Thursday, November 24, 2011



Forward

To begin, the groundwork, a quiet scene:
James, seated stealthily in book-like clothes
and rumpled concentration, reading the
breadth of the shelf for his degree, his hand
splayed over a book as though to stop it
wriggling free of his grasp; or we can look
over at the classics wing where a mob
of Aristotelians earnestly
line the mezzanine - and nasal guesswork
might trace a damp sandal scent that mars the
pleasant paper-mould mood in the alcoves.

But these books are only assailable
for the seasons of study, beyond which
your turnstile-triggering library card dies.
From then on it’s all business, from results
day to the graduation photographs:
Jonothan, David, and Sarah scatter
like dice thrown onto a map - careering
the hopeful ascent into internships,
interviews, networking, and jobs websites,
then the bar work they promise to give up
every week, the tenuous nepotism,
the spin so self-ennobling no honest
CV could house it; Despite hindrances –
like the recession - the immutable
advance trudges steadily on into
daily office captivity, coffee
breath that might be congenital, double
chins obscuring the top buttons of shirts,
the lunch time pints, the tumescent beer guts
seen sagging over belt buckles, then the
plush restaurants followed by the theatre,
or pretending to enjoy the opera;
greying, guffawing fatsos with laphroaig
filled tumblers surrounding tables, grunting
dull-eyed self-congratulation. Now the
unfettered grimace parties, disgruntled
human swellings with burgundy eczema’d
skin swilling infinite gin at hollow-smile
get-togethers…

But, focusing, these years
of faultless ironed shirts and thinning hair
shudder and divide to reveal two pub
bound suits - Harry, who they once called Hazza,
and Jeff, who noisily dredges up his
snot into his throat every few minutes -
as they loudly discuss the ample bum
and bust of their receptionist, neither
listening to the other - nor, really,
to themselves (undermining the function
of a conversation) - as a prelude
and practice for inebriation hour.
At a bleating from his pocket, Jeff stalls
to hock up sputum before answering.
Harry walks on thoughtlessly but, nearing
the chosen pub, has a thought nonetheless:
delving into his breast pocket he takes
out a small cylindrical pill vial and
automatically shakes it at his palm
unwittingly spilling a stray pellet
of fluoxetine onto the pavement.

Leaving him behind an instant later,
this pill will depart the spot plucked up snug
in the tread of a passing walker’s boot,
lodged in the aperture of the e in
berghaus, joining some gravel stowaways.
Before long the boots will be dipped in an
acrid puddle of splashed vinegar as
the wearer pauses at the threshold of
a chippy to consider the prices.
Reacting oddly with the vinegar,
the pill will begin to dissolve, losing
its shape, and disengage its rubber clamp
to froth and burgeon into a spectral,
lazily animated grey foam, like
a carbuncle on the concrete, causing
a very stoned metalworker to squint
down from his balcony through the dim street
lamplight, heart quickening, as he begins
to fear the proliferation and coup
of this giant-amoeba alien race,
one of whom would appear to be pulsing
insidiously right down there right now
oh god that cant be real its not real oh
god what is it it will take over and
melt us all in our beds it must be stopped.




But you can leave him there in a panic,
since he’s imaginary, while I stay,
as a fleshless voiceless voice on paper,
here between the page and itself, wrapped up
in its clean envelope of fictive thought,
lingering indefinitely to re-
read and consider how the initial
library hush could stray so far from itself,
dissolving the plot along with the pill…

So while I’m mired without past or future,
you have no choice but to move on ahead,
keeping with the forward motion of things,
where candles flicker (it’s compulsory,
even in still air) and the clock chisels
away - tck - at the hours you have left.

Monday, May 02, 2011




The aimless walk has served me well in recent years. I’m not talking about a single aimless walk but of aimless walking as a regular practice. It serves so many wonderful purposes and the more I do it, the more purposes and wonderfulnessess I find. I have practiced it solely within the very urban surroundings of London as the public transport network affords the aimless walker an almost certain protection against getting truly lost. There is always a bus or tube or trains station to take you back at least towards your home, always someone to ask for directions.

As a social activity it provides a wonderful atmosphere in which to chat, gossip or get stuck into some intellectual discourse. The landscape is ever moving and so the conversation, if it threatens to dry up, has ever new fuel provided by new architecture, new people, new plants, animals, adverts, art, and things you didn’t expect to see at all: things I can’t anticipate here. Even the most boring parts of town can harbour endless oddities, hidden secrets, or even charming blanknesses.

As Pissarro said ‘Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.’ And it doesn’t take any special initiation to become one of these blessed folk. I feel it might be something like being a believer in a religion. Though I have no clerics, no holy text, and no church, still I feel like I’ve come to know a godlike personality. The personality happens to be place itself.

Any given place is an endlessly deep swarm of artifacts and curios, a palimpsest of whatever stories have occurred in and of the location. Not just human events and structures but those of nature, animals, plants, and the deadest of the dead: stones. Blank, empty spaces can hold even more intrigue then those that teem with convolution. Beheld in stark contrast to the usual business, a barren zone or landmark-less landscape is so alien it can elicit purer, simpler, deeper emotional or intellectual responses. And anyway, the emptiest place on earth is no longer empty when you, the observer, arrives to be in it, to experience it.

God in the Quad - by Ronald Knox

There was a young man who said, "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

REPLY
Dear Sir:
Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
GOD.

No place is without a genius loci (spirit of place). And you don’t need tools or jargon or specialised knowledge to decipher the spirit. Discovering anything at all (scientific and mathematic truths included) lies dormant in the observer more than in the outside world. We map our thoughts and expectations onto what we see. All is in the eye of the beholder. If some mysterious marks on a wall catch your attention and make you smile, make you think of something, make you stop and wonder, it’s not necessary to discover their true origin, their actual author. Though it may become your aim, art (or we might call it intrigue) can be found regardless of considerations of author, history, or understanding. We can look at the sky when it turns an unusual colour and say “I haven’t a clue how it’s gone that colour or what’s causing it but I find it beautiful.”

So the aimless wander needs only to be open to the possible intrigue of possibly anything. Having mentioned religion already here is another similarity: I find myself preaching openness. Urging that you be open to the ever-present possibility of appreciating the world around you. As I preach this openness I squirm inwardly with sensation that I am repeating something similar to what I’ve heard so often from preaching theists. “You just have to be open to God”. Nodding and smiling as I have done at this entreaty, I have always resolutely decided I would not be open to God since it didn’t mean anything at all. Standing in the atheist’s paradigm, as I do, the notion of becoming open to this almighty ghost strikes me as intellectually impossible and no more than a weird sadomasochistic mind-ritual in which I subscribe to a fallacy so forcefully as to begin to hallucinate His actuality.

I’m well aware that my religion of the aimless wanderers who worship the variety of existence due to the endless intrigues of their own minds stands, in a sense, on the same ground as conventional religion when looked at by the as-yet-uninitiated awanderer (atheist is to theist what awanderer is to wanderer). So although I feel no less devout about the wandering cause I can understand if those standing in a conflicting paradigm see nothing but nonsense in my position.

Friday, April 29, 2011



A Snippet of 2009.

I read on the train. I very rarely read anywhere else. If I do it is probably on a bus - so most of my reading happens in a moving environment.

But most of it, almost all of it, happens on the Metropolitan Line between Baker Street and Uxbridge. I have become used to the rocking and shaking of my seat, of the whole carriage, as I read. It is a comfort like being in a pram, a cot, or a mother’s arms. Rocked back and forth in the mother’s arms, the first dance of life, the baby’s first taste of rhythm. My deity mother shakes the train as I slumber fitfully in my bookdreams.

Yes, reading is a kind of sleep. Reading is receding from the world, forgetting the body and ones surroundings. Yielding to the dream of the text. In my comforting commute, as my zooming pram shakes away my woes, I read and read. Woken only by the terminated train, whose unprecedented stillness, and whose long loud hiss, speak of a tired and reposeful deity who wishes for some rest herself. No more rockabybaby, time to get up. And so the day starts as the book ends. Like any child I mourn this departure from comfort.

Sunday, February 27, 2011




Chime


This junction of a cycle path and a footpath saw a lot of traffic,

both feet and wheels, and a lot of bell-ringing near-collisions.

Now, the flock of birds that made their home in the giant tree

towering over this intersection became so used to the chime

of the bicycle bells that it became part of their language.

They spoke it fluently, like natives, even reproducing that

dissonant metallic reverb that truncates the traditional trill.

None could tell it apart from the real thing. And so, in the quieter

moments of earliest morning or perhaps of dusk you might see

a pedestrian twirl around in fright, head swivelling frantically,

sure that at least five angry cyclists were approaching so fast

as to be nearly already on top of him. But in fact there were

no cyclists and the ear-jostled victim would walk on flummoxed.

What is this? Mischief? Such was the ventriloquism of those

birds that no human ever solved the mystery, not one ever even

looked upwards. I knew, of course, but then I’m one of those birds.