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.
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