Typical: No soon as people finally begin to heed the drought warnings then the clouds burst and it refuses to stop raining. The city is spared the worst of the weather by a long way, but still takes on a sodden fug. My woollen great coat gains a weight that bears down on my shoulders. All that water is not enough, for it merely splashes down on the brittle dry surfaces and washes away down the hillside leaving the same problem in its wake.
The trouble with trying to write a history of London in such a concise format as a blog ostensibly about something else is I’m forced to concentrate on a few specifics. Everything and everyone I miss out automatically take on a greater importance in my head than they had before I started. I find myself restricted to the grand sweep of history, the big concepts and personalities with which the reader already has a passing familiarity with. It is impossible to get truly underneath the surface, to explore the difference and keep the city alive.
Dickens recognised that it is the people which make the city, any city, unique. That’s why the best bits of his writing aren’t the moralising over the child labour or the indignation at the debtors prison and it certainly isn’t his plodding plotting or his inability to ever craft a satisfying ending as though he couldn’t actually bear to let go of his creations, but it is the deliciousness with which he speedily cuts his characters. My favourite is the man drinking in a bar running up a tab and when his friend questions his ability to pay he simply explains that he will not be able to pass by the establishment again. He then proceeds to real off an extensive list of other streets he can’t pass down for fear of encountering those who he owes, navigating a complex map of nooks and alleys swerving around the areas blocked off, occasionally sealing off whole areas, all carried inside his head. It’s a funny, believable well crafted character sketch as anecdote which tells more than it initially suggests.
Or at least I think it is my favourite Dickens’ piece. Only now I come to check I can’t remember where I read that particular vignette. So maybe I’m inserting a fiction within a fictional observation of true human nature, which makes it what? I don’t know.
Helpfully, this lack of memory sums up my failure to write this whole series. I’ve tried to capture too much in too few words and come up short. The scope is just too big to hold it all in my brain at once.
London is big monuments and crazy bars and rejuvenated streets which are the same as they’ve been for centuries. It has the triple headed beast of money, God and power stalking through her streets and the murky afterlife that is the Thames, but more than any of that it has Londoners, each with their own mystery. It is the white coated meat packers filling out the stout bars around Smithfields at seven o’clock in the morning and the unpredictability of those who sneak in with them. It’s the trendily bearded and be-glassed kids playing acoustic guitar on the local college steps in the morning sunshine. It’s the woman with only one eye waiting at the bus stop with tears on her cheek. The guy in the flat cap who smokes roll ups and drinks cans of Stella every evening between six and seven, no matter the weather, on the bench at the railway bridge. The young men passing a joint between them as they hover outside the vinyl shop opposite the Spanish bar. The city worker and the manual labourer sitting next to each other on the tube each mutually exhausted, the heads tilted towards each other, sharing the burden. It’s detail and it’s generalisation. It’s glancing down the railway arch filled alley and seeing sex pop kittens in a photo shoot, all knee high boots and tiny leather pants shimmering under the fluorescent white of the photographer’s light and then fifteen metres further along, on the other side of the railway line a distorted mirror image of the grey faced old too young woman with the pinkish stain down her hoodie who clutches her withered biceps where her veins itch and whispers some offer which can’t truly be heard. It’s the salt beef bagels on Brick Lane served out of Victorian-French-German terraced housing, culture shift overlaying culture shift. It’s the colour the smell and self-aware stereotype barking of the flower market. It’s the local community treasure hunts still going ahead despite the rain. It’s the way the Regents Canal shifts its sort of pretty as it runs west to east and back again. It’s the morning sun glistening off the incomplete tower block which overshadows the multi-lane intersection, the silence of the late night double-decker or the sudden shift from crowded to empty, from commerce to something akin to the seaside that the new docklands go through every weekend.
I could write about all of that, but actually Craig Taylor just did it better and besides I am out of time. It’s such a shame that Boris and Ken seem to only think it’s about them. They’re just missing the point and maybe that’s why I’m finding it so hard to care.
I got lost recently. Twice, in fact. This rarely happens anymore, especially when I’m not deliberately meandering around and trying to disorientate myself. It wasn’t even in a vague not being entirely sure what road I was on, but in an absolutely no idea where I am way. Twice. Once on the bike on the way to work and once on the way back from seeing Stuart Noah play guitar in Clerkenwell. I know these streets, but then, suddenly, I didn’t. It was as though, even if I’m not tired of London, it has had enough of me.
I got off the bike and back on the train with the rain. I get to immerse myself in books again, but for some reason I struggle to concentrate. I feel guilty about not cycling. I go to bed too late and outside it is raining so hard that when the water slops down between the slats of scaffolding round the back of the house and thwacks down on the concrete step it sounds like drama in the dead of the night.
Dickens, like me, would wander the city streets for inspiration. On one of his nightly journeys he found himself at Bedlam, the asylum. He was allowed to enter the hospital, presumably due to the fact he was arguably the most famous man in the Empire at the time, and there he watched how the patients’ behaviour changed with the rising of the moon. He claimed they were sedate and normal if somewhat dull witted by day, but at night they released themselves into the unconscious and let their particular fantasy world take hold. Dickens thought they were living waking dreams, as though we are all our true selves when asleep, but the mad bring those dreams to life and therefore embrace who they really are.
I feel angry with my childish response to writer’s block, to missing being on holiday, to simply missing. After a while I decide to pack Harry Noble back into his novel for the time being. I don’t need him in order to face myself anymore.
During the war, after the fall of Singapore, my Grandpa found himself stationed with the RAF bombing crews flying out of Jodphur and over Japanese held territory. The Maharaja was made an honorary commodore and consequently cared for his comrades, especially at Christmas. I have a card he sent offering seasonal greetings to the whole squadron. It shows a photo of the fort high above on the precipice of a mountain ridge, the sort that juts sharply vertical out of the plain, plateaus out and then drops back down again with the rest of the town gathering at the base like the hem of a clustered skirt.
Even with all our cultural expectations of India from novels and films and documentaries we were still amazed at how utterly different it is. Major cities don’t follow any of the European rules of structure, being instead precariously bound together by a cacophony of alleys, cows, Tuk-Tuk mechanised rickshaws, insistent horn blaring and endless chatter. If it seemed alien to reasonably well travelled thirty odd year olds in the twenty-first century I wonder what a Belfast boy, barely twenty, seventy years ago would have made of it all.
I look at the black and white photograph on the Christmas card. I appear to have taken the exact same photograph, only in colour. It shows the red-yellow hued dust of the fortifications and the shimmering blues of the houses below, painted so to ward off disease. I wish I could have shown him this picture.
Sometimes it’s okay to have a blank page.
I look up from my desk. The Sunday afternoon air is quiet and the pooling water glimmers on the terrace. The sun is shining after all.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
Thinking about London in India and back again (part 2 of 3)
‘David, are you all right?’ I look up from my desk at work, engrossed in what I was doing I hadn’t heard my colleague approach. ‘It’s just that you haven’t sworn under your breath all day.’
Back in London residue lingers, but as the days become weeks all the usual mess of life reasserts itself. My plans for time to be spent writing slip further into the distance, becoming increasingly more abstract - much like the words themselves. I want to write, but there always seems to be something else that needs to be done.
Every time I sit down at the computer the words refuse to come in anything other than the most disjointed, unsatisfactory fashion. Invariably it is too late at night and I’m trying to cram work into the day’s small corners. It’s not a successful tactic. I write and when I read it through I delete it all again. The page remains blank. I get up early on the weekend and try to make some sort of progress, but the harder I try the more it refuses to hang together and the more head-bangingly frustrated I become. Finally, I grind out a first draft of the first section. It’s okay as a statement of intent, a narration of Brutus of Troy’s discovery of Albion and the slaying of the giant race that lived here culminating with the tumbling of Gogamagog into the sea off the Cornish coast. I make some neat comparisons with the play Jerusalem which I saw, and loved, in January. Then a recounting of Boadicea’s failed uprising against the Romans and the questions of whether she’s really buried between platforms nine and ten of King’s Cross station. It’s okay, but it lacks any real spark. It’s flat and lifeless even when I’ve introduced Harry Noble and Charles Dickens’ soul has arrived in the post. There’s a bit about the election, but not much. I feel nowhere near as plugged into the news as when I wrote How to Lose an Electorate, but I don’t seem able to find the time to jack myself into the system for more than a cursorily glance.
I print a copy out and put it in my bag intending to do an edit one lunchtime. Two weeks later it has instead become a crumpled rumple with a small stain from an overripe apple on the front page. I can’t get any flow going.
I start to ride my bike into work every day hoping that, as well as getting me fitter, it will be a way of connecting me back to the city. The rhythmic pulse of peddling along the streets will draw the essence of London to me, will write copy for me. If only it worked like that. Instead, I concentrate on getting my journey time down which, given that I returned from India with a heavy cold, means every red light directed pause is spent hacking muck out of my lungs and heaving across the handle bars rather than observing the life around me. Plus it gets dull real quick. The most direct route in is straight up the Old Kent Road, a jink through pretty Borough, over Blackfriar’s Bridge and up Chancery Lane. The slog along three lanes of bus , lorry and lycra loon clogged New Cross, Peckham and Elephant is good fitness work, but it lacks charm. There’s little happening here beyond people looking to get elsewhere.
The work-out physically strengthens me up but seems to also mentally weaken me. I lose an hour’s reading every day. Unlike walking I can’t get lost in the ideas in my head. Too much attention has to be paid to cars and, more pertinently, psychotic racer bikers who attempt to mow me down.
It’s not just me finding the election uninspiring. The straight replay of Boris versus Ken with Brian lurking on the fringes and a slightly changed supporting chorus of minor parties fails to even fire up media normally desperate for something, anything to cover. I can’t stand the idea of the blonde mop topped self-important clown prince of politics winning a second term and yet the closer we get to polling day the more Ken seems an utterly redundant figure from the man who he had once been. Scandal after scandal, accusations of hypocritical tax dodging, anti-Semitism, false tears at a video of actors pretending to be Londoners as well as seemingly unworkable election promises make him increasingly unappealing. It’s like there’s an overwritten script in his head which plays out the drama of an election lacking it but there’s no director and no audience. Both Ken and Boris sculpt their campaigns around not being the other. The animosity builds until they engage in a slagging match stuck in a lift without minders in front of Green candidate Jenny Jones and even this absurdity play fails to inspire me or just about anyone else.
More and more I regret not saying something when I had the chance. A few months ago, when I walked past Boris, paused on the side of the road outside the strange bomb bunker-like Eisenhower Centre between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. I could have told him what an idiot I thought he was, how all his so-called achievements are either things he inherited from the previous administration or things that have made the city worse. Things like wasting million pounds on scrapping bendy buses and introducing new route-masters, the damp squib of the blue super cycle highways cut back beyond recognition from their original plan, the removal of the western congestion charge zone (leaving aside that I got a fine in its last week operational) and the petty point scoring banning of the drinking of alcohol on public transport like we’re a city of naughty children who just can’t behave like adults. He was perched on his bike, hair spurting through the slats on his helmet, shirt partially untucked, engaged in conversation with a pedestrian. Behind him a car presumably packed with flunkies and aides had illegally pulled over to the side of the road and a taxi was struggling to edge its way past. I should have said something, but I was late and so hurried onwards.
And Harry bloody Noble: what’s he doing in the middle of all of this? Why I am trying to shoehorn a fictional distortion of myself into a blog? Why am I crossing the lines in my writing from one sort to the other? He sits like the proverbial elephant in the room, always just out of sight, fiddling with his lighter and reminding me of my failure to get him read by a wider audience.
Failure. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Things I could have, should have, done better. Sooner. Quicker.
‘How does it feel to be back?’ someone else at work asks.
‘Oh you know. I’d rather still be out there,’ I reply because it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to say about holidays, isn’t it? But it’s true. Sort of.
In India I daydreamed about London, but in London, especially when at my desk trying to write about her, I ponder about India. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that the reason it’s so much easier to get out of bed at four o’clock in the morning on holiday, free of the wine fog, is because you’re off to do some amazingly different thing and as soon as there’s any sort of routine then the old complaints return. And it’s not as though I’ve found myself in a three week jaunt staying in middle class bed and breakfasts travelling around on a self-directed whistle-stop tour. (I often think if I did actually find myself I wouldn’t like me very much.) But there’s something nagging me about why it took me so long to go to India and how am I ever going to fit all things I want to do into the one life I’ve got.
Over a few weeks, I roughly map out the history of London I want to cover. The arrival of the Normans and the building of the Tower; the rise of the Globe theatre and the culturally creative space that the city creates; Samuel Pepys, the plague and the fire giving birth to a new city; the commercial centre of the docks and the long slow decline from warehouses and cottages to fragile pillars of glass sustained by ambition and borrowed money; Dickens’ own period, the Victorian age and the development of a modern city of public transport and integrated waterways and local politics but at the same time our modern inclination to reflect too positively on the period through some kind of strange Victoriana meta-fictional universe which keeps growing, where real and invented walk side by side re-imagined a hundred plus years later; the long twentieth century’s history of bombs from Zeppelins to the Blitz, from Irish dissidents to a mild July morning in 2005; and finally the endless circle of life and death which makes London both continually new and incapable of escaping its past.
I do some research around old childhood nursery rhymes, the strange phenomena of Springheeled Jack, Gog and Magog’s presence on the Lord Mayor’s coat of arms and the burial of Saxon King Lud under the Aldgate. Coincidentally it turns out to be the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth and so the BBC helpfully provides source material, not least Armando Iannuci’s documentary which I watch whilst ironing and pilfer ideas from. The theft itself discourages me, disgusted with my own lack of originality. The result of this procrastination is that it is all simultaneously too much and also not enough. I’m not even scratching the surface to get it right. There’s no way I’ll be able to accurately represent neither the past nor a flavour of Dickens’ writings in a few short hours of casual reading. But I try anyway and over a week grind out all eight chapters, telling myself that it’ll be okay. I’ll publish them in quick succession and that the different writing format of all at once will be an interesting experiment. The fact that I am avoiding the normal approach to a blog where instalments are followed by feedback which is similar to how Dickens wrote for magazines has a certain irony which is not lost on me.
And all the time, the first draft of the first chapter remains unedited in my bag.
‘I don’t think there’s even one decent sentence in any of this,’ I complain one evening and my girlfriend looks sympathetic, but I know I’m being self-indulgent. And so the page remains blank, the election is two or three weeks away and I am no closer to publishing anything. I am worried that either I have nothing to say or insufficient strength to find a way to say it. I am not sure which is worse.
Back in London residue lingers, but as the days become weeks all the usual mess of life reasserts itself. My plans for time to be spent writing slip further into the distance, becoming increasingly more abstract - much like the words themselves. I want to write, but there always seems to be something else that needs to be done.
Every time I sit down at the computer the words refuse to come in anything other than the most disjointed, unsatisfactory fashion. Invariably it is too late at night and I’m trying to cram work into the day’s small corners. It’s not a successful tactic. I write and when I read it through I delete it all again. The page remains blank. I get up early on the weekend and try to make some sort of progress, but the harder I try the more it refuses to hang together and the more head-bangingly frustrated I become. Finally, I grind out a first draft of the first section. It’s okay as a statement of intent, a narration of Brutus of Troy’s discovery of Albion and the slaying of the giant race that lived here culminating with the tumbling of Gogamagog into the sea off the Cornish coast. I make some neat comparisons with the play Jerusalem which I saw, and loved, in January. Then a recounting of Boadicea’s failed uprising against the Romans and the questions of whether she’s really buried between platforms nine and ten of King’s Cross station. It’s okay, but it lacks any real spark. It’s flat and lifeless even when I’ve introduced Harry Noble and Charles Dickens’ soul has arrived in the post. There’s a bit about the election, but not much. I feel nowhere near as plugged into the news as when I wrote How to Lose an Electorate, but I don’t seem able to find the time to jack myself into the system for more than a cursorily glance.
I print a copy out and put it in my bag intending to do an edit one lunchtime. Two weeks later it has instead become a crumpled rumple with a small stain from an overripe apple on the front page. I can’t get any flow going.
I start to ride my bike into work every day hoping that, as well as getting me fitter, it will be a way of connecting me back to the city. The rhythmic pulse of peddling along the streets will draw the essence of London to me, will write copy for me. If only it worked like that. Instead, I concentrate on getting my journey time down which, given that I returned from India with a heavy cold, means every red light directed pause is spent hacking muck out of my lungs and heaving across the handle bars rather than observing the life around me. Plus it gets dull real quick. The most direct route in is straight up the Old Kent Road, a jink through pretty Borough, over Blackfriar’s Bridge and up Chancery Lane. The slog along three lanes of bus , lorry and lycra loon clogged New Cross, Peckham and Elephant is good fitness work, but it lacks charm. There’s little happening here beyond people looking to get elsewhere.
The work-out physically strengthens me up but seems to also mentally weaken me. I lose an hour’s reading every day. Unlike walking I can’t get lost in the ideas in my head. Too much attention has to be paid to cars and, more pertinently, psychotic racer bikers who attempt to mow me down.
It’s not just me finding the election uninspiring. The straight replay of Boris versus Ken with Brian lurking on the fringes and a slightly changed supporting chorus of minor parties fails to even fire up media normally desperate for something, anything to cover. I can’t stand the idea of the blonde mop topped self-important clown prince of politics winning a second term and yet the closer we get to polling day the more Ken seems an utterly redundant figure from the man who he had once been. Scandal after scandal, accusations of hypocritical tax dodging, anti-Semitism, false tears at a video of actors pretending to be Londoners as well as seemingly unworkable election promises make him increasingly unappealing. It’s like there’s an overwritten script in his head which plays out the drama of an election lacking it but there’s no director and no audience. Both Ken and Boris sculpt their campaigns around not being the other. The animosity builds until they engage in a slagging match stuck in a lift without minders in front of Green candidate Jenny Jones and even this absurdity play fails to inspire me or just about anyone else.
More and more I regret not saying something when I had the chance. A few months ago, when I walked past Boris, paused on the side of the road outside the strange bomb bunker-like Eisenhower Centre between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. I could have told him what an idiot I thought he was, how all his so-called achievements are either things he inherited from the previous administration or things that have made the city worse. Things like wasting million pounds on scrapping bendy buses and introducing new route-masters, the damp squib of the blue super cycle highways cut back beyond recognition from their original plan, the removal of the western congestion charge zone (leaving aside that I got a fine in its last week operational) and the petty point scoring banning of the drinking of alcohol on public transport like we’re a city of naughty children who just can’t behave like adults. He was perched on his bike, hair spurting through the slats on his helmet, shirt partially untucked, engaged in conversation with a pedestrian. Behind him a car presumably packed with flunkies and aides had illegally pulled over to the side of the road and a taxi was struggling to edge its way past. I should have said something, but I was late and so hurried onwards.
And Harry bloody Noble: what’s he doing in the middle of all of this? Why I am trying to shoehorn a fictional distortion of myself into a blog? Why am I crossing the lines in my writing from one sort to the other? He sits like the proverbial elephant in the room, always just out of sight, fiddling with his lighter and reminding me of my failure to get him read by a wider audience.
Failure. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Things I could have, should have, done better. Sooner. Quicker.
‘How does it feel to be back?’ someone else at work asks.
‘Oh you know. I’d rather still be out there,’ I reply because it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to say about holidays, isn’t it? But it’s true. Sort of.
In India I daydreamed about London, but in London, especially when at my desk trying to write about her, I ponder about India. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that the reason it’s so much easier to get out of bed at four o’clock in the morning on holiday, free of the wine fog, is because you’re off to do some amazingly different thing and as soon as there’s any sort of routine then the old complaints return. And it’s not as though I’ve found myself in a three week jaunt staying in middle class bed and breakfasts travelling around on a self-directed whistle-stop tour. (I often think if I did actually find myself I wouldn’t like me very much.) But there’s something nagging me about why it took me so long to go to India and how am I ever going to fit all things I want to do into the one life I’ve got.
Over a few weeks, I roughly map out the history of London I want to cover. The arrival of the Normans and the building of the Tower; the rise of the Globe theatre and the culturally creative space that the city creates; Samuel Pepys, the plague and the fire giving birth to a new city; the commercial centre of the docks and the long slow decline from warehouses and cottages to fragile pillars of glass sustained by ambition and borrowed money; Dickens’ own period, the Victorian age and the development of a modern city of public transport and integrated waterways and local politics but at the same time our modern inclination to reflect too positively on the period through some kind of strange Victoriana meta-fictional universe which keeps growing, where real and invented walk side by side re-imagined a hundred plus years later; the long twentieth century’s history of bombs from Zeppelins to the Blitz, from Irish dissidents to a mild July morning in 2005; and finally the endless circle of life and death which makes London both continually new and incapable of escaping its past.
I do some research around old childhood nursery rhymes, the strange phenomena of Springheeled Jack, Gog and Magog’s presence on the Lord Mayor’s coat of arms and the burial of Saxon King Lud under the Aldgate. Coincidentally it turns out to be the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth and so the BBC helpfully provides source material, not least Armando Iannuci’s documentary which I watch whilst ironing and pilfer ideas from. The theft itself discourages me, disgusted with my own lack of originality. The result of this procrastination is that it is all simultaneously too much and also not enough. I’m not even scratching the surface to get it right. There’s no way I’ll be able to accurately represent neither the past nor a flavour of Dickens’ writings in a few short hours of casual reading. But I try anyway and over a week grind out all eight chapters, telling myself that it’ll be okay. I’ll publish them in quick succession and that the different writing format of all at once will be an interesting experiment. The fact that I am avoiding the normal approach to a blog where instalments are followed by feedback which is similar to how Dickens wrote for magazines has a certain irony which is not lost on me.
And all the time, the first draft of the first chapter remains unedited in my bag.
‘I don’t think there’s even one decent sentence in any of this,’ I complain one evening and my girlfriend looks sympathetic, but I know I’m being self-indulgent. And so the page remains blank, the election is two or three weeks away and I am no closer to publishing anything. I am worried that either I have nothing to say or insufficient strength to find a way to say it. I am not sure which is worse.
Monday, 16 April 2012
Thinking about London in India and back again (part 1 of 3)
I have been staring at a blank page for days.
Two months ago, we rattle into Satna, in North Eastern India, just as dawn was breaking. The station was almost deserted in this relatively small and obscure town, a place where anyone arriving and no involved in the production of cement is likely to be on their way to somewhere else, either one of the neighbouring tiger reserves or further still to Kharajuro’s collection of early medieval temples adorned with statues showing elaborate sexual aerobics. We transfer from train to taxi with some rudimentary bartering and an insistence that we do know where we want to go. Outside it is surprisingly cold. I am wearing a fleece and still the iced air pricks at my torso. There is a light frost on the car’s windscreen which needs to be cleared before we can set off with a gentle rock across the poorly paved roads, lolloping with the potholes and uneven camber. The sunlight is turning vibrant orange as it splinters across the horizon bathing the distant trees and mountains in its light. Along the roadside, amongst the litter, mooching dogs and cow dung, men squat down and cluster around fires of burning plastic. Polythene mixed with wood kindling is particularly popular for the speed with which it ignites and the intensity of its burn. They wear cotton trousers holing along the stitching and shirts with burn marks at the cuffs. I feel guilty to be so wrapped up and in a car no less. The driver wears a woollen hat, scarf and jacket the whole way. The heaters don’t appear to work so he wipes condensation from the inside of the windscreen where it clusters around the crack that runs from top to bottom. Between Mumbai pop songs played through the tinny speaker of his mobile phone, he makes idle conversation based around the tourism leaflets which he pulls from under his seat. My girlfriend rests her head on my shoulder and sleeps. I look out of the window and watch the sun continues to rise over the landscape of huts raised on canes above the fields, uniformed school children with the universal trudge but along a road in the middle of nowhere and everywhere people, in the gutter, waiting for passing work.
Outside is a mesmerising landscape but inside my head I am thinking about London.
I am thinking about writing. Specifically I am thinking about what I want to post on davidmarstonwrites. I was disappointed with the entries of late 2011. They lacked cohesion. They seemed too forced, too for the sake of it. Then I had an extremely productive fiction writing spell through January. The blog has been ignored and deserved something special to reignite it.
In May, the London Mayoral elections will take place. I think I write well about London and so it seems an easy win to write about the city, about different areas to before. I began to play around with different ideas and models in my head during the long car journey.
We pass a train of women in brightly coloured saris which match the breaking sun. They carry almighty trunks of timber atop their heads. This chain is spread out by the length of the wood and the stamina of the women. The older and younger clustering at the back whilst the fitter ones stalk ahead. Every time I think we’ve passed them all another appears a hundred metres or so down the road, her hefty load perfectly balanced on her crown.
I consider walking or cycling the north and south circulars combined, or as closely as I can where they become multi-lane arteries, to tell of what I see; to try and understand how living so close to a main road which doesn’t even express you in or out of the city but just ensnares it would affect people. I quickly give up on that idea as not only mildly unworkable but also far too much like a rehash Iain Sinclairs’s London Orbital.
Outside, as we stretched into mid-morning, the upturned end of a school bus protrudes out of a ditch. A scattering of men stand around scratching their heads and looking ponderous, as though it were nothing more than a minor inconvenience. The driver mutters something about taxis being better than buses. There is a shape underneath a blanket on the roadside. We don’t stop.
I consider taking individual areas of London which have significance for me and writing how they came to be and what they mean to me. I think about Bloomsbury, Maida Vale, Highbury, Greenwich, consciously trying to steer away from anywhere I’ve covered before, but I struggle to find enough places with anything more than a tenuous connection. I bore myself.
The driver pulls over at a small roadside shrine. A squat grey stone structure with higgled minarets of towers which a grey bearded man sitting cross legged outside. The old man is wrapped in blankets and he sways steadily as though the rhythmic motion warms him under the spotlight of sun. The driver hands over some small coins as an offering and in exchange he receives a coconut. The shell is cracked on the kerbside, the milk drained into a cup and the sweet white flesh passed through the open window. The driver munches, making satisfied noises, before offering some to us. I am starving having not eaten properly the day before due to a stomach upset, but decline as my gut still throbs pathetically. My girlfriend accepts and happily chews as we crawl up a tightly looping snake pass across the mountains.
History, I think to myself. We are absorbing ourselves in Indian history, why don’t I do the same for London. A big sweeping macro history, from the earliest legends to the twenty-first century. A history of life and death in the city. I still need a hook, a narrative device to transport the reader through time. The obvious solution is to mirror it with the election race, draw comparisons with policies and the inevitable circus performances that typify a campaign for office with the significant twists and turns in the city’s lifetime. That’s not bad, it’s interesting, but it lacks emotion. I need something else, something more personal. I’m not sure where I am in it all.
Ten days later and I am sitting on a balcony overlooking the Udaipurian hills. My skin is dusty from a dry hike during the heat of the day, through forest and farmland, past a sacred cave shrine, the tumbled down village schools and the distant roar of trail bikes in Cheetah country. The scene is calm. Below me stretches out straw coloured grasses cut with dirt tracks along which goats are herded with an accompanying jingle of the bells. The blaze of the sun, suddenly much warmer than in Satna, has dipped behind the opposite hill’s summit, a star blacked out by life.
I am reading Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a brick of a novel that’s been lurking around on my bookshelves for years and only by restricting myself to three similarly massive novels, two of which I’ve already finished, have I forced myself to finally dive on in. I’ve never really got on that well with Dickens, finding his voice enjoyable enough but his plotting is somewhat meandering, as though the original monthly instalments format forced him into unnecessary padding whilst he figured out where to go next or to fill up the duration of his contract. I bought Bleak House from a small junk shop in Honor Oak Park owned by a withered spider of an old man in a beige shop coat who, upon discovering me rummaging through the box of books in the corner, tried to sell me more “racey” titles he kept under the counter. I took the Dickens largely just to be able to leave.
Sitting in the evening sun, I place the paperback face down on the metal table and look out at the view again. It’s distracting me from reading, but then so are the thoughts rattling around the back of my head. Davidmarstonwrites, if it is about anything, is about writing and so I need a writing link to the history of London. Many writers set their novels in London, but few can be called quintessentially Londinium except perhaps Dickens. I sighed. I was going to have to brush up on the canon, but I still needed a route in to Charles. What would a writer I don’t terribly care for be doing in the background all the time?
The following day we visit a museum in Udaipur filled with fragments from archaeological digs. I read something I now can’t quite recall, something about receptacles for the soul. A way of storing one after death.
I look up and catch a glimpse of myself in a glass cabinet. Wearing sunglasses I look how I always imagine Harry Noble, the lead character of my still unpublished novel You’ll Never be Joe Strummer, looks. Harry started off as a caricature of myself, a way for me to express my disdain at the world without it actually being me. The longer I worked with him, the more real he became until he gained his own life and voice. He did and said things even at my most extreme I would never countenance, but he always looked a bit like me just with permanently affixed shades.
Ideas rush into place. I’ll write a history of London. I’ll explore the city with a fictional version of myself inexplicably manifest carrying a glass vessel which contains the soul of Charles Dickens whilst also passing commentary of the mayoral election. Genius, I smugly think. That will be a doddle.
Six weeks after returning to London it is late at night and the page is still blank.
Two months ago, we rattle into Satna, in North Eastern India, just as dawn was breaking. The station was almost deserted in this relatively small and obscure town, a place where anyone arriving and no involved in the production of cement is likely to be on their way to somewhere else, either one of the neighbouring tiger reserves or further still to Kharajuro’s collection of early medieval temples adorned with statues showing elaborate sexual aerobics. We transfer from train to taxi with some rudimentary bartering and an insistence that we do know where we want to go. Outside it is surprisingly cold. I am wearing a fleece and still the iced air pricks at my torso. There is a light frost on the car’s windscreen which needs to be cleared before we can set off with a gentle rock across the poorly paved roads, lolloping with the potholes and uneven camber. The sunlight is turning vibrant orange as it splinters across the horizon bathing the distant trees and mountains in its light. Along the roadside, amongst the litter, mooching dogs and cow dung, men squat down and cluster around fires of burning plastic. Polythene mixed with wood kindling is particularly popular for the speed with which it ignites and the intensity of its burn. They wear cotton trousers holing along the stitching and shirts with burn marks at the cuffs. I feel guilty to be so wrapped up and in a car no less. The driver wears a woollen hat, scarf and jacket the whole way. The heaters don’t appear to work so he wipes condensation from the inside of the windscreen where it clusters around the crack that runs from top to bottom. Between Mumbai pop songs played through the tinny speaker of his mobile phone, he makes idle conversation based around the tourism leaflets which he pulls from under his seat. My girlfriend rests her head on my shoulder and sleeps. I look out of the window and watch the sun continues to rise over the landscape of huts raised on canes above the fields, uniformed school children with the universal trudge but along a road in the middle of nowhere and everywhere people, in the gutter, waiting for passing work.
Outside is a mesmerising landscape but inside my head I am thinking about London.
I am thinking about writing. Specifically I am thinking about what I want to post on davidmarstonwrites. I was disappointed with the entries of late 2011. They lacked cohesion. They seemed too forced, too for the sake of it. Then I had an extremely productive fiction writing spell through January. The blog has been ignored and deserved something special to reignite it.
In May, the London Mayoral elections will take place. I think I write well about London and so it seems an easy win to write about the city, about different areas to before. I began to play around with different ideas and models in my head during the long car journey.
We pass a train of women in brightly coloured saris which match the breaking sun. They carry almighty trunks of timber atop their heads. This chain is spread out by the length of the wood and the stamina of the women. The older and younger clustering at the back whilst the fitter ones stalk ahead. Every time I think we’ve passed them all another appears a hundred metres or so down the road, her hefty load perfectly balanced on her crown.
I consider walking or cycling the north and south circulars combined, or as closely as I can where they become multi-lane arteries, to tell of what I see; to try and understand how living so close to a main road which doesn’t even express you in or out of the city but just ensnares it would affect people. I quickly give up on that idea as not only mildly unworkable but also far too much like a rehash Iain Sinclairs’s London Orbital.
Outside, as we stretched into mid-morning, the upturned end of a school bus protrudes out of a ditch. A scattering of men stand around scratching their heads and looking ponderous, as though it were nothing more than a minor inconvenience. The driver mutters something about taxis being better than buses. There is a shape underneath a blanket on the roadside. We don’t stop.
I consider taking individual areas of London which have significance for me and writing how they came to be and what they mean to me. I think about Bloomsbury, Maida Vale, Highbury, Greenwich, consciously trying to steer away from anywhere I’ve covered before, but I struggle to find enough places with anything more than a tenuous connection. I bore myself.
The driver pulls over at a small roadside shrine. A squat grey stone structure with higgled minarets of towers which a grey bearded man sitting cross legged outside. The old man is wrapped in blankets and he sways steadily as though the rhythmic motion warms him under the spotlight of sun. The driver hands over some small coins as an offering and in exchange he receives a coconut. The shell is cracked on the kerbside, the milk drained into a cup and the sweet white flesh passed through the open window. The driver munches, making satisfied noises, before offering some to us. I am starving having not eaten properly the day before due to a stomach upset, but decline as my gut still throbs pathetically. My girlfriend accepts and happily chews as we crawl up a tightly looping snake pass across the mountains.
History, I think to myself. We are absorbing ourselves in Indian history, why don’t I do the same for London. A big sweeping macro history, from the earliest legends to the twenty-first century. A history of life and death in the city. I still need a hook, a narrative device to transport the reader through time. The obvious solution is to mirror it with the election race, draw comparisons with policies and the inevitable circus performances that typify a campaign for office with the significant twists and turns in the city’s lifetime. That’s not bad, it’s interesting, but it lacks emotion. I need something else, something more personal. I’m not sure where I am in it all.
Ten days later and I am sitting on a balcony overlooking the Udaipurian hills. My skin is dusty from a dry hike during the heat of the day, through forest and farmland, past a sacred cave shrine, the tumbled down village schools and the distant roar of trail bikes in Cheetah country. The scene is calm. Below me stretches out straw coloured grasses cut with dirt tracks along which goats are herded with an accompanying jingle of the bells. The blaze of the sun, suddenly much warmer than in Satna, has dipped behind the opposite hill’s summit, a star blacked out by life.
I am reading Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a brick of a novel that’s been lurking around on my bookshelves for years and only by restricting myself to three similarly massive novels, two of which I’ve already finished, have I forced myself to finally dive on in. I’ve never really got on that well with Dickens, finding his voice enjoyable enough but his plotting is somewhat meandering, as though the original monthly instalments format forced him into unnecessary padding whilst he figured out where to go next or to fill up the duration of his contract. I bought Bleak House from a small junk shop in Honor Oak Park owned by a withered spider of an old man in a beige shop coat who, upon discovering me rummaging through the box of books in the corner, tried to sell me more “racey” titles he kept under the counter. I took the Dickens largely just to be able to leave.
Sitting in the evening sun, I place the paperback face down on the metal table and look out at the view again. It’s distracting me from reading, but then so are the thoughts rattling around the back of my head. Davidmarstonwrites, if it is about anything, is about writing and so I need a writing link to the history of London. Many writers set their novels in London, but few can be called quintessentially Londinium except perhaps Dickens. I sighed. I was going to have to brush up on the canon, but I still needed a route in to Charles. What would a writer I don’t terribly care for be doing in the background all the time?
The following day we visit a museum in Udaipur filled with fragments from archaeological digs. I read something I now can’t quite recall, something about receptacles for the soul. A way of storing one after death.
I look up and catch a glimpse of myself in a glass cabinet. Wearing sunglasses I look how I always imagine Harry Noble, the lead character of my still unpublished novel You’ll Never be Joe Strummer, looks. Harry started off as a caricature of myself, a way for me to express my disdain at the world without it actually being me. The longer I worked with him, the more real he became until he gained his own life and voice. He did and said things even at my most extreme I would never countenance, but he always looked a bit like me just with permanently affixed shades.
Ideas rush into place. I’ll write a history of London. I’ll explore the city with a fictional version of myself inexplicably manifest carrying a glass vessel which contains the soul of Charles Dickens whilst also passing commentary of the mayoral election. Genius, I smugly think. That will be a doddle.
Six weeks after returning to London it is late at night and the page is still blank.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
If not exactly goodbye then something sort of like it.
Back in November I was in the Camden Roundhouse watching The Low Anthem play a gig. My leather jacket was on the floor, between my feet, its pockets stretched with various books and accessories. The Low Anthem played their succulent music, like something which drifted out of the still heart of the tornado in the dust bowl, and beer dripped off my fingers onto my jacket below. I didn’t care. It could take it. The band encouraged us to take out our mobile phones and ring the person next to us, connect the lines and then let the static fill the air like drowning butterflies. It was surprisingly heartbreaking: the packed room flooded with the light of a thousand screens and a disjointed warbling which rebounded in from outer space.
By January I am sitting in the kitchen writing at the desk in the corner using a borrowed laptop. The security light, newly installed after the burglary, in the couch of the L between the kitchen and the bedroom isn’t working properly. The sensor reacts to a falling leaf or a farting ant and the patio is engulfed in an explosion of flood lighting. Whoompf, just like a stadium being used for a Reebok advert.
It’s distracting.
I glance, again, to the window and the neon roars across the bushes making them look super-real, like something back-dropped in a film. In the foreground my leather jacket is folded haphazardly across the back of one of the chairs.
It needs to be buried.
It needs the last rites.
I don’t know about you but I have an avatar in my head; a representation of myself which is my own mental shorthand for, well, for me. My thought patterns super-impose this version of myself into the situations covered by my internal monologue, whether the narrative reflects what is actually happening outside my head or is just a random collection of fantasised thoughts, the maybe and the what ifs, it’s never actually me, just a representation. Do you do this, or am I just crazy?
When I was younger, it was a cartoon drawing: Black doc martin boots, black jeans, black t-shirt, that old grey trenchcoat I used to wear pretending I was a goth John Constantine, long hair, darker than it really is, draped forward across my face, big dark glasses. Pillock. But for a fourteen year old moment it felt cool and that was kind of how I stayed in my head for too long.
At some point, I don’t know when, I, the artificial me, changed. I became less cartoon, less animate, more like a photo dropped in for the moment, briefly filling a space where David should exist. Because this is a photo, it is not a full body image. Instead, I am sitting, turning my neck to look to the camera. I think there is a pint, or maybe a whisky in my hand. Occasionally this disappears. It is sunny in the background. My mouth is open in a half-laugh-smile. I wear, I think, a grey shirt with the top couple of buttons undone and an old black leather jacket.
It is part of me, but now it is dead.
It has, depending on who you ask, been dead for some time, but recently I finally conceded that it was better to put it out its misery. Ratted with holes and faded scuffs, refusing to dry properly when rained heavily upon it is in a similar state to the sheep from which it borrow its skin. And yet it still smells of my life. It still feels alive as I conduct an autopsy and empty the pockets of ticket stubs and pens and scraps of paper with notes and bar names scrawled across, an old book mark, a lighter: all the things of life.
But that’s okay. In December I found a new leather jacket, by which I mean not that I found one in the street, but that I bought one. From a market stall. It’s brown and a different cut, longer and it’s more shiny and stiffer, although that will fade with time. I like it, but I still need the old one. It is hard to say goodbye.
Girls have, in equal measure, either loved or hated that jacket, and even those who ended up hating it, mostly, saw its charm for a little while. For the coat is me. It is infused with my character and growth from the long decade of just twenty to thirty-two and a half. So many drinks, late night buses to who knows where, dropped down the back of pub chairs, the floors of gigs, used as a pillow in someone’s bathtub. At least once I woke up in my old flat, went to buy my paper and in the Saturday drizzle wondered why I wasn’t wearing my coat, became convinced I’d left it in a pub round the back of Wardour Street and eventually found it hanging off the showerhead. It’s a mischievous little beast which likes to get around and into scrapes with little regard for sleep or responsibility. Wearing that coat I am rarely tired; it’s like a jolt of amphetamines direct into my spine. It makes me me.
But as I’ve previously discussed, it is perhaps time to grow up and move into a new decade, a shorter one no doubt, post youth and pre middle age; young manhood, perhaps, or actually as I type this on a Friday night having cried off post-work drinks or a birthday party for a friend of my girlfriend’s because I am crankily tired and have instead gone home to rewrites parts of lost novels, hit the security light with a broom until it fucks off and dies and do my shitting ironing, any pretence at youth is a fallacy that should be shunned.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe, he says admiring himself in the mirror, there is one more leather jacket in me before I look like too old to be trying so hard.
Still, the old faithful, shep, my drinking buddy, my saviour, deserves something more, a retirement home of sorts. I could put in on ebay, I think, or gumtree but closer inspection of the holes shows the stuffing rapidly escaping and I just can’t imagine anyone paying money for it. I could give it away on freecycle. I look again at its strange shapeness, the warped form from stuffing an 800 page paperback novel in the inside pocket, two cans of ale and an a-z in the hip pockets. It looks like a tiger has played with it for too long. Ah, I could just abandon it at a bus stop, somewhere random, near the sort of quality pub from which people catch the bus at times when a coat might come in useful. One last glorious run, a lap of honour around the London ale-lines and after that, who knows, a happy life frolicking on a farm somewhere.
Poompf, the security light illuminates the back of the house again, shrouding me in a golden glow and bringing me back into the present, out of my cipher filled monologue imagination.
‘Isn’t that just kind of littering?’ asks my girlfriend, getting, as usual, the best lines.
She’s got a point. Into the rubbish it goes.
But not just yet. Soon. Soon. Just another couple of weeks, who knows when it might be needed again?
By January I am sitting in the kitchen writing at the desk in the corner using a borrowed laptop. The security light, newly installed after the burglary, in the couch of the L between the kitchen and the bedroom isn’t working properly. The sensor reacts to a falling leaf or a farting ant and the patio is engulfed in an explosion of flood lighting. Whoompf, just like a stadium being used for a Reebok advert.
It’s distracting.
I glance, again, to the window and the neon roars across the bushes making them look super-real, like something back-dropped in a film. In the foreground my leather jacket is folded haphazardly across the back of one of the chairs.
It needs to be buried.
It needs the last rites.
I don’t know about you but I have an avatar in my head; a representation of myself which is my own mental shorthand for, well, for me. My thought patterns super-impose this version of myself into the situations covered by my internal monologue, whether the narrative reflects what is actually happening outside my head or is just a random collection of fantasised thoughts, the maybe and the what ifs, it’s never actually me, just a representation. Do you do this, or am I just crazy?
When I was younger, it was a cartoon drawing: Black doc martin boots, black jeans, black t-shirt, that old grey trenchcoat I used to wear pretending I was a goth John Constantine, long hair, darker than it really is, draped forward across my face, big dark glasses. Pillock. But for a fourteen year old moment it felt cool and that was kind of how I stayed in my head for too long.
At some point, I don’t know when, I, the artificial me, changed. I became less cartoon, less animate, more like a photo dropped in for the moment, briefly filling a space where David should exist. Because this is a photo, it is not a full body image. Instead, I am sitting, turning my neck to look to the camera. I think there is a pint, or maybe a whisky in my hand. Occasionally this disappears. It is sunny in the background. My mouth is open in a half-laugh-smile. I wear, I think, a grey shirt with the top couple of buttons undone and an old black leather jacket.
It is part of me, but now it is dead.
It has, depending on who you ask, been dead for some time, but recently I finally conceded that it was better to put it out its misery. Ratted with holes and faded scuffs, refusing to dry properly when rained heavily upon it is in a similar state to the sheep from which it borrow its skin. And yet it still smells of my life. It still feels alive as I conduct an autopsy and empty the pockets of ticket stubs and pens and scraps of paper with notes and bar names scrawled across, an old book mark, a lighter: all the things of life.
But that’s okay. In December I found a new leather jacket, by which I mean not that I found one in the street, but that I bought one. From a market stall. It’s brown and a different cut, longer and it’s more shiny and stiffer, although that will fade with time. I like it, but I still need the old one. It is hard to say goodbye.
Girls have, in equal measure, either loved or hated that jacket, and even those who ended up hating it, mostly, saw its charm for a little while. For the coat is me. It is infused with my character and growth from the long decade of just twenty to thirty-two and a half. So many drinks, late night buses to who knows where, dropped down the back of pub chairs, the floors of gigs, used as a pillow in someone’s bathtub. At least once I woke up in my old flat, went to buy my paper and in the Saturday drizzle wondered why I wasn’t wearing my coat, became convinced I’d left it in a pub round the back of Wardour Street and eventually found it hanging off the showerhead. It’s a mischievous little beast which likes to get around and into scrapes with little regard for sleep or responsibility. Wearing that coat I am rarely tired; it’s like a jolt of amphetamines direct into my spine. It makes me me.
But as I’ve previously discussed, it is perhaps time to grow up and move into a new decade, a shorter one no doubt, post youth and pre middle age; young manhood, perhaps, or actually as I type this on a Friday night having cried off post-work drinks or a birthday party for a friend of my girlfriend’s because I am crankily tired and have instead gone home to rewrites parts of lost novels, hit the security light with a broom until it fucks off and dies and do my shitting ironing, any pretence at youth is a fallacy that should be shunned.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe, he says admiring himself in the mirror, there is one more leather jacket in me before I look like too old to be trying so hard.
Still, the old faithful, shep, my drinking buddy, my saviour, deserves something more, a retirement home of sorts. I could put in on ebay, I think, or gumtree but closer inspection of the holes shows the stuffing rapidly escaping and I just can’t imagine anyone paying money for it. I could give it away on freecycle. I look again at its strange shapeness, the warped form from stuffing an 800 page paperback novel in the inside pocket, two cans of ale and an a-z in the hip pockets. It looks like a tiger has played with it for too long. Ah, I could just abandon it at a bus stop, somewhere random, near the sort of quality pub from which people catch the bus at times when a coat might come in useful. One last glorious run, a lap of honour around the London ale-lines and after that, who knows, a happy life frolicking on a farm somewhere.
Poompf, the security light illuminates the back of the house again, shrouding me in a golden glow and bringing me back into the present, out of my cipher filled monologue imagination.
‘Isn’t that just kind of littering?’ asks my girlfriend, getting, as usual, the best lines.
She’s got a point. Into the rubbish it goes.
But not just yet. Soon. Soon. Just another couple of weeks, who knows when it might be needed again?
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Write About
I meant to write this over a month ago. Maybe it would have had more bite, more relevance had I written it immediately after the fact. Maybe, but it also would have been different. I would have written it, but typing made my fingers bleed.
At a conference I was organising, whilst opening a box of delegate packs at seven o’clock in the morning, I shredded the tips of my fingers open on the plastic coated card. I spent an hour walking around holding my right hand with the fingers in the air as thick red droplets ran down over my nails and into the pool of my palm.
Afterwards typing split the still fresh scars open; writing, literally, made me bleed.
I wanted to use the blog to voice some frustration, to vent some anger. After the events at the end of the God Reflex, my brief moment of tantrum thrown back in the face of exhaustion, I felt like I’d won. In the end, I overcome and popped out the other end if not quite shiny and new then at least not broken and beaten.
So, Friday evening, I went for a couple of beers. But, tired as I was, it wasn’t long before my heavy eyelids demanded to be closed. I made my excuses and headed for the train station. At Charing Cross, perhaps through mild tipsyness, perhaps through bleary vision, I managed to board a fast train to Sevenoaks by mistake.
Thirty minutes later and the next train back into town was yet another thirty minutes. I kicked my heels on the platform and wrapped myself deep in my greatcoat against the icy wind that cut across the top of the Kentish hillocks. All the time a growing tiredness and need to be at home exhibited itself through grumbling aloud to myself and incessant pacing back and forth punctuated by loud exhalations of air as the minutes refused to speed up. My girlfriend was out for dinner with some friends, so I just wanted to grab some food, have another beer and watch the tv, a rare lazy indulgence. Not too much to ask, surely?
Eventually, over two hours after I’d left Bloomsbury, I made my way down the Lewisham Way towards home. I felt out of sorts. Something felt wrong, a nagging at my guts like I should have known better.
I unlocked the door, not before dropping my keys and faffing around in the dark. Opposite the door from the communal hall is our bedroom. We always leave the door open, but there it was: closed. I thought ‘that’s odd, maybe she’s come home and gone to bed already.’
Gingerly I pushed the door. ‘Hun?’ I said conscious of a chill in the air and scattered shadows in the murk. Snapping on the light I saw the French windows were ajar and every drawer and cupboard thrown open. The bolts and locks in the windows had been forced through the frame, splintering the wood like a wound in the building’s fabric, like my fingers would be three days later. The bottom fell out of my stomach, a surging vacuum ripped everything downwards and a rush of nausea replaced it.
I ran to the kitchen where my laptop should have been. It wasn’t.
‘Fuck, no!’ I shouted, a real deafening bellow that echoed through the empty flat.
I rang the police and then began to try and gauge what else was gone. Her laptop too. Surely her jewelry, although I couldn’t be sure what there was. On the floor were some ipod headphones still curled neatly in a spool but no ipod. Cameras. Other things I wouldn’t notice for days. Then came a second bungee plummet for my stomach, a headlong dive into the ravine with air pressing against your eyeballs and then the snapping jerk backwards and the spine cracking flick through the air: my back-up hard-drive.
‘No!’ I properly screamed that time, unable to control my rage. The new neighbour who’d just moved in upstairs must have wondered who was killing whom.
The police came. My girlfriend’s phone ran out of battery before I could reach her. I paced the flat nervously, back and forth unsure what to do with myself; incapable of even sitting down, not knowing what I could possibly say when she came home.
At last, a key turned in the front door and I went to meet her in the darkened corrider.
I was somewhat depressed for days afterwards. The combination of the violation, my natural tendency towards melancholy, all those photo memories disappeared, all that work. The hours and hours and sacrifices and wrenching stuff from deep inside, all gone, all for nothing. All a waste. Me, a waste.
Writing had made me bleed in more than one way.
That fury was what I wanted to spleen if I’d had a computer, if my fingers hadn’t cracked open every time they stuck a keyboard at work.
Then, on the journey away for Christmas, away from the damage, away to forget in the car they inexplicably didn’t take, Belle and Sebastian sang on the stereo.
“I know a spell
That would make you help
Write about love, it could be in any tense
But it must make sense”
I looked across at her, dozing in the half-lit passenger seat. Ahead the black road was punctuated by neon lights dancing away over the rolling hillsides. I smiled both to myself and to her. Beloved. That was what I would do, not write about hate and anger and frustration and despair, but write about love. After all, what else is there of any worth? Write about love and love by writing.
At a conference I was organising, whilst opening a box of delegate packs at seven o’clock in the morning, I shredded the tips of my fingers open on the plastic coated card. I spent an hour walking around holding my right hand with the fingers in the air as thick red droplets ran down over my nails and into the pool of my palm.
Afterwards typing split the still fresh scars open; writing, literally, made me bleed.
I wanted to use the blog to voice some frustration, to vent some anger. After the events at the end of the God Reflex, my brief moment of tantrum thrown back in the face of exhaustion, I felt like I’d won. In the end, I overcome and popped out the other end if not quite shiny and new then at least not broken and beaten.
So, Friday evening, I went for a couple of beers. But, tired as I was, it wasn’t long before my heavy eyelids demanded to be closed. I made my excuses and headed for the train station. At Charing Cross, perhaps through mild tipsyness, perhaps through bleary vision, I managed to board a fast train to Sevenoaks by mistake.
Thirty minutes later and the next train back into town was yet another thirty minutes. I kicked my heels on the platform and wrapped myself deep in my greatcoat against the icy wind that cut across the top of the Kentish hillocks. All the time a growing tiredness and need to be at home exhibited itself through grumbling aloud to myself and incessant pacing back and forth punctuated by loud exhalations of air as the minutes refused to speed up. My girlfriend was out for dinner with some friends, so I just wanted to grab some food, have another beer and watch the tv, a rare lazy indulgence. Not too much to ask, surely?
Eventually, over two hours after I’d left Bloomsbury, I made my way down the Lewisham Way towards home. I felt out of sorts. Something felt wrong, a nagging at my guts like I should have known better.
I unlocked the door, not before dropping my keys and faffing around in the dark. Opposite the door from the communal hall is our bedroom. We always leave the door open, but there it was: closed. I thought ‘that’s odd, maybe she’s come home and gone to bed already.’
Gingerly I pushed the door. ‘Hun?’ I said conscious of a chill in the air and scattered shadows in the murk. Snapping on the light I saw the French windows were ajar and every drawer and cupboard thrown open. The bolts and locks in the windows had been forced through the frame, splintering the wood like a wound in the building’s fabric, like my fingers would be three days later. The bottom fell out of my stomach, a surging vacuum ripped everything downwards and a rush of nausea replaced it.
I ran to the kitchen where my laptop should have been. It wasn’t.
‘Fuck, no!’ I shouted, a real deafening bellow that echoed through the empty flat.
I rang the police and then began to try and gauge what else was gone. Her laptop too. Surely her jewelry, although I couldn’t be sure what there was. On the floor were some ipod headphones still curled neatly in a spool but no ipod. Cameras. Other things I wouldn’t notice for days. Then came a second bungee plummet for my stomach, a headlong dive into the ravine with air pressing against your eyeballs and then the snapping jerk backwards and the spine cracking flick through the air: my back-up hard-drive.
‘No!’ I properly screamed that time, unable to control my rage. The new neighbour who’d just moved in upstairs must have wondered who was killing whom.
The police came. My girlfriend’s phone ran out of battery before I could reach her. I paced the flat nervously, back and forth unsure what to do with myself; incapable of even sitting down, not knowing what I could possibly say when she came home.
At last, a key turned in the front door and I went to meet her in the darkened corrider.
I was somewhat depressed for days afterwards. The combination of the violation, my natural tendency towards melancholy, all those photo memories disappeared, all that work. The hours and hours and sacrifices and wrenching stuff from deep inside, all gone, all for nothing. All a waste. Me, a waste.
Writing had made me bleed in more than one way.
That fury was what I wanted to spleen if I’d had a computer, if my fingers hadn’t cracked open every time they stuck a keyboard at work.
Then, on the journey away for Christmas, away from the damage, away to forget in the car they inexplicably didn’t take, Belle and Sebastian sang on the stereo.
“I know a spell
That would make you help
Write about love, it could be in any tense
But it must make sense”
I looked across at her, dozing in the half-lit passenger seat. Ahead the black road was punctuated by neon lights dancing away over the rolling hillsides. I smiled both to myself and to her. Beloved. That was what I would do, not write about hate and anger and frustration and despair, but write about love. After all, what else is there of any worth? Write about love and love by writing.
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
The God Reflex - Spirit
And in the end, well everything will just end. The beauty of creation, the void filling light will be snuffed out by a war which wrenches the world asunder. The many headed beasts will rise out of steaming hot oceans, the lamb’s blood will be spilt for no reason and the four cantering horsemen scattering pestilence, famine, brutality and the final, final death for all humanity will appear on the blood red horizon at the end of the anti-Christ’s reign. The good work, everything we’ve ached for will collapse into an abyss where the very fabric of reality cracks open and, maybe, the good will be reborn, to try again. To try better, to fail better.
‘I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the world,’ is a bit of dramatic flag waving to for tension’s sake from Flash Gordon, but, somehow, the impending end always feels plausible. Indeed the apocalypse fills fictions to overflow, words and images slip over the top of the page, the screen, and into a sticky puddle in our lap. As Stan Lee would have said, ‘this one’s got it all true believer’: The eternal battle for all humanity! Goodness versus the devil! Satan and the endless hordes of the flies rampaging up a local high street accosting boy scouts and traffic wardens alike. It’s particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. For genres which seem intent on distancing themselves from the routine rules of the world they’re also the keenest for God and his adversary to crop up in some badly disguised form or other. All those stories I absorbed as a child of heroes and villains, and the fight over evil - nothing sums them up like the end of existence hanging in the balance, from the first Star Trek to Galactus looming, hungrily over the ozone layer. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is essentially revelations boiled down into an allegory about small boys trapped on an island. The underlying unnervingness of this is what makes it work for some many, for so long. Even CS Lewis in his Narnia books, despite the overt Christian tub-thumping, understood that the apocalypse is the end we fear the most because we don’t truly believe in it.
Perhaps this was partly why I studied history, by which I don’t mean the social details of a fifteenth century French Nun’s daily habits, but the grand, sweeping narrative arcs. Whilst all those nuanced details of mundane existence flesh out the past and give it life again, it was the politics, the wars, the murders and the power which really fascinated me, all those years ago. At the centre of it all, at least for medieval Europe, was the Catholic Church and its all threatening dogma: ‘be good, else come the last battle you’ll finish in the fiery pits for eternity’s duration.’ Hell was only ever a heartbeat away.
Numerous princes and irritants, dissidents and doubters were labelled the anti-Christ whose coming heralded the beginning of a thousand year reign by Beelzebub over the Earth. It’s only after the Devil’s millennia that things will really go tits up. My favourite candidate for the anti-Christ is Frederick Barbarossa, an early thirteenth century Holy Roman Emperor who dared to challenge the might of Rome in a fit of todger waggling and for ever more, according to legend, sleeps in a cave somewhere in Sicily, his broken body healing, his defiant soul surviving, awaiting the time become the harbinger of the end once again.
‘Look after yourself,’ my Mother said, some time ago as I was leaving to return to the big smoke. ‘You’re not indestructible.’
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied clambering into my car. ‘Well,’ I grinned cockily, ‘I bounce at any rate.’
But things catch up with you and sometimes you don’t quite bounce high enough. Sometimes you just pitter out.
Last week I had something of a meltdown. I’d been working hard, pushing myself both at work and with my writing, but predominately at work. Twelve hour days have been frustratingly familiar and then I write in the evenings and I neglect my life and still I don’t seem to get any closer. The point is always inching further away and so I am sacrificing things and what for? For nothing. For nothing but something half-forgotten, an argument to which no-one else is listening anymore.
I was, at my desk in central London, four and a half hours sleep for the second night running and getting eight-six emails in less than an hour, both my desk phone and my mobile ringing and a stinging, streaking white hot pain starts to pulse along my arm. I persevere, but a problem arises and I can’t think how to rectify it.
It’s a problem of my own making, something that’s happened because I didn’t have time to do it properly because I’ve got too much work to do and, for a moment, I just don’t know what to do. It feels as though my head is going to burst; literally it feels as though the skin at my temples is going to split and a throb that reverberates around my rib cage seems to contract.
I’d been to the doctors a couple of days before, not because I am ill, but because my girlfriend, rightly, thinks it’s probably not a bad idea to be registered with a GP. So I got an early registration appointment with the nurse a little after seven and as I waited, I worried about what I should be doing at work. During my check up I seemed fine until she took my blood pressure which was high. She took it again and tutted. She told me to unstress msyself and come back in three months.
‘Am I having a heart attack,’ I momentarily wonder as though that’s going to add to my problems and then I manage to calm down and realise that it’s a mild panic coupled with some fucking painful repetitive strain injury.
Bounce, bounce, bou-.
At home, that evening, I feel weighed down, as though my heart is pumping iron fillings through my blood stream. My girlfriend is endearingly sympathetic, yet I worry that such self-induced collapse can only be tolerated for a short while before it simply becomes a character failing. A spirit that refuses to relent only goes so far before it becomes frustratingly stubborn.
A bit like David Cameron being suicidally stubborn over Europe. Still, at least Nick Cleggs found some spirit again and spoken up. Admittedly it some old spirit, dried and crusty on a used tissue, but at least he’s speaking up again, trying to be heard over the distressed nation. Maybe he’s the one the anti-capitalist protestors should be looking to? Probably not, but they do need someone. Or perhaps just themselves.
The holy spirit, the holy ghost, is the third and final part of triune which makes up the Christian God almighty. Without the spirit there is no god, just mysterious paintings of an old man amongst clouds and legends of a bastard crucified. And yet this part is the hardest to define, the trickiest to understand. It is both the element which brought life into Mary’s womb and an ethereal notion of truth. It has both practical function and also is abstract to the point of incomprehension. It is but the word and the word is God and the words are what bring about our God reflex.
It’s always the words which haunt, which linger, which inspire, which hate, which love, which fight. Peel back the layers of everything and without language, there is nothing.
What is spirit? We talk about people having a lot of spirit, so it is the woman I saw sprawled on a zebra crossing at seven-thirty Tuesday evening, her skirt risen up the rim of her waist length fake fur jacket, big-arsed tiger print knickers gleefully displayed, quietly singing muddled songs from the Sound of Music to herself? No, that’s just drunkenness. High spirits is nothing but an excuse. Real spirit is something else.
Perhaps it’s the stoic, acceptance of life during wartime that many of our grandfathers would have had. They went off to fight and some came back, but many didn’t. Many may have been shocked into horror and lost, but many just got on with life. As though it was something you had to do. Me? I just go to work and I can’t really handle that. I guess it’s something that’s been lost over the generations, slowing being ebbed away at as life becomes more comfortable and your fucking iphone having insufficient signal to stream video is an infringement on your basic human rights.
Evelyn Waugh wrote a lot about spirit, I think, both holy and otherwise. He wrote some deft, slightly bitter comic turns too, but Brideshead Revisited – which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – is about man’s spirit and its fruitless defiance in the face of the holy spirit. Waugh was a convert as a man and he wanted to expose clever, cynically, envious, glutinous Charles Ryder to the innocence and loving malevolence of faith.
I’d forgotten what a wonderful novel it was, words to bring meaning to life more than abstract aspirations to saintliness, but the real world cast on paper. It had been years since I read it, but Brideshead just seemed to swell up from the deepest recesses of my brain and as some point over the summer my own work swerved away from being a relatively straightforward noir-esque murder mystery and something which wrapped in all those eternal themes that Waugh encircled in a single family. I’m not writing about Christianity, but I think I am writing about ideals and about heroes. Not fictional ones, not anymore, but about those people whom we let control our lives, who dominate us, and for whom our flesh is weak even if our spirit is strong.
I think I’ve been trying to expose the shallow adoration for others that we all instinctively have. Rather than be reliant on someone else, someone wonderfully marvellous who will be just as fallible when the mask slips, perhaps we just have faith in ourselves. I think we expect too much, we believe in the impossibility of others and so when we can’t reach their fake standards we are disappointed. Remember everyone is a fiction to some degree.
I don’t know what Samuel Beckett though of God, other than his comment about his most famous play: ‘I wrote Godot. If I’d meant God, I would have written God.’ One suspects that maybe he wouldn’t. Regardless of his religious views, he has another point to make: I found an old postcard the other day showing a man discovering that the heavy sack of grain over his shoulder has been leaking. ‘No matter,’ it says at the bottom, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
‘I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the world,’ is a bit of dramatic flag waving to for tension’s sake from Flash Gordon, but, somehow, the impending end always feels plausible. Indeed the apocalypse fills fictions to overflow, words and images slip over the top of the page, the screen, and into a sticky puddle in our lap. As Stan Lee would have said, ‘this one’s got it all true believer’: The eternal battle for all humanity! Goodness versus the devil! Satan and the endless hordes of the flies rampaging up a local high street accosting boy scouts and traffic wardens alike. It’s particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. For genres which seem intent on distancing themselves from the routine rules of the world they’re also the keenest for God and his adversary to crop up in some badly disguised form or other. All those stories I absorbed as a child of heroes and villains, and the fight over evil - nothing sums them up like the end of existence hanging in the balance, from the first Star Trek to Galactus looming, hungrily over the ozone layer. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is essentially revelations boiled down into an allegory about small boys trapped on an island. The underlying unnervingness of this is what makes it work for some many, for so long. Even CS Lewis in his Narnia books, despite the overt Christian tub-thumping, understood that the apocalypse is the end we fear the most because we don’t truly believe in it.
Perhaps this was partly why I studied history, by which I don’t mean the social details of a fifteenth century French Nun’s daily habits, but the grand, sweeping narrative arcs. Whilst all those nuanced details of mundane existence flesh out the past and give it life again, it was the politics, the wars, the murders and the power which really fascinated me, all those years ago. At the centre of it all, at least for medieval Europe, was the Catholic Church and its all threatening dogma: ‘be good, else come the last battle you’ll finish in the fiery pits for eternity’s duration.’ Hell was only ever a heartbeat away.
Numerous princes and irritants, dissidents and doubters were labelled the anti-Christ whose coming heralded the beginning of a thousand year reign by Beelzebub over the Earth. It’s only after the Devil’s millennia that things will really go tits up. My favourite candidate for the anti-Christ is Frederick Barbarossa, an early thirteenth century Holy Roman Emperor who dared to challenge the might of Rome in a fit of todger waggling and for ever more, according to legend, sleeps in a cave somewhere in Sicily, his broken body healing, his defiant soul surviving, awaiting the time become the harbinger of the end once again.
‘Look after yourself,’ my Mother said, some time ago as I was leaving to return to the big smoke. ‘You’re not indestructible.’
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied clambering into my car. ‘Well,’ I grinned cockily, ‘I bounce at any rate.’
But things catch up with you and sometimes you don’t quite bounce high enough. Sometimes you just pitter out.
Last week I had something of a meltdown. I’d been working hard, pushing myself both at work and with my writing, but predominately at work. Twelve hour days have been frustratingly familiar and then I write in the evenings and I neglect my life and still I don’t seem to get any closer. The point is always inching further away and so I am sacrificing things and what for? For nothing. For nothing but something half-forgotten, an argument to which no-one else is listening anymore.
I was, at my desk in central London, four and a half hours sleep for the second night running and getting eight-six emails in less than an hour, both my desk phone and my mobile ringing and a stinging, streaking white hot pain starts to pulse along my arm. I persevere, but a problem arises and I can’t think how to rectify it.
It’s a problem of my own making, something that’s happened because I didn’t have time to do it properly because I’ve got too much work to do and, for a moment, I just don’t know what to do. It feels as though my head is going to burst; literally it feels as though the skin at my temples is going to split and a throb that reverberates around my rib cage seems to contract.
I’d been to the doctors a couple of days before, not because I am ill, but because my girlfriend, rightly, thinks it’s probably not a bad idea to be registered with a GP. So I got an early registration appointment with the nurse a little after seven and as I waited, I worried about what I should be doing at work. During my check up I seemed fine until she took my blood pressure which was high. She took it again and tutted. She told me to unstress msyself and come back in three months.
‘Am I having a heart attack,’ I momentarily wonder as though that’s going to add to my problems and then I manage to calm down and realise that it’s a mild panic coupled with some fucking painful repetitive strain injury.
Bounce, bounce, bou-.
At home, that evening, I feel weighed down, as though my heart is pumping iron fillings through my blood stream. My girlfriend is endearingly sympathetic, yet I worry that such self-induced collapse can only be tolerated for a short while before it simply becomes a character failing. A spirit that refuses to relent only goes so far before it becomes frustratingly stubborn.
A bit like David Cameron being suicidally stubborn over Europe. Still, at least Nick Cleggs found some spirit again and spoken up. Admittedly it some old spirit, dried and crusty on a used tissue, but at least he’s speaking up again, trying to be heard over the distressed nation. Maybe he’s the one the anti-capitalist protestors should be looking to? Probably not, but they do need someone. Or perhaps just themselves.
The holy spirit, the holy ghost, is the third and final part of triune which makes up the Christian God almighty. Without the spirit there is no god, just mysterious paintings of an old man amongst clouds and legends of a bastard crucified. And yet this part is the hardest to define, the trickiest to understand. It is both the element which brought life into Mary’s womb and an ethereal notion of truth. It has both practical function and also is abstract to the point of incomprehension. It is but the word and the word is God and the words are what bring about our God reflex.
It’s always the words which haunt, which linger, which inspire, which hate, which love, which fight. Peel back the layers of everything and without language, there is nothing.
What is spirit? We talk about people having a lot of spirit, so it is the woman I saw sprawled on a zebra crossing at seven-thirty Tuesday evening, her skirt risen up the rim of her waist length fake fur jacket, big-arsed tiger print knickers gleefully displayed, quietly singing muddled songs from the Sound of Music to herself? No, that’s just drunkenness. High spirits is nothing but an excuse. Real spirit is something else.
Perhaps it’s the stoic, acceptance of life during wartime that many of our grandfathers would have had. They went off to fight and some came back, but many didn’t. Many may have been shocked into horror and lost, but many just got on with life. As though it was something you had to do. Me? I just go to work and I can’t really handle that. I guess it’s something that’s been lost over the generations, slowing being ebbed away at as life becomes more comfortable and your fucking iphone having insufficient signal to stream video is an infringement on your basic human rights.
Evelyn Waugh wrote a lot about spirit, I think, both holy and otherwise. He wrote some deft, slightly bitter comic turns too, but Brideshead Revisited – which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – is about man’s spirit and its fruitless defiance in the face of the holy spirit. Waugh was a convert as a man and he wanted to expose clever, cynically, envious, glutinous Charles Ryder to the innocence and loving malevolence of faith.
I’d forgotten what a wonderful novel it was, words to bring meaning to life more than abstract aspirations to saintliness, but the real world cast on paper. It had been years since I read it, but Brideshead just seemed to swell up from the deepest recesses of my brain and as some point over the summer my own work swerved away from being a relatively straightforward noir-esque murder mystery and something which wrapped in all those eternal themes that Waugh encircled in a single family. I’m not writing about Christianity, but I think I am writing about ideals and about heroes. Not fictional ones, not anymore, but about those people whom we let control our lives, who dominate us, and for whom our flesh is weak even if our spirit is strong.
I think I’ve been trying to expose the shallow adoration for others that we all instinctively have. Rather than be reliant on someone else, someone wonderfully marvellous who will be just as fallible when the mask slips, perhaps we just have faith in ourselves. I think we expect too much, we believe in the impossibility of others and so when we can’t reach their fake standards we are disappointed. Remember everyone is a fiction to some degree.
I don’t know what Samuel Beckett though of God, other than his comment about his most famous play: ‘I wrote Godot. If I’d meant God, I would have written God.’ One suspects that maybe he wouldn’t. Regardless of his religious views, he has another point to make: I found an old postcard the other day showing a man discovering that the heavy sack of grain over his shoulder has been leaking. ‘No matter,’ it says at the bottom, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
The God Reflex 2 - The Son
Afterwards the light reached itself to every corner of the new found existence, stretching and yawning its way across the once invisible universe bringing the first vestiges of life with it. There was stillness, aside from the change from black to the unnamed not-black, and there was silence. Everything was still empty, but the emptiness has potential. A potential which, eventually, was filled with the movement and noises of shuffling, snorting creatures, the penultimate of which stumbled on two legs and was named Adam, forged in his creator’s image. The first son, the forgotten son, the less favoured child than his younger brother.
The God Reflex, if it even exists at all, means that in those moments of despair and panic, much how Adam would have felt awakening in the garden, we cease to be rational beings. Suddenly we, if only briefly, are prepared to believe in that which we’d previously dismissed. For an instant we have faith in the stories we learnt as a child. We believe in more than just the moral principles of religion, but in the mythos and magic that lie at its heart. Those stories that have been told and retold, shaped by events and agendas. And us. And then, like the moment before existence, like the silence before the Large Hadron Collider actually works, when all life pauses, ends and restarts, we return to our previous state. Just twenty-first century cynics again.
It’s not so unreasonable to believe in stories that are clearly impossible, is it? I used, once. When I was a child I believed in everything I read. In the past, before we came to the cusp of the future.
My belief, my faith, in the future changes almost day to day. Sometimes it’s easiest to just think that everything will work itself out. More frequently, the coming hardships, and therefore the need for some sort of life plan, seem unavoidable. New studies show that most people think they will be worse off than their parents; the unrelenting growth pattern where the next generation always enjoys more frivolous fun and a healthier lifestyle, appears to be ending. Strangling personal debt and unemployment beckons for the young; a housing market that climbs further away; longer working lives; worse pension benefits; soaring costs of basic commodities like fruit and vegetables, gas and electricity monopolised to maximise profits before the resources dry out; a swallowing, gaping refusal to accept that the planet is dying and every word I type, every song I listen to, every book I read all contributes to the capitalist, consumerism, selfish self-destruction of all life.
In such circumstances who would want the future, who would bring more living beings into the world?
And yet I can see the joy in the faces of my friends and family who have children, who have future. The pride and devotion they feel towards one whom came from them, but perhaps for the unconvinced, it is better to remain without? After all, provision for myself is likely to be difficult, why should I knowingly cause a dependant to suffer? To place the burden for my old age onto another who never asked for anything, who never existed until I chose to release myself into the gene pool?
My girlfriend and I went to see We Need to Talk About Kevin the other Sunday night. It’s a rare incident for me to see a movie without reading the book first - although, to be honest, I’ve no real inclination to read it. My girlfriend refers to this animosity towards best-sellers and popularism in general, as cultural snobbishness. Well, okay, so it sort of is, but I also feel that, since those books will be around to read in the future, and others might not be some sort of prioritisation is in order. Besides, somewhere along the line Lionel Shriver just started to irritate me. There was something strangely aggressive about her approach to marketing which I found disturbing.
Anyway, it was hardly relaxing end of the weekend viewing. Whilst it was indeed prettily directed and neatly acted I found the sense of foreboding doom difficult to ignore. It was like a relentless voice from above signposting the devil in all our spawn, a thundering arrow jutting down into the middle of the narrative declaring that was possible would be inevitable. It’s just what happened to people, okay?
The movie did, once we’d pulled apart the plot and style, force us into a vague conversation about children and the complexities of being a parent. My standpoint has always been unashamedly ambiguous sprinkled with cruel jokes about keeping infants in plastic boxes in the cellar, but this has only ever been a distraction technique. All the gags and socially unacceptable statements can’t hide my internal unease, my lack of a plan.
Maybe I’d have more decisive clarity if I had a life plan. Maybe, maybe not, but the world keeps getting in my way. Events, dear boy, events, conspire against me and I’m not single-minded enough to plough on regardless. Those that do have that drive also seem to have this faith that the world will always, stutteringly but ultimately actually, improve. That’s something which seems to be as flawed, or at least as unproven, as a faith in divinity. Huh, I make myself sound like life has been one long hardship, but then I look up from my keyboard as glance around my world. In the main it looks pretty damn good. Different from how I once expected, but very fine indeed.
Is there any point in having a plan when the pace of change over the past hundred years has left a world utterly unrecognisable from the one our great-grandparents were born into and who’s to say it’s going to slow down. Society and the ways in which we interact with reality have shifted into something inconceivable at the end of the First World War. But, whilst change still advances at a pace I find almost impossible to keep up with, the expected end point has shifted from a utopia to a dystopia in the same period of time which I spent at infant school. The lucky few, the so-called one percent, will continue their personal advancement whilst everyone else finds themselves relocated to down amongst the Morlocks in the sewers.
Perhaps this in itself helps to explain the God Reflex? That when the world’s demise appears inevitable in one form or another then at least there is another life to be embraced, an afterlife of perfection and enchantment, once you’ve negotiated the oft forgotten notion of purgatory. Everyone, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, passes through that temporal punishment, where the good and evil are purged from one another, torment tests the worthy for the advancement up the divine ascent to heaven whilst the others spiral down to the fiery pits. But for all of us there is the opportunity of perfection, something better than an ever degrading human existence, to be snatched.
Whatever his personal opinions on the church, Dante lived in fourteenth century Italy and so the concept of a better world in the next was pressingly desirable. Life would have been moderately short and filled with far more difficulties than running out of coffee or a jam on the motorway so what came next important. In the same way, a son was crucial to continue the lineage. They came next too, only on the Earthly plain. Legacy and the next life; the lines become blurred as the two interlock like reincarnation.
Perhaps that explains my reticence. I worry that I expect a son to be better than me. Not exactly a hard feat, but still an unnecessary burden. Is that what Jesus, Adam’s sort of younger brother, was supposed to be? Better than humanity’s creator, its saviour?
Whilst I am in no way trying to compare myself to anyone else’s deity or the so-called son of God (although I’m sure there are those out there who would expect me to do just that), I worry that I have been something of a disappointment, or at least a mystery, as a son. I lack a career; I lack offspring of my own; I am far away and unable to engage with family responsibilities fully; I feel as though I am yet to do anything of worth to justify this self-indulgence.
No, that is not fair. I know my family, my Father, love me and are proud of my meagre achievements. They don’t begrudge me my independence and nor do they expect me to feel guilty for it. Kevin is guiltless, that’s what seems so alien about the character. He’s so utterly free from remorse whilst his mother drowns in a sense of self-indulgent shame, a personal affront which implies immaturity below her years and experience.
I wandered through the protest camp outside St Paul’s the other evening, on the way home via London Bridge station after a few beers with Ben. It was eerily quiet and yet defiantly full of people sheltering inside their tents, deep breaths echoing out into the open night sky. The plastic pseudo canvas flickered in the reflected up lighting illuminating the domed tower high above them. As I walked, I remembered an anecdote I’d read recently. The main complaint about their protest against capitalism is that they don’t know what they want instead. If you go to a restaurant and your steak is disgusting you don’t have to eat it. You also don’t have know how to grill an amazing steak to know you want something different to what you had before, something better.
You don’t have to know exactly what you want in life, but it doesn’t hurt to always want something better and sometimes helps to acknowledge that you can be more than one thing. It is possible to be both the son and the father without losing traits of either.
Which makes me wonder whether you can also be the final component of the trinity?
The God Reflex, if it even exists at all, means that in those moments of despair and panic, much how Adam would have felt awakening in the garden, we cease to be rational beings. Suddenly we, if only briefly, are prepared to believe in that which we’d previously dismissed. For an instant we have faith in the stories we learnt as a child. We believe in more than just the moral principles of religion, but in the mythos and magic that lie at its heart. Those stories that have been told and retold, shaped by events and agendas. And us. And then, like the moment before existence, like the silence before the Large Hadron Collider actually works, when all life pauses, ends and restarts, we return to our previous state. Just twenty-first century cynics again.
It’s not so unreasonable to believe in stories that are clearly impossible, is it? I used, once. When I was a child I believed in everything I read. In the past, before we came to the cusp of the future.
My belief, my faith, in the future changes almost day to day. Sometimes it’s easiest to just think that everything will work itself out. More frequently, the coming hardships, and therefore the need for some sort of life plan, seem unavoidable. New studies show that most people think they will be worse off than their parents; the unrelenting growth pattern where the next generation always enjoys more frivolous fun and a healthier lifestyle, appears to be ending. Strangling personal debt and unemployment beckons for the young; a housing market that climbs further away; longer working lives; worse pension benefits; soaring costs of basic commodities like fruit and vegetables, gas and electricity monopolised to maximise profits before the resources dry out; a swallowing, gaping refusal to accept that the planet is dying and every word I type, every song I listen to, every book I read all contributes to the capitalist, consumerism, selfish self-destruction of all life.
In such circumstances who would want the future, who would bring more living beings into the world?
And yet I can see the joy in the faces of my friends and family who have children, who have future. The pride and devotion they feel towards one whom came from them, but perhaps for the unconvinced, it is better to remain without? After all, provision for myself is likely to be difficult, why should I knowingly cause a dependant to suffer? To place the burden for my old age onto another who never asked for anything, who never existed until I chose to release myself into the gene pool?
My girlfriend and I went to see We Need to Talk About Kevin the other Sunday night. It’s a rare incident for me to see a movie without reading the book first - although, to be honest, I’ve no real inclination to read it. My girlfriend refers to this animosity towards best-sellers and popularism in general, as cultural snobbishness. Well, okay, so it sort of is, but I also feel that, since those books will be around to read in the future, and others might not be some sort of prioritisation is in order. Besides, somewhere along the line Lionel Shriver just started to irritate me. There was something strangely aggressive about her approach to marketing which I found disturbing.
Anyway, it was hardly relaxing end of the weekend viewing. Whilst it was indeed prettily directed and neatly acted I found the sense of foreboding doom difficult to ignore. It was like a relentless voice from above signposting the devil in all our spawn, a thundering arrow jutting down into the middle of the narrative declaring that was possible would be inevitable. It’s just what happened to people, okay?
The movie did, once we’d pulled apart the plot and style, force us into a vague conversation about children and the complexities of being a parent. My standpoint has always been unashamedly ambiguous sprinkled with cruel jokes about keeping infants in plastic boxes in the cellar, but this has only ever been a distraction technique. All the gags and socially unacceptable statements can’t hide my internal unease, my lack of a plan.
Maybe I’d have more decisive clarity if I had a life plan. Maybe, maybe not, but the world keeps getting in my way. Events, dear boy, events, conspire against me and I’m not single-minded enough to plough on regardless. Those that do have that drive also seem to have this faith that the world will always, stutteringly but ultimately actually, improve. That’s something which seems to be as flawed, or at least as unproven, as a faith in divinity. Huh, I make myself sound like life has been one long hardship, but then I look up from my keyboard as glance around my world. In the main it looks pretty damn good. Different from how I once expected, but very fine indeed.
Is there any point in having a plan when the pace of change over the past hundred years has left a world utterly unrecognisable from the one our great-grandparents were born into and who’s to say it’s going to slow down. Society and the ways in which we interact with reality have shifted into something inconceivable at the end of the First World War. But, whilst change still advances at a pace I find almost impossible to keep up with, the expected end point has shifted from a utopia to a dystopia in the same period of time which I spent at infant school. The lucky few, the so-called one percent, will continue their personal advancement whilst everyone else finds themselves relocated to down amongst the Morlocks in the sewers.
Perhaps this in itself helps to explain the God Reflex? That when the world’s demise appears inevitable in one form or another then at least there is another life to be embraced, an afterlife of perfection and enchantment, once you’ve negotiated the oft forgotten notion of purgatory. Everyone, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, passes through that temporal punishment, where the good and evil are purged from one another, torment tests the worthy for the advancement up the divine ascent to heaven whilst the others spiral down to the fiery pits. But for all of us there is the opportunity of perfection, something better than an ever degrading human existence, to be snatched.
Whatever his personal opinions on the church, Dante lived in fourteenth century Italy and so the concept of a better world in the next was pressingly desirable. Life would have been moderately short and filled with far more difficulties than running out of coffee or a jam on the motorway so what came next important. In the same way, a son was crucial to continue the lineage. They came next too, only on the Earthly plain. Legacy and the next life; the lines become blurred as the two interlock like reincarnation.
Perhaps that explains my reticence. I worry that I expect a son to be better than me. Not exactly a hard feat, but still an unnecessary burden. Is that what Jesus, Adam’s sort of younger brother, was supposed to be? Better than humanity’s creator, its saviour?
Whilst I am in no way trying to compare myself to anyone else’s deity or the so-called son of God (although I’m sure there are those out there who would expect me to do just that), I worry that I have been something of a disappointment, or at least a mystery, as a son. I lack a career; I lack offspring of my own; I am far away and unable to engage with family responsibilities fully; I feel as though I am yet to do anything of worth to justify this self-indulgence.
No, that is not fair. I know my family, my Father, love me and are proud of my meagre achievements. They don’t begrudge me my independence and nor do they expect me to feel guilty for it. Kevin is guiltless, that’s what seems so alien about the character. He’s so utterly free from remorse whilst his mother drowns in a sense of self-indulgent shame, a personal affront which implies immaturity below her years and experience.
I wandered through the protest camp outside St Paul’s the other evening, on the way home via London Bridge station after a few beers with Ben. It was eerily quiet and yet defiantly full of people sheltering inside their tents, deep breaths echoing out into the open night sky. The plastic pseudo canvas flickered in the reflected up lighting illuminating the domed tower high above them. As I walked, I remembered an anecdote I’d read recently. The main complaint about their protest against capitalism is that they don’t know what they want instead. If you go to a restaurant and your steak is disgusting you don’t have to eat it. You also don’t have know how to grill an amazing steak to know you want something different to what you had before, something better.
You don’t have to know exactly what you want in life, but it doesn’t hurt to always want something better and sometimes helps to acknowledge that you can be more than one thing. It is possible to be both the son and the father without losing traits of either.
Which makes me wonder whether you can also be the final component of the trinity?
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