at the thrill of electric life emerging from the city off-licence soon to regard gaudy CD covers in the corporate wall-display store. Iggy Pop in black and white is thin and looks gloomy from denim and a feather cut. Iggy has thin nipples and a hatchet face which looks to be dreaming fishlike on heroin.
Now a poem for the sad face girl going home to her stupid boyfriend or laying motionless in the dark and maybe stops to chuckle at TV. Pulling on grim clothing, family slobbering at TV guides and the potplant Christmas tree warmth of messy livingrooms and sexless bedrooms containing bright sad 1970's wall cupboards. And fluffy bridegroom clutter.
A poem for the frozen drops of rain that breeze and wet bridges, the lonely sun that comes out and shines brokenly down broad alleyways illuminating sad pubs where pipemen are fingering facial hair, or laughing at the pendulous breasts of barmaids, or thinking back to science fiction and the garble of robots.
A poem for the huge cinema with five screens, for emotion in the back row and loneliness and papery garbage and crunching snacks, or blond paperboys silent in poverty staring at the screen.
A poem for February.
Work for the potbellied geezer unaware of his stubble, cursing and drilling at roadsides, clods of mud on the sleeping pick-axe. The thin apprentice with his spiky hair and with blue overalls is grappling with something and thinks of sex.
Motors vibrate as dreadlock boy laughs at the thrill of electric life emerging from the city off-licence soon to regard gaudy CD covers in the corporate wall-display store. Iggy Pop in black and white is thin and looks gloomy from denim and a feather cut. Iggy has thin nipples and a hatchet face which looks to be dreaming fishlike on heroin.
Now a poem for the sad face girl going home to her stupid boyfriend or laying motionless in the dark and maybe stops to chuckle at TV. Pulling on grim clothing, family slobbering at TV guides and the potplant Christmas tree warmth of messy livingrooms and sexless bedrooms containing bright sad 1970's wall cupboards. And fluffy bridegroom clutter.
A poem for the frozen drops of rain that breeze and wet bridges, the lonely sun that comes out and shines brokenly down broad alleyways illuminating sad pubs where pipemen are fingering facial hair, or laughing at the pendulous breasts of barmaids, or thinking back to science fiction and the garble of robots.
A poem for the huge cinema with five screens, for emotion in the back row and loneliness and papery garbage and crunching snacks, or blond paperboys silent in poverty staring at the screen.
A poem for February.
February 1
Right now such flames are flowing in the February sky, that seem to make the smelling winds flow faster, increase, sweep far above our heads. And over on the russet roofs the old smell of rain is dank.
The air is crisp even now, frosty outside, silenced outside on the windowpane. The windows put a flat defence face against the melting outside. They are so impassive and dark dark brown in shadows, so uncaring.
But somewhere the redhead girls are smiling, and somewhere dreaming of drink they're diving heads, slurping beers, laughing at the scent of cheap perfume.
Love for the vulgar vaginal girls at lunchstops and deserting the stepped-off pavements of roads, near inside where the sweeties are banked up in rows, and an old man is sweeping past with his meditative hat. Street-sweepers in blue overalls moaning with pugnacious faces and the morning paper. They sweep up pink cards announcing last Saturday's football games, wedding invitations, guest lists and chewing gum.
Inside suburbia are fat televisions and holy icons, tabernacle tables and polished sweeties in a box. Old ladies are knitting in bed, and screwing up mouths over sorrow. She dreams of the flowering hill, the secretive flowing burn, the taste of fresh cow's milk on the wooden bench at the crack of morn. And down steep hills floodwaters are coming, washing mud-brown the sleek fur of puppies.
The lazy sound of faraway traffic, broken carved-out packages on the bottom of reclining hills, ambulance driver reclining with his bald patch, ticking off his lottery numbers. The happy brunette passing wants to cry. Wants to fold fat sheets and smell lovely brew, the brew of feather warmth and shampoo.
Wants cream cakes and luxurious handsoap, wants translucent vases and to be reminded of the Virgin Mary. Wants to cradle the finest silks to her round belly, or to caress bleating sheep.
Instead has to strangle herself into grappling with rusty steel, with stinking leather, with the creamy sheen of plastic.
The air is crisp even now, frosty outside, silenced outside on the windowpane. The windows put a flat defence face against the melting outside. They are so impassive and dark dark brown in shadows, so uncaring.
But somewhere the redhead girls are smiling, and somewhere dreaming of drink they're diving heads, slurping beers, laughing at the scent of cheap perfume.
Love for the vulgar vaginal girls at lunchstops and deserting the stepped-off pavements of roads, near inside where the sweeties are banked up in rows, and an old man is sweeping past with his meditative hat. Street-sweepers in blue overalls moaning with pugnacious faces and the morning paper. They sweep up pink cards announcing last Saturday's football games, wedding invitations, guest lists and chewing gum.
Inside suburbia are fat televisions and holy icons, tabernacle tables and polished sweeties in a box. Old ladies are knitting in bed, and screwing up mouths over sorrow. She dreams of the flowering hill, the secretive flowing burn, the taste of fresh cow's milk on the wooden bench at the crack of morn. And down steep hills floodwaters are coming, washing mud-brown the sleek fur of puppies.
The lazy sound of faraway traffic, broken carved-out packages on the bottom of reclining hills, ambulance driver reclining with his bald patch, ticking off his lottery numbers. The happy brunette passing wants to cry. Wants to fold fat sheets and smell lovely brew, the brew of feather warmth and shampoo.
Wants cream cakes and luxurious handsoap, wants translucent vases and to be reminded of the Virgin Mary. Wants to cradle the finest silks to her round belly, or to caress bleating sheep.
Instead has to strangle herself into grappling with rusty steel, with stinking leather, with the creamy sheen of plastic.
Mecca
You can see the beautiful mecca orange glow from here: A long line of streetlight, a row of lampposts that is streaming down on the curve of a hill, and which is really beautiful because it speaks not of busy traffic and harsh realities like in a sweltering city, but is shining yellow quiet gold out of a completely peaceful treescene, a bunch of grey and dark trees alongside a road where every now and then you can see busy silent glimmers of headlights brightly intent on destinations flicker in between the bodies of the sorrowful trees.
Downhill the lights converge and cluster around what might be a pub, some brightly lit establishment surrounded by warm coincidental streetlights, seen by tricks of perspective and lines of sight to form a beautiful and clean neon bright stardust cluster. Closer to here as I'm looking out the window away amongst all the new housing estate there directly under the lonely spectral lamplit road the lampposts're also shining bright in a lonesome empty road where you can see the dark suburban upstairs windows staring back like vacant eyes, at first glance vacant but when you look closer it's all actually all homely nice boxiness, on a similar quiet house on the corner there's a yellow porchlight or lamp above door of some kind which is casting its own more pathetic and forlorn light, not as harsh intent and staring as lamp-posts yet infinitely more heartbreakingly beautiful, speaks of bare feet curled under sumptuous duvets in dark lonely rooms, lonesome Sunday night suppers before school, dims my heart like an unspeakable tragedy.
Now I see a couple dark and tiny figures moving up the street. A couple arm in arm, young maybe, one in white jacket one in black, now they've disappeared. They're going home to light up rooms and happily sigh and switch on TV's happy and lost in the evening, fully stretching and quivering in the knowledge of their eventual deaths. Faraway there's a blue stern smokestack, and in the blue evening sky hangs a phantom whisp of cloud, like a fluffy rag commanded to glumly suspend itself, fixed.
Downhill the lights converge and cluster around what might be a pub, some brightly lit establishment surrounded by warm coincidental streetlights, seen by tricks of perspective and lines of sight to form a beautiful and clean neon bright stardust cluster. Closer to here as I'm looking out the window away amongst all the new housing estate there directly under the lonely spectral lamplit road the lampposts're also shining bright in a lonesome empty road where you can see the dark suburban upstairs windows staring back like vacant eyes, at first glance vacant but when you look closer it's all actually all homely nice boxiness, on a similar quiet house on the corner there's a yellow porchlight or lamp above door of some kind which is casting its own more pathetic and forlorn light, not as harsh intent and staring as lamp-posts yet infinitely more heartbreakingly beautiful, speaks of bare feet curled under sumptuous duvets in dark lonely rooms, lonesome Sunday night suppers before school, dims my heart like an unspeakable tragedy.
Now I see a couple dark and tiny figures moving up the street. A couple arm in arm, young maybe, one in white jacket one in black, now they've disappeared. They're going home to light up rooms and happily sigh and switch on TV's happy and lost in the evening, fully stretching and quivering in the knowledge of their eventual deaths. Faraway there's a blue stern smokestack, and in the blue evening sky hangs a phantom whisp of cloud, like a fluffy rag commanded to glumly suspend itself, fixed.
Art school interview dream 2
They were at art school in the seventies or eighties I spose. They belong to that punk or post-punk generation.
I am thinking of Beth: At sixteen she goes to art school. Her paintings were nothing special. She had a boyish figure and would brook no nonsense. She was working class.
She was interested in me cos I could draw and was always nice to me. It was Beth who told the twins of my expulsion from the college. I can imagine the scene.
If she caught the boys drawing cartoons, graffiti or manga style drawings, she would not tolerate it. She might even confiscate and bin the offending drawings.
A married woman, with kids. Even a woman like this is not immune to the art school disease: Pretentiousness.
The art school people are in their own little club. How do they justify themselves? I have always been jealous of people who can glide through life easily. The student boys and girls who are relaxed, whose actions are easy and untroubled, who seem to be not in the least affected by the kind of doubt which all but cripples me.
What does pretentiousness mean? To me it means the conviction that they have that what they are doing is important.
On what basis then can one claim to be an artist? I think of my father: He's certainly not anyone's ideal, but he is definitely unpretentious. He does not talk about his painting as anything important. Outwardly, at least, he is modest.
What are his views? He is a socialist and a republican. Is his art proletarian? In a sense it is. He cannot help but conceive and produce these images in the spirit of what he believes. And his beliefs are based on the experiences, sometimes bitter, of his working life.
You can't seriously claim that art is useful, but you can claim that it serves a purpose. The problem is to define the purpose.
Possible aims of art: To comment on society. To hold a mirror up to life and to highlight certain (usually negative) tendencies. To be spiritually uplifting in some way. To teach, to show alternatives. (This is positive). Could result though in mere propaganda. These obviously are not distinct.
But how many kids that go off to art college have a purpose in mind? And what purpose can I really claim for the images that I like to create?
Obituary of an artist: "He was afflicted by doubt throughout his life, seemingly at every turn. He seemed unable to sustain belief in either his image-making or his writing, its efficacy or worth".
It is belief that I lack....
I am thinking of Beth: At sixteen she goes to art school. Her paintings were nothing special. She had a boyish figure and would brook no nonsense. She was working class.
She was interested in me cos I could draw and was always nice to me. It was Beth who told the twins of my expulsion from the college. I can imagine the scene.
If she caught the boys drawing cartoons, graffiti or manga style drawings, she would not tolerate it. She might even confiscate and bin the offending drawings.
A married woman, with kids. Even a woman like this is not immune to the art school disease: Pretentiousness.
The art school people are in their own little club. How do they justify themselves? I have always been jealous of people who can glide through life easily. The student boys and girls who are relaxed, whose actions are easy and untroubled, who seem to be not in the least affected by the kind of doubt which all but cripples me.
What does pretentiousness mean? To me it means the conviction that they have that what they are doing is important.
On what basis then can one claim to be an artist? I think of my father: He's certainly not anyone's ideal, but he is definitely unpretentious. He does not talk about his painting as anything important. Outwardly, at least, he is modest.
What are his views? He is a socialist and a republican. Is his art proletarian? In a sense it is. He cannot help but conceive and produce these images in the spirit of what he believes. And his beliefs are based on the experiences, sometimes bitter, of his working life.
You can't seriously claim that art is useful, but you can claim that it serves a purpose. The problem is to define the purpose.
Possible aims of art: To comment on society. To hold a mirror up to life and to highlight certain (usually negative) tendencies. To be spiritually uplifting in some way. To teach, to show alternatives. (This is positive). Could result though in mere propaganda. These obviously are not distinct.
But how many kids that go off to art college have a purpose in mind? And what purpose can I really claim for the images that I like to create?
Obituary of an artist: "He was afflicted by doubt throughout his life, seemingly at every turn. He seemed unable to sustain belief in either his image-making or his writing, its efficacy or worth".
It is belief that I lack....
Art school interview dream 1
An interview at Edinburgh. My attempts "to get into Edinburgh". In the back of my mind: that's where Lisa is.
I arrive at the place. Official air, like a dole office.
Bespectacled woman behind desk interviews me. Reminds me of Beth, an old tutor from Telford. Beth was a very nice lady and in my waking hours I feel friendly toward her. The interviewer is perhaps an amalgam of several female interviewers I have encountered.
Long nose, dark hair, glasses. The two times I've been interviewed at Edinburgh, they used a male and female interviewer.
First time: Woman seemed impressed with the portfolio and interview, glanced at the man, nodding, to gauge his response. The guy however continued to look doubtful. Frowned a little.
Second time: Went very well. Woman youngish short-haired. Guy looked pliable, soft, feminine. They were impressed with my published poetry. As it was my second time, I was super-confident.
"What vibe did you get?" said Lisa.
The dream interviewer is criticising my appearance and general demeanour. Other official figures are around, listening. All like the art college interviewers: Relaxed, informal, exuding youth and humour.
They have learned how to be authoritative and yet not compromise their youthfulness. This youthfulness seems eternal, one has the feeling it could extend into the fifties and beyond.
I arrive at the place. Official air, like a dole office.
Bespectacled woman behind desk interviews me. Reminds me of Beth, an old tutor from Telford. Beth was a very nice lady and in my waking hours I feel friendly toward her. The interviewer is perhaps an amalgam of several female interviewers I have encountered.
Long nose, dark hair, glasses. The two times I've been interviewed at Edinburgh, they used a male and female interviewer.
First time: Woman seemed impressed with the portfolio and interview, glanced at the man, nodding, to gauge his response. The guy however continued to look doubtful. Frowned a little.
Second time: Went very well. Woman youngish short-haired. Guy looked pliable, soft, feminine. They were impressed with my published poetry. As it was my second time, I was super-confident.
"What vibe did you get?" said Lisa.
The dream interviewer is criticising my appearance and general demeanour. Other official figures are around, listening. All like the art college interviewers: Relaxed, informal, exuding youth and humour.
They have learned how to be authoritative and yet not compromise their youthfulness. This youthfulness seems eternal, one has the feeling it could extend into the fifties and beyond.
Tuesday 8 November 2011
Electric White Part 5
At some point we went to the other house, farther up the street... I went in the livingroom. We were in Joe's mum's bedroom. It was warm, bright, muddled. We sat by the bed. I looked at the cheap country n western CD's... They were crap. He went, "That's my mum's...".
He stripped to the waist at one point. I went, "Hey, he's strippin!...". Everything was soft-focus and rosy and bright, like a blurred photo in a steamy room.
I lay on the livingroom couch and immediately went to sleep. I took off my coat and glasses. Mack was probably directing my activities at this point. He would've been a bit concerned for me.
I then left the house to vomit more than I have ever vomited in my life. I did it in the front garden. It lasted for ages. Mack was always hovering around, aiding and abetting the process. He brought out some water, perhaps with salt dissolved in it, in an effort to quicken the process. He got behind me, saying "Now don't be thinkin I'm a poof Michael" and tried to Hiemlich manoeuvre me.
I only just remembered to retrieve my coat and glasses from the house. Other people were around... Mack was concerned for me. There may have been mutterings from him about "take Michael home". After a while we did set off for his home, him supporting me more or less.
Once I set foot inside his mum's kitchen I had to puke again. He went "Over there Michael" and a fresh dollop of sick hit the stainless steel of the kitchen sink.
After that I was taken upstairs and put to bed in his bed. I took off my shoes and lay down. Mack must've left. His brother Andy was already in bed. I didn't sleep that night. All night I lay there in that darkened bedroom, dazed, stupefied, cast into a new phase of life.
When I woke up I discovered a grey stain of vomit on the tongue of my trainer. I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and was sick in an appallingly painful way. I felt my stomach contract violently, and hit the base of my ribs. Nothing came from my mouth but jets of clear, greasy liquid.
After this I felt perfectly OK.
Ellen had given me a cassette, with "Take That and Party" written on it, which I was supposed to tape over with some Nirvana or something. I taped "In Utero"...
I also brought with me a Rage Against the Machine album (on cassette). It was a great album with "Killing in the Name" etc, on it. The cover featured the famous photo of the Buddhist monk setting fire to himself.
These two tapes were in my jacket pocket. My coat had been left for a spell on the Easey's livingroom couch while I went outside to puke.
The next day the tapes had disappeared.
He stripped to the waist at one point. I went, "Hey, he's strippin!...". Everything was soft-focus and rosy and bright, like a blurred photo in a steamy room.
I lay on the livingroom couch and immediately went to sleep. I took off my coat and glasses. Mack was probably directing my activities at this point. He would've been a bit concerned for me.
I then left the house to vomit more than I have ever vomited in my life. I did it in the front garden. It lasted for ages. Mack was always hovering around, aiding and abetting the process. He brought out some water, perhaps with salt dissolved in it, in an effort to quicken the process. He got behind me, saying "Now don't be thinkin I'm a poof Michael" and tried to Hiemlich manoeuvre me.
I only just remembered to retrieve my coat and glasses from the house. Other people were around... Mack was concerned for me. There may have been mutterings from him about "take Michael home". After a while we did set off for his home, him supporting me more or less.
Once I set foot inside his mum's kitchen I had to puke again. He went "Over there Michael" and a fresh dollop of sick hit the stainless steel of the kitchen sink.
After that I was taken upstairs and put to bed in his bed. I took off my shoes and lay down. Mack must've left. His brother Andy was already in bed. I didn't sleep that night. All night I lay there in that darkened bedroom, dazed, stupefied, cast into a new phase of life.
When I woke up I discovered a grey stain of vomit on the tongue of my trainer. I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and was sick in an appallingly painful way. I felt my stomach contract violently, and hit the base of my ribs. Nothing came from my mouth but jets of clear, greasy liquid.
After this I felt perfectly OK.
Ellen had given me a cassette, with "Take That and Party" written on it, which I was supposed to tape over with some Nirvana or something. I taped "In Utero"...
I also brought with me a Rage Against the Machine album (on cassette). It was a great album with "Killing in the Name" etc, on it. The cover featured the famous photo of the Buddhist monk setting fire to himself.
These two tapes were in my jacket pocket. My coat had been left for a spell on the Easey's livingroom couch while I went outside to puke.
The next day the tapes had disappeared.
Electric White Part 4
We went on and came to where all the trees are. Between Lochore and Crosshill there was a veritable pine forest you'd have to traverse. You'd walk down a curious wooded path, past rows and rows of dark-green trees.
By the entrance or in some corner beside it I stopped to piss. There was a dirt track... There may've been a turnstile... The dirt track went off between the trees.
I felt viciously happy, extraordinarily buoyant. I didn't give a fuck.
We were all drunk by this time but me especially. I was perfectly happy. We accompanied Ellen home. We arrived back in his low street and Ellen went back inside. As we walked away from the house I took another big swig from the half-empty cider bottle. I knew at that point it would be wise to stop.
We climbed the opposite green bank to some grey civic building. Mack and Joe pissed there side by side. Their piss formed two grey streams behind them on the concrete. I said, "We'll name them the river Mack and the river Joe..."
Old women lived around there.
We ended up back in Crosshill. We went in somebody's house. It was the latter of the two houses in the street, where the young couple stayed. It was a few doors down from the other one. Inside the guy with the moustache was watching the Untouchables on Friday night TV. I slumped in his big brown easy chair and asked him "Do you mind me being drunk?". He didn't seem to mind at all.
... I said I had to go outside. I sat on the doorstep at the side of the house. I felt confused. A kindly-faced, middle-aged guy emerged from a neighbouring house to put his bucket out or something. (Perhaps he was putting something in the bin). He laughed shortly when he saw me and said, "Are you drunk?". I answered, "A wee bit".
By the entrance or in some corner beside it I stopped to piss. There was a dirt track... There may've been a turnstile... The dirt track went off between the trees.
I felt viciously happy, extraordinarily buoyant. I didn't give a fuck.
We were all drunk by this time but me especially. I was perfectly happy. We accompanied Ellen home. We arrived back in his low street and Ellen went back inside. As we walked away from the house I took another big swig from the half-empty cider bottle. I knew at that point it would be wise to stop.
We climbed the opposite green bank to some grey civic building. Mack and Joe pissed there side by side. Their piss formed two grey streams behind them on the concrete. I said, "We'll name them the river Mack and the river Joe..."
Old women lived around there.
We ended up back in Crosshill. We went in somebody's house. It was the latter of the two houses in the street, where the young couple stayed. It was a few doors down from the other one. Inside the guy with the moustache was watching the Untouchables on Friday night TV. I slumped in his big brown easy chair and asked him "Do you mind me being drunk?". He didn't seem to mind at all.
... I said I had to go outside. I sat on the doorstep at the side of the house. I felt confused. A kindly-faced, middle-aged guy emerged from a neighbouring house to put his bucket out or something. (Perhaps he was putting something in the bin). He laughed shortly when he saw me and said, "Are you drunk?". I answered, "A wee bit".
Electric White Part 3
We were stood in the livingroom. It was a Friday night...
A little baby was there, and tottered forward, dummy in mouth. This was the baby of a couple, maybe related to the Easeys. Ellen was there. She remarked at the baby "Oh, braw, etc, isn't it nice" but I was unmoved. The baby beamed brightly at us both. It seemed like a personal benediction, a blessing... I briefly saw us as a couple.
We bought cider at some shop. Ellen was with us. We wandered through streets and came to a darkened field on the hump of a hill. We sat in the grass. It was night.
The lake was nearby. We swigged the cider. I could barely stomach the taste of it, but glugged it down anyway. I'd brought a photo taken at school, of Mack, in one of my pockets. I showed him this and he briefly struck a match to see it.
The photo was taken in the winter, round the back of the technical block. A medium layer of snow was on the ground that day. Robert stood to the left, grinning, legs akimbo, rolling up a snowball. Mack was near him in a similar attitude. Jeremy Phelps was in the photo too, grinning, standing off to one side.
Immediately after taking the photo I got hit with a snowball and my camera crashed to the ground.
Where we were beside the lake it was completely dark, sinister, with a wide bleak sky overhead. On the horizon a flare of flame spurted up now and again. It was from some factory or refinery... You could hear it spurt and falter across the night.
From across and around the lake we heard loud yelling voices. They seemed distant, threatening, like bands of marauders. We heard echoing male voices, deep-throated. There was a feeling of danger in the air. Mack would grow uncomfortable. We moved on.
A little baby was there, and tottered forward, dummy in mouth. This was the baby of a couple, maybe related to the Easeys. Ellen was there. She remarked at the baby "Oh, braw, etc, isn't it nice" but I was unmoved. The baby beamed brightly at us both. It seemed like a personal benediction, a blessing... I briefly saw us as a couple.
We bought cider at some shop. Ellen was with us. We wandered through streets and came to a darkened field on the hump of a hill. We sat in the grass. It was night.
The lake was nearby. We swigged the cider. I could barely stomach the taste of it, but glugged it down anyway. I'd brought a photo taken at school, of Mack, in one of my pockets. I showed him this and he briefly struck a match to see it.
The photo was taken in the winter, round the back of the technical block. A medium layer of snow was on the ground that day. Robert stood to the left, grinning, legs akimbo, rolling up a snowball. Mack was near him in a similar attitude. Jeremy Phelps was in the photo too, grinning, standing off to one side.
Immediately after taking the photo I got hit with a snowball and my camera crashed to the ground.
Where we were beside the lake it was completely dark, sinister, with a wide bleak sky overhead. On the horizon a flare of flame spurted up now and again. It was from some factory or refinery... You could hear it spurt and falter across the night.
From across and around the lake we heard loud yelling voices. They seemed distant, threatening, like bands of marauders. We heard echoing male voices, deep-throated. There was a feeling of danger in the air. Mack would grow uncomfortable. We moved on.
Electric White Part 2
I went up there one night... We were going for a "night out". We were in Crosshill, we went in a house.
Crosshill was a deprived area. You'd walk down the streets and half the windows would be boarded up. Tough guys lived there. Walking into Crosshill, Mack gave me advice. He said "If one comes down the street towards you, don't look him in the eye". You'd see these types in their shellsuit bottoms.
The Easeys lived there. This extended family occupied two houses in a street. In one house lived the Easeys proper. The mum was a big fat woman, always in her dressing-gown, she was very aggressive and kind of crazy. She was a big country and western fan. There was a huge picture of Elvis on the bedroom wall.
They had dogs... The house stank.
There were a couple of girls, like teenage girls. One suffered from depression, and was able to take days off school. In one of the houses there was an older guy who lounged about on couches. He was surly, idle, staring always at TV. Occasionally an English guy would show up. This was some relative of theirs. He was scrawny, with white hair and thick glasses. He was kind of a geordie or something.
In the other house was a married couple. They had their TV in the corner... The guy had a moustache. Mack told me one of them had tried to commit suicide. He said it was slashed wrists.
I didn't particularly like the Easeys, and was kind of afraid of them. Their's was an authentic working class milieu. You had the feeling that you had reached a strange substrata of society, where anything was permissible. I never felt exactly threatened, but I did feel out of place.
There was a raucous, anything-goes atmosphere that you would never have got in Mack's house. His parents were warm and accepting but they clung to a certain distance and respectability.
Crosshill was a deprived area. You'd walk down the streets and half the windows would be boarded up. Tough guys lived there. Walking into Crosshill, Mack gave me advice. He said "If one comes down the street towards you, don't look him in the eye". You'd see these types in their shellsuit bottoms.
The Easeys lived there. This extended family occupied two houses in a street. In one house lived the Easeys proper. The mum was a big fat woman, always in her dressing-gown, she was very aggressive and kind of crazy. She was a big country and western fan. There was a huge picture of Elvis on the bedroom wall.
They had dogs... The house stank.
There were a couple of girls, like teenage girls. One suffered from depression, and was able to take days off school. In one of the houses there was an older guy who lounged about on couches. He was surly, idle, staring always at TV. Occasionally an English guy would show up. This was some relative of theirs. He was scrawny, with white hair and thick glasses. He was kind of a geordie or something.
In the other house was a married couple. They had their TV in the corner... The guy had a moustache. Mack told me one of them had tried to commit suicide. He said it was slashed wrists.
I didn't particularly like the Easeys, and was kind of afraid of them. Their's was an authentic working class milieu. You had the feeling that you had reached a strange substrata of society, where anything was permissible. I never felt exactly threatened, but I did feel out of place.
There was a raucous, anything-goes atmosphere that you would never have got in Mack's house. His parents were warm and accepting but they clung to a certain distance and respectability.
Electric White part 1
I went to his house... It was a flat. The bus-stop was across the road from the pub.
Set back in the backstreets was a greyish block of flats. They were a simple and friendly family. His brother Andy was at that time cheerful and easygoing.
... we had spahghetti... I sat at their kitchen table.
They occupied a greasy-grey flat in Lumphinnans, the Little Moscow, with a balcony. Lumphinnans was an empty little place, where seemingly nothing occurred. There was a pub by the main road...
Mack later got a house there, many years later. It was the site of the infamous housewarming party where I offended him and his guests.
Mack had a computer. The computer was kept in a bedroom. Here Mack would go, sit on the bed... The curtains would be always drawn. There was a communal atmosphere, everything held in common, everything shared.
... Then they moved to Lochore. It was a lowdown, quiet street, fields behind. I'd go n play computer there.
Set back in the backstreets was a greyish block of flats. They were a simple and friendly family. His brother Andy was at that time cheerful and easygoing.
... we had spahghetti... I sat at their kitchen table.
They occupied a greasy-grey flat in Lumphinnans, the Little Moscow, with a balcony. Lumphinnans was an empty little place, where seemingly nothing occurred. There was a pub by the main road...
Mack later got a house there, many years later. It was the site of the infamous housewarming party where I offended him and his guests.
Mack had a computer. The computer was kept in a bedroom. Here Mack would go, sit on the bed... The curtains would be always drawn. There was a communal atmosphere, everything held in common, everything shared.
... Then they moved to Lochore. It was a lowdown, quiet street, fields behind. I'd go n play computer there.
Prometheus
Like if we came from the mountains and came down in the valley
And found our tribesmen slaughtered
And you are saying I simply do not care about politics.
I care about the changing of the seasons
And the song of the birds.
I can lie and say-
I have learned to love my solitude.
I have done violence to myself in wanting to jump
Out of this world.
And I will not roll in the blood and the mud,
Backbreaking work for babies not yet born,
Toil for millions in the new dawn.
I will find a corner in which my spit
Will become like a river,
And my curses (fucks and shits)
A rich compost heap
On which to grow
Bitter silver flowers of hate.
Razorsharp, the petals
Of brilliant metal.
Grit in the eye of the demi-god,
Burning a sacrifice to the immortal
Prometheus.
And found our tribesmen slaughtered
And you are saying I simply do not care about politics.
I care about the changing of the seasons
And the song of the birds.
I can lie and say-
I have learned to love my solitude.
I have done violence to myself in wanting to jump
Out of this world.
And I will not roll in the blood and the mud,
Backbreaking work for babies not yet born,
Toil for millions in the new dawn.
I will find a corner in which my spit
Will become like a river,
And my curses (fucks and shits)
A rich compost heap
On which to grow
Bitter silver flowers of hate.
Razorsharp, the petals
Of brilliant metal.
Grit in the eye of the demi-god,
Burning a sacrifice to the immortal
Prometheus.
Written in Spring
I opened the window to the room for a few minutes and the outside air intruding met the enclosed warmth of the room. Condensation crept across the pane...
You can physically smell spring, coming from the west.
I am handing out dollar bills to passers-by I suppose. I got my job in the city, a schedule to meet.
I have been doing my research in reference to my sacred schedule. Drawn up rigidly.
My collection of first editions. I can offer education but one according to strict and thorough principles. I know the big money-brokers and where the parasitic attorneys hang out.
Whenever anyone asks what I'm doing these days, I answer "takin' care o' business". An asinine but effective phrase. All is under control.
Coffee games. Instead of sleep you find a bitter control. Whatever we want, it is not enough.
There is no superior race but there may be a superior mode of thought. Attached for a while to a particular culture or time. "Preferable" is a better word than "superior" perhaps, going from the universal to the individual.
Drawn slime in moron games. Parlour attitudes, motorbike is evensong. Drove us all crazy with his bitchin'. Walkin' behind us, demandin'. All of those awkward demeanours. Thank the Lord I didn't go crazy.
I am walking out into a vacant spring
Bolstered by fine attitudes
Poor imitation of no thought
- Graveyard blooz.
I could do it again given half the chance.
You can physically smell spring, coming from the west.
I am handing out dollar bills to passers-by I suppose. I got my job in the city, a schedule to meet.
I have been doing my research in reference to my sacred schedule. Drawn up rigidly.
My collection of first editions. I can offer education but one according to strict and thorough principles. I know the big money-brokers and where the parasitic attorneys hang out.
Whenever anyone asks what I'm doing these days, I answer "takin' care o' business". An asinine but effective phrase. All is under control.
Coffee games. Instead of sleep you find a bitter control. Whatever we want, it is not enough.
There is no superior race but there may be a superior mode of thought. Attached for a while to a particular culture or time. "Preferable" is a better word than "superior" perhaps, going from the universal to the individual.
Drawn slime in moron games. Parlour attitudes, motorbike is evensong. Drove us all crazy with his bitchin'. Walkin' behind us, demandin'. All of those awkward demeanours. Thank the Lord I didn't go crazy.
I am walking out into a vacant spring
Bolstered by fine attitudes
Poor imitation of no thought
- Graveyard blooz.
I could do it again given half the chance.
An Assembly
I hated and objected to the assemblies.
I'd sit and mock them from the back row, within earshot of the teachers. I thought them a waste of time, and was very bitter and convinced about it. The line I took was that it was not education, and ate into teaching-time. I was very cynical about the whole idea of education.
Sitting up the back with Stephen Thompson and Beano, I made some cynical remark which they wheezed at. Sitting nearby, her fat backside in a chair, was my old English teacher, Mrs. Anderson. She gave no sign that she had heard.
After the religious element of the assembly was over, there was a long secular part which was, quite plainly and undisguisedly, a re-affirmation of authoritarianism, in order to cow the pupils en masse. The priest would shuffle off toward the doors at the back of the hall, off to attend to other business, his duty done and conscience quite clear. It struck me then, the hypocrisy and uselessness of the priests, the willing partners in this subjugation.
The rector and the heavy duty administration staff, the "strict" teachers, then took the stage. To me it was as if, after the token prayers and hymn-singing, the official religious stamp on the proceedings, the true nature and purpose of the assembly was revealed in all its ugliness.
I'd sit and mock them from the back row, within earshot of the teachers. I thought them a waste of time, and was very bitter and convinced about it. The line I took was that it was not education, and ate into teaching-time. I was very cynical about the whole idea of education.
Sitting up the back with Stephen Thompson and Beano, I made some cynical remark which they wheezed at. Sitting nearby, her fat backside in a chair, was my old English teacher, Mrs. Anderson. She gave no sign that she had heard.
After the religious element of the assembly was over, there was a long secular part which was, quite plainly and undisguisedly, a re-affirmation of authoritarianism, in order to cow the pupils en masse. The priest would shuffle off toward the doors at the back of the hall, off to attend to other business, his duty done and conscience quite clear. It struck me then, the hypocrisy and uselessness of the priests, the willing partners in this subjugation.
The rector and the heavy duty administration staff, the "strict" teachers, then took the stage. To me it was as if, after the token prayers and hymn-singing, the official religious stamp on the proceedings, the true nature and purpose of the assembly was revealed in all its ugliness.
Friday 4 November 2011
un petit mort
This girl asked me, Have you ever fucked someone you cared about? Like actually cared about? And laying in their arms after, were you happy?
No, I felt deflated if anything, like staring into a void. That's why they call it a little death, un petit mort. There can be no real pleasure in anything so transient as the flesh.
I want hours, and days and months and years of illumination, centuries and aeons, not petty orgasms that you can get on any streetcorner. It's the things of the heart that last.
"What mean dull souls, in this high measure
To haberdash
In earth's base wares, whose greatest treasure
Is dross and trash;
The height of whose enchanting pleasure
Is but a flash?
Are these the goods that thou suppliest
Us mortals with? Are these the highest?
Can these bring cordial peace?
False world, thou liest."
F. Quarles
Thursday 13 October 2011
Fragments
Somebody stole my black moleskin jacket with the punk badges.
I was walking forward behind the housing estate in a provincial lowland culdesac of a suburban post-industrial townlet.
Here were the features of the townlet: grannies in granny flats being onlookers. Patches of council-shorn grass. Rain-wet roads, grey tarmac. An empty white sky. Council-built semi-detacheds from the '30s look so unbecoming in a brief late summer rain....
Opening her drawers softly so the girl in the next room doesn't hear. It's the big chest of drawers, with the long, heavy drawers, overstuffed with garments. The housebreaker....
This girl, what is she like? Has an ex and a son, of whom she is very fond. Wears what I consider to be too much make-up, an awful mask of make-up. In general, vulgar, and not slightly, not forgivably. Face is not too pretty, looks haggard and weary before her time, also her thought and ways of expressing herself are coarse, which is reflected in her face, her over-eager appearance. Going through her facebook pictures you see it; an eagerness to please.
Obviously, too, her coarseness is allied with a short temper and a protectiveness towards her wean.
I was told she contacted one or two of the prettier boys in the art school and offered them liasions. I can well believe it, but, of course, it is hearsay. She added me as a friend, but I was never offered anything myself. I didn't find her particularly attractive.
I was walking forward behind the housing estate in a provincial lowland culdesac of a suburban post-industrial townlet.
Here were the features of the townlet: grannies in granny flats being onlookers. Patches of council-shorn grass. Rain-wet roads, grey tarmac. An empty white sky. Council-built semi-detacheds from the '30s look so unbecoming in a brief late summer rain....
Opening her drawers softly so the girl in the next room doesn't hear. It's the big chest of drawers, with the long, heavy drawers, overstuffed with garments. The housebreaker....
This girl, what is she like? Has an ex and a son, of whom she is very fond. Wears what I consider to be too much make-up, an awful mask of make-up. In general, vulgar, and not slightly, not forgivably. Face is not too pretty, looks haggard and weary before her time, also her thought and ways of expressing herself are coarse, which is reflected in her face, her over-eager appearance. Going through her facebook pictures you see it; an eagerness to please.
Obviously, too, her coarseness is allied with a short temper and a protectiveness towards her wean.
I was told she contacted one or two of the prettier boys in the art school and offered them liasions. I can well believe it, but, of course, it is hearsay. She added me as a friend, but I was never offered anything myself. I didn't find her particularly attractive.
Friday 7 October 2011
Eden
My girlfriend is called Eden. Short, about 18. Nice covering of flesh. Her mother was white Scottish, her father a black man from the West Indies. Black hair that could've been curled. Like the half-Indian girl that lived up the street, short and fleshy, in a tight top.
Eden is uncertain and despondent. She was born when the sun was in the sign of Pisces. She has a disorder of the thyroid gland which can render her confused, her attention span is very short.
Mostly silent, crossed arms, a lack of confidence. Coffee-coloured inclining to brown, a fringe of neatly-curled hair, a tight top. Her full breasts stretch the fabric, a white brastrap cutting into the soft flesh of her shoulder can now and then be glimpsed.
Perhaps the sun was in the sign of Aquarius when she was born. She is sometimes cold. Tight-lipped, hard to tell what she's thinking. But when once I teased her about this inscrutability, she said, without a smile, "I'm quite straightforward".
The expression on her face: expectant, insecure. She doesn't talk much.
We get on the bus. Long bus journeys through grey countrysides. Monotonous drone of the engine. She is silent most a the way, lookin out the window.
Eden is uncertain and despondent. She was born when the sun was in the sign of Pisces. She has a disorder of the thyroid gland which can render her confused, her attention span is very short.
Mostly silent, crossed arms, a lack of confidence. Coffee-coloured inclining to brown, a fringe of neatly-curled hair, a tight top. Her full breasts stretch the fabric, a white brastrap cutting into the soft flesh of her shoulder can now and then be glimpsed.
Perhaps the sun was in the sign of Aquarius when she was born. She is sometimes cold. Tight-lipped, hard to tell what she's thinking. But when once I teased her about this inscrutability, she said, without a smile, "I'm quite straightforward".
The expression on her face: expectant, insecure. She doesn't talk much.
We get on the bus. Long bus journeys through grey countrysides. Monotonous drone of the engine. She is silent most a the way, lookin out the window.
Thursday 6 October 2011
Lycurgus of Sparta
Slow, lone, unbeknownst to me,
New forms of eternity
Being born.
Lycurgus of Sparta.
a bullethole in each knuckle
a wolverine
a straight line.
Four drums.
Flesh & bone.
Street demonstrations.
Six Thirty. The Spaniards.
"I can't imagine him ragin' at anybody."
Seventeen thousand albinos in Tanzania.
"They've gone berserk in Detroit".
There's always more. Jes' turn on the news.
New forms of eternity
Being born.
Lycurgus of Sparta.
a bullethole in each knuckle
a wolverine
a straight line.
Four drums.
Flesh & bone.
Street demonstrations.
Six Thirty. The Spaniards.
"I can't imagine him ragin' at anybody."
Seventeen thousand albinos in Tanzania.
"They've gone berserk in Detroit".
There's always more. Jes' turn on the news.
My Utopia
All the neds will be given AK-47's, and formed up into a regular army. They will be absolutely bombarded with the most extreme anarchist propaganda, getting them all fired up to exterminate the bourgeoisie. They will march on London to commence the class war, slaughtering anyone who looks rich, or looks as though they might one day think of being rich. Bodies of hedge fund managers and investment bankers will litter the floor of the stock exchange. Politicians will be ritually bludgeoned in tune to the finale of the 1812 overture, their bodies used to fertilise the fields. When the last capitalist has been hung by the guts of the last politician, a new Golden Age will dawn on earth, a New Spring heralding once and for all the death of the winter of hierarchy and obedience. At the stroke of midnight, a non-stop party will commence, which will last until the sun burns itself out, or until mankind finally exhausts itself from drunkenness, lust, and joy.
A Good Time Will Be Had By All.
SUPPORT the two-party system: The Party Party and the All-Night Party.
(and I'm a "moderate")
A Good Time Will Be Had By All.
SUPPORT the two-party system: The Party Party and the All-Night Party.
(and I'm a "moderate")
Saturday 1 October 2011
Big Black
An early morn. The backdrop grey sky. A steamengine whistle. A cement wall. The back of a fence.
The complex pictureplay of faces flickering by. Some of the men have Nosferatu faces.
The piles of records, vinyl mostly, lurking there in spindly rows, so full of vacant promise and really so shiny and beautiful. Reworkings of shiny accelerated tape, wound over on messy spools but catalogued gladly by in the stereo compartments and shiny rows nicely. Piles of CD stacked neatly there too, these carefully-wrought, divinely produced products with their glorious florid packaging and serious workmanship.
The workmanship of vinyl records is especially beautiful, an actual sizeable slab of human ingenuity more lovely than the techno egghead meanness of tiny, grumpy CDs. A shiny, broad LP cover, and a broad, proud disc especially of, say coloured vinyl thin and grooved nicely and with weird messages probably scratched in the vinyl. Ah the beautiful clutter of bleak speakers and smooth audio equipment and your noble LPs all grouped in their collective silence and brotherhood, clustering their vivid, multifarious spines!
Drop a slab of vinyl on that carefully balanced, artfully constructed timetable. Remember Big Black, think how much Robert loved them and had the big nameless glossy poster on his wall. Think of that divine Albini twiddling his knobs in some forsaken studio long ago, creating these weird Big Black albums, all the dark buzz of feedback and unique crunch and interchange of guitars dangerously presumptuous and thundering, but never being clichéd or becoming such a hideous thing as metal.
At first there's the darkness and psychosis of danger and gritting teeth and furious voices on the record, Albini's voice which always sounds pure in anger, "Songs about Fucking" you see in rows of LPs in obscure record shops, with the manga guy on the front sweating and straining in pain or ecstasy. The anonymity and dread seriousness of Big Black, black shiny vinyl laying recumbent on the turntable. The grimness of thin t-shirts and serious eighties noise in their grim expressions. Hissing madness of rumbustious songs, guitars so straining and wheezing that they break forth into psychotic rage, but restrained like the matchless thundering of the drums, always imbued with darkness rattling as the vocals get higher and more clean-throated in pure noise. A slow, sinister cover of "The Model" buzzing out with mean vocals and raw guitar parts instead of clean Kraftwerk keyboards. More dark underground beats and eighties drumming, flash and booming, industrial darkness and facelessness. Wheezing, bursting, bombastic guitars, the bass stands out meanly as if played by someone especially pissed off and isolated, minimal battering of drums. Screaming vocals. Big Black are better than Husker Du or the Pixies for me....
The complex pictureplay of faces flickering by. Some of the men have Nosferatu faces.
The piles of records, vinyl mostly, lurking there in spindly rows, so full of vacant promise and really so shiny and beautiful. Reworkings of shiny accelerated tape, wound over on messy spools but catalogued gladly by in the stereo compartments and shiny rows nicely. Piles of CD stacked neatly there too, these carefully-wrought, divinely produced products with their glorious florid packaging and serious workmanship.
The workmanship of vinyl records is especially beautiful, an actual sizeable slab of human ingenuity more lovely than the techno egghead meanness of tiny, grumpy CDs. A shiny, broad LP cover, and a broad, proud disc especially of, say coloured vinyl thin and grooved nicely and with weird messages probably scratched in the vinyl. Ah the beautiful clutter of bleak speakers and smooth audio equipment and your noble LPs all grouped in their collective silence and brotherhood, clustering their vivid, multifarious spines!
Drop a slab of vinyl on that carefully balanced, artfully constructed timetable. Remember Big Black, think how much Robert loved them and had the big nameless glossy poster on his wall. Think of that divine Albini twiddling his knobs in some forsaken studio long ago, creating these weird Big Black albums, all the dark buzz of feedback and unique crunch and interchange of guitars dangerously presumptuous and thundering, but never being clichéd or becoming such a hideous thing as metal.
At first there's the darkness and psychosis of danger and gritting teeth and furious voices on the record, Albini's voice which always sounds pure in anger, "Songs about Fucking" you see in rows of LPs in obscure record shops, with the manga guy on the front sweating and straining in pain or ecstasy. The anonymity and dread seriousness of Big Black, black shiny vinyl laying recumbent on the turntable. The grimness of thin t-shirts and serious eighties noise in their grim expressions. Hissing madness of rumbustious songs, guitars so straining and wheezing that they break forth into psychotic rage, but restrained like the matchless thundering of the drums, always imbued with darkness rattling as the vocals get higher and more clean-throated in pure noise. A slow, sinister cover of "The Model" buzzing out with mean vocals and raw guitar parts instead of clean Kraftwerk keyboards. More dark underground beats and eighties drumming, flash and booming, industrial darkness and facelessness. Wheezing, bursting, bombastic guitars, the bass stands out meanly as if played by someone especially pissed off and isolated, minimal battering of drums. Screaming vocals. Big Black are better than Husker Du or the Pixies for me....
Corner Shop
There are certain corner shops and grocery stores, little backwater dives located on secluded streets, that even in the lengths of afternoon seem dark and gloomy, as if they were located underground, and only a glimmer of light were allowed through.
In one such shop, on one such afternoon, M traipsed to and fro, pretending to be interested in the scant merchandise on offer. The interior of this little shop was murky-brown and bare, with a floor-covering smooth and swept-clean. Against one wall was a cheap-looking wire rack on which various newspapers and magazines were arranged, and by the door leading into the inner sanctum of the building was a chipped, shoddy counter on which were scattered a few scraps of paper. The place was empty of staff and of customers, besides M.
He wandered around, coughing embarassedly, waiting, puzzling at the bare pasteboard walls, the sense of desolation and even despair which seemed to inhabit the place. It seemed for all the world as though the shop had been cleared of all but its most worthless stock, and even of its internal decorations, so that the only advertisement posters that remained were of the quietest and most modest kind.
The proprietors of the shop were a rotund, homely family of Asians, who M had seen before stepping out onto the shop-floor among the crowded,neatly-piled boxes of stock, the solid-bodied mother, perpetually grinning and head-scarfed, purple-swathed in a neat sari with a diaphanous veil. Yet behind it all, somewhere, M felt as always the great gloom of such families, an inexplicable gloom related to headscarves, moustachio'd fathers with white-glaring eyes, coins scraped bitterly across counters, lamentations in Urdu, mangy newspapers full of swishy characters in the back alley. This family worked quietly, arose at dawn to gather in the papers, sort out the rack with its load of brightly-coloured magazines, creaking across floorboards, mumbling their sorrows to one another.
In one such shop, on one such afternoon, M traipsed to and fro, pretending to be interested in the scant merchandise on offer. The interior of this little shop was murky-brown and bare, with a floor-covering smooth and swept-clean. Against one wall was a cheap-looking wire rack on which various newspapers and magazines were arranged, and by the door leading into the inner sanctum of the building was a chipped, shoddy counter on which were scattered a few scraps of paper. The place was empty of staff and of customers, besides M.
He wandered around, coughing embarassedly, waiting, puzzling at the bare pasteboard walls, the sense of desolation and even despair which seemed to inhabit the place. It seemed for all the world as though the shop had been cleared of all but its most worthless stock, and even of its internal decorations, so that the only advertisement posters that remained were of the quietest and most modest kind.
The proprietors of the shop were a rotund, homely family of Asians, who M had seen before stepping out onto the shop-floor among the crowded,neatly-piled boxes of stock, the solid-bodied mother, perpetually grinning and head-scarfed, purple-swathed in a neat sari with a diaphanous veil. Yet behind it all, somewhere, M felt as always the great gloom of such families, an inexplicable gloom related to headscarves, moustachio'd fathers with white-glaring eyes, coins scraped bitterly across counters, lamentations in Urdu, mangy newspapers full of swishy characters in the back alley. This family worked quietly, arose at dawn to gather in the papers, sort out the rack with its load of brightly-coloured magazines, creaking across floorboards, mumbling their sorrows to one another.
Friday 30 September 2011
The empty street
Last week the empty street I stood on. There were dense green bushes planted sourly in pavement cracks, the old shut-up 1980s office with coloured placards in the window. It was eight or nine in the evening and stifles were stiffening like ghosts inside. The road was grey and there was nobody on it. There were old grey terraced houses that lurked eitherside, swishy trees behind.
These big greyish domineering old mother matron houses, which are exactly like the dank parlour glumness of their inhabitants. Meaty redscrubbed washing-up forearms, grim dinnertime satisfaction, sepulchral gossips.
The scent of washingpowder on the back stone step which is damp from rain and worn like the stone of destiny. Combined with the sight of a billowing white sheet on the line which I bet still happens here in these sensible and common backyards, half-remembered by slimy kneepatch toddlers of yore. Sitting nobly on their proud arses.
In her room there were accoutrements set down in front of a little mirror, just a cloistered discreet mirror set modestly just right in the little corner alcove. Little pathetic feminine powderpuffs and potions in front, china clutters of objet d'art or maybe a dumb plastic comb, gathered there like a little temple of aching vanity. Even sadder, there were little pictures and things stuck on the mirror, as well as scraps of memento sensibly tucked away. Half like the thin dressingtable of the disgruntled circus clown who is really nevertheless a teenager girl stooping to fiddle and twiddle with bits of stuff to paint on an awful face.
When you see cosmetics in application the full wretchedness of it hits you. Those dumb screwings up of mouth and flickings at the eyelash. The powdery flicker of her birdish intensity and naked tragic wrist.
That intelligence most of all.
These big greyish domineering old mother matron houses, which are exactly like the dank parlour glumness of their inhabitants. Meaty redscrubbed washing-up forearms, grim dinnertime satisfaction, sepulchral gossips.
The scent of washingpowder on the back stone step which is damp from rain and worn like the stone of destiny. Combined with the sight of a billowing white sheet on the line which I bet still happens here in these sensible and common backyards, half-remembered by slimy kneepatch toddlers of yore. Sitting nobly on their proud arses.
In her room there were accoutrements set down in front of a little mirror, just a cloistered discreet mirror set modestly just right in the little corner alcove. Little pathetic feminine powderpuffs and potions in front, china clutters of objet d'art or maybe a dumb plastic comb, gathered there like a little temple of aching vanity. Even sadder, there were little pictures and things stuck on the mirror, as well as scraps of memento sensibly tucked away. Half like the thin dressingtable of the disgruntled circus clown who is really nevertheless a teenager girl stooping to fiddle and twiddle with bits of stuff to paint on an awful face.
When you see cosmetics in application the full wretchedness of it hits you. Those dumb screwings up of mouth and flickings at the eyelash. The powdery flicker of her birdish intensity and naked tragic wrist.
That intelligence most of all.
God of Night
Her blue eyes, her sandy hair swishing, her nice young breasts underneath her top, her placid careful footsteps down the lane, the way she twists to look around half-concerned at something behind her in the afternoon street, her softly shaded blurs of feature and set in there the clear blue eyes, her T-shirt is smooth and lined in indie girl black and white burglar stripes, her jacket is for summer all nice and smooth, swishes, her feet tread markedly down the plaza.
She disappears past the fences smiling evilly to herself and is swallowed up past housecorners by mounds of grass. Her pretty shoes swishing the soaking ribboned grass of late summer rain.
Now in the evening in the dark outside it rains again. All is silent outside. Then murmured young voices meeting darkly in the street to plan dingy kitchensink dramas. In the dark their faces are as glum as opals, they move on, eyes upraised in the glorious hope of kitchens and early nights somewhere behind locked prefabricated doors all inked with the cloudy effervescent flood of night everywhere, hiding impenetrably with her in the midst of her warmth, she doesn't know, can't ever care, she's pink and fleshy and utterly exhausted drowning in a big dreamy sulk like the sleep of Orpheus angels in cells everywhere, like malcontent eyemovements neath crinkly eyelids surrendered in a silky tomb.
Just then I heard the loneliest sound in the world and a sound which always echoes in my heart, the rhythmic sound of a faraway forlorn car passing on distant road in the dark and through the rain, which coincided sadly and damply with freezing dripdrops of splatter rain that dimpled the clinical uncaring iron rim of the double glazing, these orange suburban houses all have double glazing and are dead. Still I can hear that heartbreaking hush faraway on the edge of hearing almost which is utterly grim and satanic and like purple intensified till it all becomes a blueblack cloud of night.
To me the God of Night was always tall and crooked and gaunt, he was plushly enwrapped in purple velvet coffin linings, he fills every inch of the sky with his purple, just like a vast curvaceous cinema screen which michelangelo laboured for fifteen years to tarnish potblack, tinctured with a dab of deep azure.
The God of Night is blue and has a hollow face, curls around the whole sky. Sometimes when he's really feeling wet and drippy in his awesome gloom he sets the silent stormclouds to weep and disperse like wraiths and dimples the dome with stars, glimmers of eyes in the black fabric.
The noise of a car door opening on Halloween. A Celtic prince just ran outside and slammed and locked the door of his car. The sound of it echoed round the silent neighbourhood and he struggled back indoors. As if he was fleeing from some vast inevitable pursuit.
She disappears past the fences smiling evilly to herself and is swallowed up past housecorners by mounds of grass. Her pretty shoes swishing the soaking ribboned grass of late summer rain.
Now in the evening in the dark outside it rains again. All is silent outside. Then murmured young voices meeting darkly in the street to plan dingy kitchensink dramas. In the dark their faces are as glum as opals, they move on, eyes upraised in the glorious hope of kitchens and early nights somewhere behind locked prefabricated doors all inked with the cloudy effervescent flood of night everywhere, hiding impenetrably with her in the midst of her warmth, she doesn't know, can't ever care, she's pink and fleshy and utterly exhausted drowning in a big dreamy sulk like the sleep of Orpheus angels in cells everywhere, like malcontent eyemovements neath crinkly eyelids surrendered in a silky tomb.
Just then I heard the loneliest sound in the world and a sound which always echoes in my heart, the rhythmic sound of a faraway forlorn car passing on distant road in the dark and through the rain, which coincided sadly and damply with freezing dripdrops of splatter rain that dimpled the clinical uncaring iron rim of the double glazing, these orange suburban houses all have double glazing and are dead. Still I can hear that heartbreaking hush faraway on the edge of hearing almost which is utterly grim and satanic and like purple intensified till it all becomes a blueblack cloud of night.
To me the God of Night was always tall and crooked and gaunt, he was plushly enwrapped in purple velvet coffin linings, he fills every inch of the sky with his purple, just like a vast curvaceous cinema screen which michelangelo laboured for fifteen years to tarnish potblack, tinctured with a dab of deep azure.
The God of Night is blue and has a hollow face, curls around the whole sky. Sometimes when he's really feeling wet and drippy in his awesome gloom he sets the silent stormclouds to weep and disperse like wraiths and dimples the dome with stars, glimmers of eyes in the black fabric.
The noise of a car door opening on Halloween. A Celtic prince just ran outside and slammed and locked the door of his car. The sound of it echoed round the silent neighbourhood and he struggled back indoors. As if he was fleeing from some vast inevitable pursuit.
Vision of the Garden
This street of quiet suburbia, the little girls go n play in each other's houses till evening comes on.
The little blonde girl, her dad comes over to knock. A thin dude, blond spiky hair, glasses, gentle smile. Wearing a big padded ski jacket. Often to be seen carwashing. Also his son, dressed identically, a rotund, selfish face. Knock knock knock. Is Tracey there? Obviously its hometime... Chap at th' brownwood door.
Up the hallway into the cosy kitchen where the light is already on. Mum n that are sitting in there smoking, not moving. The hall is dark. They nod n smile, very gentle like with their big jackets on. The evenin twilight.
"She's not here". Blue shadows gathering in the shallow cul de sac. No lights on in the semi-detached suburban mansion, of orange brick, of tiles, big plaster-walled rooms. The bedrooms empty and dark. A huge silent block of darkness.
Why do they sit so impassive in the kitchen, so drowsy in the yellow electric light? They look on, amused, judgemental, not moving unless to flick ash in an ashtray. A distant setpiece in electric light, still and even. My mum's brown sweep of fringe, my brother languid, crossarmed, unspeaking. Entertaining friends in the lamplit kitchen, the stereo softly on. Not participating.
Off go the dad n brother with soft OK's. I close the front door. The much-maligned scuffed and maltreated brownwood door, metal letterbox, frosted glass pane. Some impulse makes me yank it open again for otherside revelations.
Outside.... The twilit cul de sac had vanished, and in its place, through the portal, stood a vision of a beautiful garden.
A garden in summer, a mid-August garden, a garden in a blaze of light. Suburban garden. In one corner, a marked-off flowerpatch. And standing on the grass, a number of wild beasts. Oh garden where in summer we'd lie on the grass and wait for rain, where I'd watch sunrises or laze with books in the shade, miserable grasspatch, arena of childhood.
The little blonde girl, her dad comes over to knock. A thin dude, blond spiky hair, glasses, gentle smile. Wearing a big padded ski jacket. Often to be seen carwashing. Also his son, dressed identically, a rotund, selfish face. Knock knock knock. Is Tracey there? Obviously its hometime... Chap at th' brownwood door.
Up the hallway into the cosy kitchen where the light is already on. Mum n that are sitting in there smoking, not moving. The hall is dark. They nod n smile, very gentle like with their big jackets on. The evenin twilight.
"She's not here". Blue shadows gathering in the shallow cul de sac. No lights on in the semi-detached suburban mansion, of orange brick, of tiles, big plaster-walled rooms. The bedrooms empty and dark. A huge silent block of darkness.
Why do they sit so impassive in the kitchen, so drowsy in the yellow electric light? They look on, amused, judgemental, not moving unless to flick ash in an ashtray. A distant setpiece in electric light, still and even. My mum's brown sweep of fringe, my brother languid, crossarmed, unspeaking. Entertaining friends in the lamplit kitchen, the stereo softly on. Not participating.
Off go the dad n brother with soft OK's. I close the front door. The much-maligned scuffed and maltreated brownwood door, metal letterbox, frosted glass pane. Some impulse makes me yank it open again for otherside revelations.
Outside.... The twilit cul de sac had vanished, and in its place, through the portal, stood a vision of a beautiful garden.
A garden in summer, a mid-August garden, a garden in a blaze of light. Suburban garden. In one corner, a marked-off flowerpatch. And standing on the grass, a number of wild beasts. Oh garden where in summer we'd lie on the grass and wait for rain, where I'd watch sunrises or laze with books in the shade, miserable grasspatch, arena of childhood.
Thursday 29 September 2011
Christmas on Earth (beginning)
When Christmas morning comes around, dragging itself slowly, everyone is disappointed. The day itself is often grey, not crystalline and swathed in snow like in the movies. The morning comes reluctantly, like all winter mornings, so that it seems a half-morning, almost impervious to celebration. Small wonder then that behind our thick walls, having crawled from bed and downstairs, we react against it, that great sorrowful dullness of the winter day, and want to light up a huge blaze in the grate, become ruddy-cheeked and drunken, to carouse, to wear down the weary day with the glitter of tinsel and the shining gloss of rosy-red wrapping paper.
How horrible then, and yet how fitting, that at the end of the momentous day you realise your efforts have failed, and you find in yourself only a great apathetic horror, a slumbering, monumental dread that falls like the death of the year, a deadness to match not only the deadness of winter but the deadness of your plastic surroundings.
This, then, is the story of one typically sorrowful Christmas that had, atypically, a real jubilation and purity at the centre of it, albeit one very briefly known.
It began with Christmas Eve in the bedroom. All was pleasant, mild, sleepy at bedtime. There was a semblance of what seemed to be happiness. The heavy curtains were drawn, the cheering yellow lamp was switched on. The heavy, fragrant blankets were thrown back, and M and the girl beside him at first slept content.
M and his "wife"- for so she seemed to him to be- had pacified each other with little kisses and pettings, sweet for the festive season, with the maudlin memory of Christmas lights and tinsel incumbent on their drowsy minds. The girl in nightie, placid, respectable, and M himself feeling almost middle-aged as he settled down to sleep. Their bedroom was neat and softly carpeted, suggestive of rest, and with a sumptuous white-sheeted double bed. With the lamp turned out, and with heads hitting pillows, it did not take long for the room's real character to prevail. As M's restless eyes grew used to the darkness, the room seemed warmly staid, as comforting and banal as a womb, and M began to feel about it almost as an infant feels about the menacing shadows of his room at night, or a travelling salesman suddenly waking up to the anonymous contours of a cheap hotel room. But no, M banished those thoughts, buried his head in the pillow, and screwed up his eyes, vainly trying to intoxicate himself with the cheap fragrance of matrimony and Christmastime.
The girl beside him was a petite, neat-figured brunette, who had changed fussily into a clean nightdress and settled down beside him, laying herself carefully on the mattress like a sacrificial victim. Tonight, although full of lazy festive spirit, she seemed even more remote than usual, and the way she gathered the blankets around her seemed curiously formal and distracted. She had responded to M's goodnight kisses with smiles and words that weren't altogether convincing.
When the lights went out she lay perfectly still beside him, with her back turned, seeming to be asleep almost immediately. Even by listening hard M couldn't hear her breathing. He wondered whether he had done something to offend her.
It was only after a period of sleep that the nightmares began.
Wednesday 28 September 2011
The three-week novel
I set myself the task of writing a novel in three weeks. I had a schedule all worked out at great length, and had already marked out the days on the calendar and laboriously prepared. This schedule would involve me sitting at my desk at every spare moment I got, all day every day, twenty-four seven, and writing exhaustively.
The project I had in mind was vast, no less than a huge epic poem explaining the whole scenario of life to myself, all the problems of youth, of life in the twenty-first century.
I wanted to take every element of this and extend on it, make it lasting. I always had about three or four such novels and large poems on the go at any one time, and I had grand delusions about the depth and scope of my works in progress. In those days I very much tended to write quickly and exhaustively til I had finished. I found out in this way the terrible feeling of uphill struggle one has to face when contemplating writing any kind of large work, the long, lonely hours bitterly struggling with yourself in order to create, the endless days and weeks and months of creative turmoil with seemingly no end in sight. But I knew one thing clearly, and that was that to be a writer you have to write, and write unceasingly, every day of your life...
Alone at nights in bed misery descended on me. My thoughts were stripped to the bare bones of anguish, all pretension was lost. I saw myself and the world exactly as it was, foregoing all fantasy, lies, and escapism. In these moments I felt acutely the impossibility of fulfilment. I forced myself to face the facts, one by one, and put them to myself in the bitterest way I could. I stripped everything down to the plainest facts, the most harsh home-truths.
And upon waking, that's what I wanted my writing to be, infused with some of that truth. Everywhere I went I enthusiastically quoted the words of Jack Kerouac: "fiction is for kids". I wanted to look with brave eyes at the real world around me, and set it down truthfully on paper. I wanted to tackle the status quo, strip away the layers of appearance, contradict and twist everything I was told until I found the barest fundament, the rock of truth. This is dynamic realism in action, a negation of all current forms, a denial of everything, a reduction of the world to zero so that in that void may be found a new starting-point for new values, new perspectives, and a new, broader truth!
Encounter with Alex
On TV the TV presenter giving good lines ad libs and syllabic puns.
In a close room after the ad break my second floor bedsit room, the paint peeling off the windowsill and patchy plaster walls.
Her name is Alex, dark hair rather bland or pretty looks, standard Midwestern accent inflected with a bit of Glaswegian. Shortish hair, skinny t-shirt, a certain voluptuous inflection of words in mouth.
Static interrupting on the screen every now n then. D'you know when the TV screen seems to disgorge or vomit itself into reality and its static and ozone becomes evaporated into the air and seems to blister further the paintwork round the doorframe where outside it's four o'clock. The door ajar...
All signalling that the TV show has come to an end. Quick titles scroll upwards and a 30 second themetune leading to a quick-sliding ad break.
We have in our bedsit patchy shadows and a fishbowl green. Twin beds too, her's over on the left, the smooth cream duvet. Stormclouds go over, shadows descend. The TV screen has disgorged its contents all over the room as if its flesh were suddenly real and not mere static and buzzes of light.
Alex, I love to watch her reading her emails say for fifteen minutes.
Like the peephole bars where you watch the coy girls or secretaries at computer terminals. Weird bars in Tokyo wit mirrored floors.
For fifteen minutes I watch her unobserved slumped on my single bed the ruffled counterpane, skinny-armed and gleeful. What have the myriad stoners and deadbeats to do all day but dream dreams like these.
In a large oblong gap between the last frame of the teen TV show and the delayed commercial break. I watch soporifically thru a plastic screen thinkin I had once a comicbook promised me the revolution would be televised... gettin harder to distinguish between fiction and reality...
Old pervert that I am, as if I was a veritable tramp I get up off the bed no concealment thump-fisted beatin off in the duvet. The cock stalk-like outthrust n the prepuce semi- or fully retracted showing the shiny bulbous head. And all for the pretty cherubic smile of the girl, coyly down-smiling at the computer monitor.
... Vapid white-skied afternoon outside the paint-peeling windowsills and the blocks a council flats.
An Enemy of the People
I have done something peculiar with my life, half-submitted to it and half-opposed it. I could quite easily become "an enemy of the people".
So much of mankind's energies go to opposing one another. This seems to be his nature. So much strife occurring on the globe seems to be unnecessary, petty, when viewed from a distance. What is needed then, obviously, is to put aside differences and unite.
Nowadays though, there is no solid basis for this. People have lost faith in socialism. The old socialist ideas just cannot flourish in today's world. The old figure of "the industrial proletariat" is nowhere to be seen. He's as much an anachronism or ghost as the old top-hatted capitalist who formerly was such an obvious target.
We have settled for an easy option. We have drifted into loose consumer capitalism. The public loves celebrities more than anything. Our culture is attuned toward shallowness, artificiality. This kind of atmosphere can sustain nothing but a wretched cynicism. (Special pleading?)
Our culture is dead for me because on the one hand it supports elitism and on the other artifice. Consumerism has taken over our ideas. It has lost even its old vitality... there is torpor in many people's ideas. This torpor comes from the dead weight of an inherited popular culture which is characterised by the fact that it is over, that it perished some time ago. The eternal rehashing of the past is ghoulish, and bespeaks nothing so much as spiritual poverty. Rosy nostalgia is often close to impotence.
So much of mankind's energies go to opposing one another. This seems to be his nature. So much strife occurring on the globe seems to be unnecessary, petty, when viewed from a distance. What is needed then, obviously, is to put aside differences and unite.
Nowadays though, there is no solid basis for this. People have lost faith in socialism. The old socialist ideas just cannot flourish in today's world. The old figure of "the industrial proletariat" is nowhere to be seen. He's as much an anachronism or ghost as the old top-hatted capitalist who formerly was such an obvious target.
We have settled for an easy option. We have drifted into loose consumer capitalism. The public loves celebrities more than anything. Our culture is attuned toward shallowness, artificiality. This kind of atmosphere can sustain nothing but a wretched cynicism. (Special pleading?)
Our culture is dead for me because on the one hand it supports elitism and on the other artifice. Consumerism has taken over our ideas. It has lost even its old vitality... there is torpor in many people's ideas. This torpor comes from the dead weight of an inherited popular culture which is characterised by the fact that it is over, that it perished some time ago. The eternal rehashing of the past is ghoulish, and bespeaks nothing so much as spiritual poverty. Rosy nostalgia is often close to impotence.
Monday 26 September 2011
If you go to the fair
If you go to the fair there's a certain huge tent where waits amid the clutter the old stand-up comedian with his long straggly beard now turning white. He's wild-eyed and enthusiastic, he'll lead you inside in spite of your trepidations.
In the disorder and dimness inside spread out on the floor among dozing tramps is a large blue quilt sewn with scenes and colours. Leaping dolphins sporting in azure seas, freshly depicted on the tapestry. And these flitting birds of a dull brown colour, he tells you (he's read it from a script) represent the souls of despondent suicides. The suicide epidemic among young guys means that the gloomy birds have proliferated, and are perching among the branches of a bitter tree. But who knows whether the old stand-up comic can be trusted? His thoughts and gestures seem disordered and over-dramatic.
And after reading your tea-leaves and administering the drug he ties you up in a foul-smelling tent where animals have recently been. Calls you "my dear" and tells you not to worry. Strokes your soft, exposed throat with his long finger. Perhaps preparing you as a candle-lit exhibit for the after-hours black mass, where all the carnies come masked and solemn.
In the disorder and dimness inside spread out on the floor among dozing tramps is a large blue quilt sewn with scenes and colours. Leaping dolphins sporting in azure seas, freshly depicted on the tapestry. And these flitting birds of a dull brown colour, he tells you (he's read it from a script) represent the souls of despondent suicides. The suicide epidemic among young guys means that the gloomy birds have proliferated, and are perching among the branches of a bitter tree. But who knows whether the old stand-up comic can be trusted? His thoughts and gestures seem disordered and over-dramatic.
And after reading your tea-leaves and administering the drug he ties you up in a foul-smelling tent where animals have recently been. Calls you "my dear" and tells you not to worry. Strokes your soft, exposed throat with his long finger. Perhaps preparing you as a candle-lit exhibit for the after-hours black mass, where all the carnies come masked and solemn.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Bob Seger is in Detroit
Bob Seger is in Detroit and he says, "Hey Dee-troit!" from the stage. Cue cheers and rejoicing. One of their native sons has returned and is bolstering their civic pride. So go home to Glasgow, the Detroit of Britain, and proclaim your love or pledge your allegiance from the stage of the SECC. "We knew Franz Ferdinand, we did coke with 'em. My momma is from this town and all my ancestors swill around in its environs, and my friend knows the guy from Deacon Blue. That makes a nigga like me proud." Not a dry eye in the house. Ironic, o course.
Then we close with a cover of "Into the Valley".
Then we close with a cover of "Into the Valley".
Saturday 24 September 2011
In the Shop Part 2
Anyway it's dusk and closing time, and next to the shop down a spiral staircase is a bar, already brightly lit and inviting. Tempting to stay.
And as I see the pallid languid boys leaving, and the gangster proprietors put their white heads together, the colours of their sharp suits blending in the shadows, I begin to imagine. What if I could stay here through the night, when the place was shut up and quiet...
What if I could stay forever? What if I was a spy cop private dick there to eavesdrop, I'd hide myself in a long gallery-space upstairs, behind thick curtains. Down in the shopspace the old gangsters have taken out a bottle and shot glasses, in the dimness by the counter they sit and murmur. One of these old geezers has an enormous head of white hair, is crafty, distrustful, unsmiling.
And perhaps the spy cop, the investigative journalist, is in the overhanging gallery, or hiding behind the curtains, or locked in the hushed ballroom when he steps on a loose floorboard that creaks its echoes around the wide room, one of those lovely varnished floorboards so often seen in galleries. The gangster's heads glance up and the FBI man's cover is blown, his mission aborted.
Now he runs him outside to the anonymous-grey back of the store, where a short gravel path leads from the fire exit, simultaneously drawing his official handgun from its holster at his side. He sees, almost before he has time to take it in, the white-haired, huge-headed, portly gangster dashing down the concrete fire-escape, and he seems to the hero movie spycop to be reaching for a weapon, to make good his escape. The honest man from the bureau's firearm flashes in response once, twice, and the gangster-actor performs a marvellous stunt, plummeting down the concrete steps, really impressive and I hope the actor, who must be over 60, hasn't hurt himself.
His weasely, thin-faced accomplice meets a similar fate, while dashing across a nearby concrete gangway. At the end of it a squad car has already sped up, and the sexshop gangster is bundled inside, in a flash of gold bracelet and spiv moustache.
Another triumph for the G-Men.
And as I see the pallid languid boys leaving, and the gangster proprietors put their white heads together, the colours of their sharp suits blending in the shadows, I begin to imagine. What if I could stay here through the night, when the place was shut up and quiet...
What if I could stay forever? What if I was a spy cop private dick there to eavesdrop, I'd hide myself in a long gallery-space upstairs, behind thick curtains. Down in the shopspace the old gangsters have taken out a bottle and shot glasses, in the dimness by the counter they sit and murmur. One of these old geezers has an enormous head of white hair, is crafty, distrustful, unsmiling.
And perhaps the spy cop, the investigative journalist, is in the overhanging gallery, or hiding behind the curtains, or locked in the hushed ballroom when he steps on a loose floorboard that creaks its echoes around the wide room, one of those lovely varnished floorboards so often seen in galleries. The gangster's heads glance up and the FBI man's cover is blown, his mission aborted.
Now he runs him outside to the anonymous-grey back of the store, where a short gravel path leads from the fire exit, simultaneously drawing his official handgun from its holster at his side. He sees, almost before he has time to take it in, the white-haired, huge-headed, portly gangster dashing down the concrete fire-escape, and he seems to the hero movie spycop to be reaching for a weapon, to make good his escape. The honest man from the bureau's firearm flashes in response once, twice, and the gangster-actor performs a marvellous stunt, plummeting down the concrete steps, really impressive and I hope the actor, who must be over 60, hasn't hurt himself.
His weasely, thin-faced accomplice meets a similar fate, while dashing across a nearby concrete gangway. At the end of it a squad car has already sped up, and the sexshop gangster is bundled inside, in a flash of gold bracelet and spiv moustache.
Another triumph for the G-Men.
Friday 23 September 2011
In the Shop Part one
In the city I go to a certain street, in broad daylight. Maybe get some comics, magazines.
Because this is a city shop it's hip and laidback and urban. Split it into different sections. You wander up some stairs and as you pass the long galleries and counters you gradually ascend, like walking uphill, till you've reached the very summit of the backwall of the shop.
Near the glass frontdoor as I roam idly in I see a sour-faced little goth girl who wrinkles up her nose at me in disgust. Shorn hair under an anonymous beanie hat, one eye swollen from an infection from being plastered in out-of-date make-up. T-shirt says "chaos". Short trousers and stripy tights beneath, beetlejuice-style. I know her vaguely. I glance at her but she acts like I'm not there. I am being sent to coventry.
So I pass by quickly and continue on, ever upwards into the shop.
In this shop can be seen comics and magazines and DVD's and items of clothing. Bored dishevelled boys or girls at dark counters, the floorspace is long and narrow. I pass by the comics and I head for the adult section.
The adult section is run by gangsters, quite plainly. There lurks a whitehaired, grimfaced geezer in a sharp suit. Looks at me dangerously, obviously a proprietor. Also a couple of girls in there, tall and vulgar, awed and giggling at all the filth, wide-eyed curiosity hidden behind amused disgust. Normal girls.
And I look at the DVDs and DVDs and DVDs. Because the market has diversified and the filth has abundantly proliferated. Look at the categories: girl on girl inter-racial college girls the gonzo stuff older women big tits. All specialisms luridly competing. At the cheaper and softer end of the market, I view the ripoff titles, a pink-white DVD cover, some random wife shot from below, unlovely face turned away, gripping her pendulous breasts. But now that the market for natural flesh has developed, quality can be found: This beautiful model, Mediterranean, trussed up in a tight basque, white-toothed and spread-legged; this voluptuous Welsh girl, her abundant flesh held balanced in a bra; this English girl-next-door, with enormous breasts, two huge soft slabs of flesh overpowering her chest. Next to the boxed dildoes in excitingly-coloured boxes, are the solo DVDs where the dildoes are put to use. In a glass case nearby, buttplugs and metallic lovebeads. Near the shoddy and soft-lit backwall of the store, near the fire exit.
Because this is a city shop it's hip and laidback and urban. Split it into different sections. You wander up some stairs and as you pass the long galleries and counters you gradually ascend, like walking uphill, till you've reached the very summit of the backwall of the shop.
Near the glass frontdoor as I roam idly in I see a sour-faced little goth girl who wrinkles up her nose at me in disgust. Shorn hair under an anonymous beanie hat, one eye swollen from an infection from being plastered in out-of-date make-up. T-shirt says "chaos". Short trousers and stripy tights beneath, beetlejuice-style. I know her vaguely. I glance at her but she acts like I'm not there. I am being sent to coventry.
So I pass by quickly and continue on, ever upwards into the shop.
In this shop can be seen comics and magazines and DVD's and items of clothing. Bored dishevelled boys or girls at dark counters, the floorspace is long and narrow. I pass by the comics and I head for the adult section.
The adult section is run by gangsters, quite plainly. There lurks a whitehaired, grimfaced geezer in a sharp suit. Looks at me dangerously, obviously a proprietor. Also a couple of girls in there, tall and vulgar, awed and giggling at all the filth, wide-eyed curiosity hidden behind amused disgust. Normal girls.
And I look at the DVDs and DVDs and DVDs. Because the market has diversified and the filth has abundantly proliferated. Look at the categories: girl on girl inter-racial college girls the gonzo stuff older women big tits. All specialisms luridly competing. At the cheaper and softer end of the market, I view the ripoff titles, a pink-white DVD cover, some random wife shot from below, unlovely face turned away, gripping her pendulous breasts. But now that the market for natural flesh has developed, quality can be found: This beautiful model, Mediterranean, trussed up in a tight basque, white-toothed and spread-legged; this voluptuous Welsh girl, her abundant flesh held balanced in a bra; this English girl-next-door, with enormous breasts, two huge soft slabs of flesh overpowering her chest. Next to the boxed dildoes in excitingly-coloured boxes, are the solo DVDs where the dildoes are put to use. In a glass case nearby, buttplugs and metallic lovebeads. Near the shoddy and soft-lit backwall of the store, near the fire exit.
Monday 19 September 2011
Beneath the Suburbs 2
And even in my digital entertainment fantasy world I see nothing but strife and violence. Mondo wrestling, a bitch fight taking place in a room not dissimilar to my suburban bedroom. Like a music video, like one a those oh so ironic postmodern movies that reference 70's trash culture. All the reference points are tediously in place.
This is the stuff of mass media now, the stuff that weary America dreams of when it slumbers. A blonde and a Chinese chick Lucy Liu-like are really laying into each other. The blonde is in a split satin skirt, she gets the Chinese girl in a hold from behind and gets her hand bitten, the Chinese girl emitting an angry high-pitched shriek loud enough to alert the neighbours to call the cops.
Like a fightscene in one a those old Batman episodes. Full of blam and kapowie. Now their exertions are trashing the room, brushing ornaments off shelves. That big-legged and booted blonde, savagely intent, wrenches back China girl's head but she wriggles free and delivers a telling blow to her midriff...
Where to present this scene? Bitchfight in the bedroom. Pre-Superbowl Show. Before the music awards, before the video awards. Guest-starring. Stick in the canned laughter later.
Sunday 18 September 2011
Beneath the Suburbs
But it's back to art school for me. Struggle and arguments with mum, epiphanies reached, harsh words thrown, tempers lost. And the student has to migrate from his suburban blue-carpeted bedroom, has to cram his stuff into bags, stress himself out all over again.
The comfortable suburban master bedroom! From here I launch myself into arguments, hysterics, with my dark-haired mothers and sisters, they fling ultimatums at me, their faces bruised with mascara, they shriek or grunt with rage.
Rage, despair, violence. Always under the surface of the quiet suburbs, setting for the great melodramas of our time.
I pack my accredited paperwork and my pathetic schedule.
And in London a huge downpour ends the heatwave.
The comfortable suburban master bedroom! From here I launch myself into arguments, hysterics, with my dark-haired mothers and sisters, they fling ultimatums at me, their faces bruised with mascara, they shriek or grunt with rage.
Rage, despair, violence. Always under the surface of the quiet suburbs, setting for the great melodramas of our time.
I pack my accredited paperwork and my pathetic schedule.
And in London a huge downpour ends the heatwave.
Thursday 15 September 2011
Peter Parker
Read, say, 15 Marvel comic books and you get a greater insight into life than if you study the greatest works of the philosophers.
Here's a badly-drawn example from the nineties, with a certain rough charm. A character from the dark and tangled personal life of Peter Parker, after his death or disappearance, gets a roomsearch. In a deskdrawer he keeps a handgun. Didn't Ernest Hemingway keep his gun in a drawer? Reaches for it angstily. Perhaps a secret compartment.
Reminds me of when a cop came to see my flatmate and I had an illicit replica handgun lying on the couch. I heard the static of a tinny voice on his radio as he ascended the stairs and went into a paranoid panic, flung the gun into a bottom drawer.
A boy with something to hide.
Here's a badly-drawn example from the nineties, with a certain rough charm. A character from the dark and tangled personal life of Peter Parker, after his death or disappearance, gets a roomsearch. In a deskdrawer he keeps a handgun. Didn't Ernest Hemingway keep his gun in a drawer? Reaches for it angstily. Perhaps a secret compartment.
Reminds me of when a cop came to see my flatmate and I had an illicit replica handgun lying on the couch. I heard the static of a tinny voice on his radio as he ascended the stairs and went into a paranoid panic, flung the gun into a bottom drawer.
A boy with something to hide.
Wednesday 7 September 2011
a small prayer
Grace, descending from above, gild the paths of those I love.
Strife, erupting from below, deliver all my foes to woe.
Strife, erupting from below, deliver all my foes to woe.
Monday 5 September 2011
New Art Class (Neue Kunst)
Having enrolled in a new Art Class... I am waiting patiently in the hall where I reckon the Klass is to take place. Having avoided the brown-clad dusty teachers and the grey-haired matrons. Togas and memories of Olympia. Now is this where the Klasse ist to begin? Let's wait unconcernedly and see. My brown eyes, my clever fringe, my Art School jumper.
A large symposium-type hall, like in latter-day schools would be a gymnasium. ie, with marbled lacquer, squeaking floorboards, porticos of Christ-like learning personified in pictura.
I have a bunch of biros, pencils, and paintbrushes in a glazed mug on the desk. How sweet and thoughtful.
But ye know when the drudgery and intellect Junges come in, like bejumpered Oxfordensians, to take seats, and all betiding me keenly. I begin to bethink me is perhaps an examination about to commence?
I sit, and speak not to no-one.
After a period of say ten minutes when the shady lads n lasses are a-coming in to choose seats and lift pens, the idea comes into my mind to take a longsome stroll, say of fifteen minute's space, to kill time and ascertain the veracity of the concurrent programme.
Accordingly, I leave my seat wordless and traipse out.
And gaining the dark lowdown groundfloor corridor. I mope strolling, my draping schooltie and shoddy shirt, the perfect postmodern schoolboy, complete with hundred dollar perspex glasses. To add a shade of intellect.
And entering out I come to the packed entrance foyer. Which is packed with the hangout schoolkids and young student types slouching Angus Young-like in doorways bedraggled.
A large symposium-type hall, like in latter-day schools would be a gymnasium. ie, with marbled lacquer, squeaking floorboards, porticos of Christ-like learning personified in pictura.
I have a bunch of biros, pencils, and paintbrushes in a glazed mug on the desk. How sweet and thoughtful.
But ye know when the drudgery and intellect Junges come in, like bejumpered Oxfordensians, to take seats, and all betiding me keenly. I begin to bethink me is perhaps an examination about to commence?
I sit, and speak not to no-one.
After a period of say ten minutes when the shady lads n lasses are a-coming in to choose seats and lift pens, the idea comes into my mind to take a longsome stroll, say of fifteen minute's space, to kill time and ascertain the veracity of the concurrent programme.
Accordingly, I leave my seat wordless and traipse out.
And gaining the dark lowdown groundfloor corridor. I mope strolling, my draping schooltie and shoddy shirt, the perfect postmodern schoolboy, complete with hundred dollar perspex glasses. To add a shade of intellect.
And entering out I come to the packed entrance foyer. Which is packed with the hangout schoolkids and young student types slouching Angus Young-like in doorways bedraggled.
Friday 2 September 2011
Absolution
We'll say our goodbyes, then,
We'll "share a drink and step outside"
Onto the streets where once we dwelled,
And tonight we'll laugh at our deaths.
Let us follow each other home once again,
Ignoring the dreams that seep in like a tide,
Under the skies where the angel first fell,
Onto the rooftops where we first drew breath.
And if, weeping, yet laughing with hope, I could send
My soul to the bus-station where I first died,
I would cling to the sound of the clock-tower bell
In summers afar when youth's spirit was left
Forsaken, abandoned, in the jubilant glen
Where the ghosts of old autumns surrender and hide-
To the newness of winter's ethereal shell-
Ere our failure we sought its cold soul, and were blessed.
We'll "share a drink and step outside"
Onto the streets where once we dwelled,
And tonight we'll laugh at our deaths.
Let us follow each other home once again,
Ignoring the dreams that seep in like a tide,
Under the skies where the angel first fell,
Onto the rooftops where we first drew breath.
And if, weeping, yet laughing with hope, I could send
My soul to the bus-station where I first died,
I would cling to the sound of the clock-tower bell
In summers afar when youth's spirit was left
Forsaken, abandoned, in the jubilant glen
Where the ghosts of old autumns surrender and hide-
To the newness of winter's ethereal shell-
Ere our failure we sought its cold soul, and were blessed.
Wednesday 31 August 2011
Sick Autumn
Sick autumn when the leaves scattered are wet
And skitter in gutters. Pale autumn hiding
Cattarh coughs in traffic fumes, tragic colours,
Terminally ill. An old man stained with mucus
In a hospital bed, coughs like revved-up engines
Scars like scattered leaves, tears like autumn rain.
And it is the widow fainting, casting a veil
In the gutter, the driveway, the lonely sunslant.
Sad wilt of my heart that cast this dry leaf
Groundwards; an uprooted tree falls uselessly.
Autumnal rains make the silent boys heartsick,
Beside the plexi-glass window. Hairwet, eyes shrouded.
Big raindrops on my hairline. Frost at eight
In the morning. Even the sun at noon is sick,
Pale and wan. I should sleep all autumn,
And give birth to dreams. That's the only health.
Internal Combustion Engine. Splat of a Puddle.
And the Girls are Swearing. Downstairs the Door Slamming.
Scratch Acid
In the room, showing the girls my record collection.
The hardcore ones first. Guess this CD.
It's Bad Religion. A roar of guitar. And she sings "We're Only Gonna Die". (Next is Fugazi).
The CD's in the cardboard box.
Next we put on the tapes one by one. Guess the song.
(Songs from the White Album on side one). First the one that Ringo sings. Then Obladi Oblada.
Next, a cream-coloured tape. Scrawled on the front: "Acid". What are you listening to acid? She says pressing play.
(No acid rock just caramel coloured and candy coated dark songs.)
Play that one "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" suggests the girl.
Monday 29 August 2011
The Other Side of the Bridge
I have reached the other side of the bridge but I don't move from there. I am too lazy to penetrate up into the heartland, through the country, to home.
The Bridge as it's end is made of wooden slats. An Indiana Jones rope bridge. A checkpoint the traveller has to pass.
And on this precarious bridge I make my home. Bed down with my sleeping-bag. I and the lads. With me I have two boys, brothers of departed friends.
One I call "the Wee Man". He is about ten. Strong and snivel-nosed. Goes about bare-torsoed and wild-haired. The other is a mere babe. And his first words were curses. I constantly have to look out for him. Once when brushing a fly from his nose he almost toppled from the bridge. I had to grasp his plump little body.
(Sometimes I think, that when the campfire is extinguished for the night and the lads are asleep, I'll steal off up into the mainland and make for home.)
When they send the news media out to the bridge I call the lads "my brothers". They show us on the 6:30 news in grey footage.
The announcer says the state has failed us. But we are proud. We strap ourselves to the top of the bridge and shout. We wave our arms in defiance.
Roaring with pride on the bridge.
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