Saturday 10 December 2011

Untitled

You step off the train and take your first scent of the air that was once so familiar to you. You recognise the station. Every inch. But the smell, it’s different. You think this as the cool, sea air rises in your nostrils. You place one foot forward, wondering briefly whether it’s right to savour it. You’ve been gone a long time. Too long perhaps. Too long for him. You hear the train conductor hail, the doors slam. It’s only when you’re half way over the pedestrian bridge that the train pulls away.

It’s quite cold and you remember the time he’d call to see if you wanted picking up. You look at your phone and realise that now that could never happen. You thought twice about things like that in the past. You were only being considerate. If you could measure a person’s love out in offers refused, he’d fill an ocean.

You continue walking and all you hear is the sound of gulls overhead. You hear them as you think he would have heard them too, all those years ago. You remember the times he’d recount his childhood of serving ice cream at the beach. What was it, you say? Three and six? You don’t even know what that means. Did you ever, really, understand him? You think that time can be cruel. You carefully measure your footfall down the last remaining steps.

You begin walking the gentle incline up from the station, bringing to mind the many times you’ve done it before. How do things change so much, you think, but always stay the same? Gradually you think. Did you stay the same when you got old? Did I watch you change like I’m changing now into the same man you were? Did it matter to you that I came back to visit? Did I come back enough? Those last days when all you wanted to do was go to bed.

You ask yourself the kinds of questions you know now not to expect an answer to. You see cars with passengers in the backseat and wonder if they recognise you. There he goes, young Jimmy’s son, must be tough you know, all that to bear. And the wife, how does she cope? If only he’d been the talk of the town. He’d died quietly, you think. How everyone does now. In their own little bubble. Away. Just a few people to hear.

You keep on walking and your breath is getting quick as you reach the alley. The leaves are cracking under foot and the sunlight peeks through the leaves like its tapping you on the shoulder. You tug your bag against your back and check the road for cars. It’s altogether quiet today, kind of fitting. Respectful you think. You hear the church bell toll and reckon there must be a service in the morning too. You find things coming back but not like they used to. You think something’s been taken away but this time it actually has.

You wonder how long it’ll be before you discover something you can’t do, something you need help with. You think of the future. You’re melancholy. You were worse. It had been tough. It still was, sure. Can you keep missing someone like that though? He had others there for him now. Others to care.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

The Grand Entrance

It was upon him. They said you only experienced it once. It was his grand entrance. Some rumour of it being hot. Scoldingly hot.

Wednesday 11 May 2011

'The Mother in Me' (a poem for my mother)

When I lapse, as before, it is the
Mother in me, I find.
Rarely for searching but because you’re
There, in me, holding on.

All this existed before our lives,
Before yours, before mind.
And mistakes again, not for the last time, where the
Mother in me is peace of mind.

Because surging up is
Water
Laughter
Out from deep
A desert
My head
Where you keep me alive, as the
Morning gets late and I
Shake with
Sound
As you turn around, the
Mother in me.

Excerpt from 'Undressing Alone: A Life in Pieces' (On Fernando Pessoa)

I

When I was young - so long ago now it seems like a different life – I would walk along the street, moving, but only physically. Shrouded in an ancient fog of forgotten meaning and swept along an invisible stream, I missed the shadow of my horizon form.

II

Unfeeling and unthinking, to this day I extract the elements that keep me dreaming. In reading, seeing and hearing, my blueprint is absolute and entrenched, and I never seek. I lean on each challenge with the same sallow strength, dwelling in miniature, a puddle isolated from the ocean I never knew.

III

One morning, I found myself undressing alone, digging up the layers of a heartless life, discovering endless depths that disappear into the mist.

IV

Unravelled with the expectant hope of a butterfly at birth, my wings tire under the heavy glare of the midnight sun. A travelling ship without a port to sail from, I am lost on the infinite sea. I mistook the sand for castles in the sky. My angel crumbles among the choppy waves.

V

Anguished, I go out the same closed door each morning, not knowing if it’s the right one, for reasons I will never know. The darkness is the light I wake up to. It clouds the beginning and the end of the day, and any light that intercedes is a fleeting reminder of what we once had.

VI

Illusion is reality for everyone. Conceived to be the actor in a pivotal narrative, the deluded individual is integral to everything he knows, fulfilling his own self-selecting prophecy. Unconscious and unreflecting, he is utterly confident in his own meaning and rejecting of all other narratives. As the sea catches at his ankles, he finds himself trapped on an island, specialized, but with no special significance.

VII

Our lives are consumed by desire and the world ends at our window. Slaves to external circumstance, we adapt to unknown elements with armoured, agonized resistance. The control we must have is forgotten as fate and treasured in narrative. The truth less palatable embeds the tangles and cracks glossed over in our precipitous madness.

VIII

I look at life through a solitary window in this, the grandest of mansions. The walls of the house have come unstuck and the words in my heart have broken. Each non-existent step is measured in fragments and it passes slowly. It hurts to live and to think this way, but the pain is hidden.

IX

Humanity acts within prescribed norms that it doesn’t even know exist. Everything we believe, feel and do is unconscious. The flash of a torch is as much a reminder to batten our eyelids as it is to penetrate the gloom. Sometimes the walls we cling to aren’t there and we fall in a common tragedy.

X

A storm is brewing overhead. Blackish clouds accumulate in the uncaring sky, breaking out in oppressive dullness. Everything I see has a greyish shade, behind restless eyes that recoil from unshed tears.

XI

Disabused of the fallacy of my infancy, I marvel at all that I was and now see I can never be. Glib certainties sustained by so much torturous reasoning sour in the poisoned sea. A veil has been torn from the perennial night and my mind floats free in a world perverted by questions, devoid of meaning. I was the role that got acted - patterned, fake, I was never myself.

XII

I harvest the memories I retain with a sigh of nostalgia, investing them with mute happiness. My fondness for the past is a love of history; a lovely illusion protected from anxiety, stable and sheltered in a cushion like soft animal fur. I remember tenderly the first time a book made me cry, my passion for music and my scrupulously honed identity. Dead and vanished, I wilt like a dead flower, glow like an extinguished lamp. Between now and what I’ve lost, what I find is me, all me.

XIII

Forgetful of the fact that reality is often a humdrum array of things that mean nothing at all, my mind strives for perfection in incommensurable events that extend back centuries. Abstract thought and disinterested emotion have taken hold, confusedly interpreting nothing at all. A profound awareness of everything that could ever happen has settled on my soul, along with a futile, endless probing of words for their singular significance.

XIV

My reflexive thoughts are debilitating and I have no valid means of redress. My perspective is unworthy and each suggestion is undermined by its own inherent dubiousness. We can never finish, can only evolve. I decay silently, fearing for the loneliness of my limited, finite self and its infinite imagining of perfection.

XV

I believe I want to think of everything so as not to think anymore. But if I don’t know something, how can I think of or even recognise it? Everything is external, illogical, and not in my power to change. And if all our perspectives are limited, then so are our perfections.

XVI

Savouring nothing but complete, tyrannical control, my obsessively analytical mind cannot adjust to the reality that there is no such thing as complete understanding. I fixate on flaws, imperfections, improvements. But everything is contingent, bracketed by contexts that conflate and contort like shapes with unseen dimensions. I cannot understand that I cannot understand. Long silences make up my inner speech. I am interested by everything, but flicker continuously. How did I get here?

XVII

Work is the locus of all my suffering. Thrown out into a world that has been revolving for some time, I meet a blistering array of interpretations, a nauseous consensus of accounts and satiety of discontents. I can no longer think, and I’m distracted all the time. So devastatingly unintelligible is this environment in light of the soul’s attitude to inner truth, circumstances feed back and accumulate, tormenting me in vexed alienation.

XVIII

I know that today will oppress me and weary me as when I cannot grasp anything at all. Every word is hollow and emptied of significance. Today I am older and wiser, more experienced, but somehow diminished. Who, I ask myself, would ever enter this struggle, knowing what we know?

XIX

Whatever I think, I quickly try and square with what I think I know. This takes the form of arranging things into words, dusty sentences and bloodless classifications. I’ve lost that rapt interest in all that I was, and the passion I no longer feel is sadder for its uncertainty. I hope that the pain will become clearer tomorrow, that I’ll find some cover. Sometimes I look around and wonder what it’s all for.

Saturday 7 May 2011

The Settlement

The boy and the father stepped on to the wooden suspension bridge across the bay. Their first steps were not the ones you’d expect, surprisingly confident and calm. The car they’d left behind disappeared out of sight, forgotten by their eyes as much as their minds. The bridge was brown but flaking with paint. This wasn’t noticeable to the boy and the father. What was noticeable was that the bridge was made up of wooden slats. The bridge took on a blue tinge as the bright sun overhead reflected off the turquoise blue sea. Beside the bridge was a steep cliff that looked the perfect match for the sploshing waves. The waves disappeared into the sound of the ripping air that tore at the bridge. The boy and the father walked on, seemingly unconcerned by what was ensuing around them.
The picture was one of continuous, connected flow. The waves lashed and the cliffs pushed. The bridge swayed and the boy and the father moved. Never once could one stop to take a photograph or contemplate things as they were in that very moment. If things were ever to come to a stop, it would take the end of the bridge to do it.
The boy and the father walked indistinguishably, save for the stimulating visual effect of size. For when the boy who trod in front took one step, he appeared shorter for a fraction of a second while the father appeared taller. When the father took his step, the boy assumed an unpronounceable height that dwarfed the father, but only temporarily. The creaking of the bridge sounded like someone’s screams from several kilometres away, the same situation transferred in space, at a contrary stage of development.
The sun looked ready to dip under the horizon, or maybe it was rising. The shimmer from the sea made it almost impossible to tell. Neither the boy nor the father seemed willing to give anything away. I thought I asked them to make this clear before they got out the car, but I guess I didn’t.
The boy was a reflection of the man in everything but appearance. They walked the same and wore identical expressions. Neither of them carried anything yet. The baggage that wasn’t stowed in the car was locked up inside them.
It must be mentioned that there were two rope hand rails on either side of the suspension bridge. But these were not used right now. Perhaps this is why they haven’t been mentioned already. The rope rails were there but their presence was not noticeable above the noise of the creaking bridge. Later on the boy would cling to the rails for reassurance, to make sure they really were there. The father might have gone somewhere else by this point, but he too would need them even if no one was there to see it.
The boy and the father descended the suspension bridge towards a row of stacked shacks to the right, away from the precipitous cliff. They’d been approaching the settlement for a long time. The bridge kept dropping towards the water but it never got there. The bay, even if it was a one, had disappeared so no sand could be sought as refuge. The outlying shacks were stacked three by three. There appeared a single line of rope connecting them to the vertical of the bridge, a drop ladder connecting the rope to the bridge itself. The shacks were light blue as well. It was hard to tell how far they lifted off the water.
The boy and the father were part of a relocation scheme undertaken while maintenance work was carried out on the existing settlement. This was the first time the boy and the father had seen the new settlement and it came as a shock to see it like this. For this reason the boy found it difficult to make a firm judgement on what he saw. The boy knew he had questions but didn’t know how to phrase them or even if he’d ask the right ones. He also wondered which shack was his and if this made a difference. Despite himself, the boy began imagining the benefit of being close to the edge, of seeing the sea each morning.
The father would help the boy ask the questions. He would do this by asking one himself or making an observation that led to one. The boy would have to accept this question to get anywhere. He could propose another one but this was unlikely to help. This thought made the boy sad.
While the boy considered how he might successfully reach the outer edge of the shacks without falling in, the father spoke.
‘There is a brown plume in the water. This is human excrement and is not safe.’
The boy began smelling shit. The smell made him immediately anxious of the whole situation and he kept looking back at the father for reassurance. The boy was stunned to think they could house anyone here and he thought there must be an explanation. The father was riled as well he might. The place was not safe but there was no choice but to try and access the shacks. The father seemed quicker to acknowledge this. The boy and the father had no comeback. For if their current settlements were not habitable, that could hardly be used as a reason for not settling here. There would be a written contract somewhere.
The plume kept chuffing out the brown effluent. The boy considered the distance between the settlement and the outlet sizeable enough. Was it really that bad when all this would be temporary?
At the end of the bridge was a wooden gate. The gate was locked. To the right of the edge was a drop rope and to the left a single rope that swung round. The boy feared descending the drop rope which was only accessible through a small, square opening beneath the hand rail. He wondered how he would ever transport luggage to the shacks. The boy considered and considered again but he just didn’t know.
The father walked back up the bridge to fetch the luggage, disappearing in the distance. The boy would wait, joined presently by other people. The others all wore blank expressions, indicative of uncertainty and hopeless detachment. The boy saw reason to sit down for a surer footing, but doubted this would incur favourable looks. He was increasingly tempted to try his balance on the rope as this was only what was coming. If he just let himself go he might get somewhere. But the boy was just as likely to fall into the sea, into the fathomless, blue deep.
While the father wasn’t there, the boy considered it a dangerous mission. Before long the father appeared with a rucksack and several other items of luggage, walking along the suspension bridge with the kind of ease either were unlikely to experience again. The sun was still up and the waves were still sploshing. The wind had grown by now and it threatened to spill the people over the edge.
The boy thought it only right that he try the rope first before the father had room to do so. But the boy would not try the drop rope on the side of the bridge facing the shacks. He insisted that he navigate the rope which swung under the bridge from the other side. This was potentially more hazardous but the father knew the boy was in this alone. Against the force of the wind the boy dropped his thin legs over the edge and caught a glimpse of the cliff in his eyeshot, a glimpse he’d seen before? The boy was not to focus his attention on the cliff face for too long for he had other things on his mind. He thought for a minute he’d like to return to the beginning when all this might stop. He couldn’t make sense of how the rope might reach the shacks. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
The boy was making his way along the rope, each step a small victory. He was mindful of moving too quickly. The faces of the people still on the bridge focused on him and looked on the face of it like they experienced the self-same thoughts. The shacks had disappeared from view and the boy wondered if he’d ever see them again, that he had seen them before but was blind to them now. The boy feared he may get lost and kept thinking of how to get back on the bridge. The only way to reach the shacks now was along the rope and it was the only way for the boy. The drop rope was the other side and too far to reach at this stage. The boy had to keep on his chosen path and perhaps ask the question differently next time. This would set him free.
A seagull landed on a spot on the gate and abseiled along it. The gull seemed unruffled by a big gust of wind which shook the bridge and the rope with it perilously. The boy lost a footing. The last image to flash before the boy’s sight was of the father staring blankly.

The Commercialisation of Public Space (written 2009)

Commerce is all around us now; we have become inured to the ubiquitous messages adorning screens and billboards citywide, inviting us to consider the newest, most up-to-date product or some heretofore unrepresented service, freshly packaged or merely cast in a different shade. And these frequently garish advertisements have found increasingly obscure and uncomfortably intrusive places to proclaim their message, popping up in pub urinals, on supermarket concourses, and even intruding into our very own students’ union at Goldsmiths (see the Topman placard). Culturally, the issue of product placement was of great concern in the recent Shane Meadows film, Somers Town, as was the question of corporate sponsorship, as small-budget artistic enterprises struggle to source the funds for ever more adventurous proposals. These instances represent a few of the recent inroads advertising has made into our social landscape.

To be sure, public spaces are part of the same economic and social fabric as the commercial sector. Sellers and vendors are everywhere on market stalls or on checkout counters, forming a key element of today’s capital infrastructure. Yet energetic economic activity is in danger of becoming so powerful and pervasive that it threatens the very idea of a shared, public, open space. The pressures of privatisation and commercialisation may be seen to have crossed the line into something crass and debasing, re-casting what was free and accessible into something selective and restricted.

This branding of public space took a step further into the unpalatable the other day when I stepped onto a bus to get ‘out of the bubble’ of New Cross on a trip to a job interview in central London. One of the buses I stepped onto that afternoon was the 168, the service which runs from Hampstead to the Old Kent Road, two public destinations, known and reachable by all, places that define our landscape and are part of the collective imagination. Importantly, however, the route was marked as terminating not just at the public space of the Old Kent Road, but as finishing its journey at ‘Old Kent Road, Tesco’, a fundamentally private, commercialised place, corporate and undemocratic. In other words, the ‘landmark’ of a multinational superstore has become so much a part of our way of life that it has come to circumscribe a bus route and frame our very experience of the world. This represents the next step in the reverence for commerce and an increase in the prominence it is afforded by each and every one of us.

Indeed, the idea of where we live, the essence of who we are, is now constrained and structured in terms of huge, faceless corporate entities. The space is no longer representative or reflective of the surrounding community, but a place where exclusion, division, and a loss of shared identity are common currency. This generic, homogenised space, now all around us, has begun to infiltrate the collective imagination, becoming our most widely understood public language and defining our lives. What do you pick out as the most conspicuous landmark when you find yourself lost in a large town: would it be the civic centre, the magistrates’ court, the old post office? Or would it more than likely be the Tesco Express that’s just opened its doors on the main road? London, like many other cities in the UK, is becoming less distinctive and less meaningful to its inhabitants. We are in serious danger of defining ourselves by these branded, commercial places when the argument that they merit such a lauded position in the social and cultural realm is highly questionable. The 168 bus I rode on only the other day has become a systematic hoarding.

This isn’t just a lazy brand of old-fashioned nostalgia for a bygone era that never was; rather, this is a sincere plea for the reestablishment of the real, valuable symbols of our existence, the spaces that embody a community’s spirit and soul precisely because they have no rules or strictures to limit their sense of ownership. Outside of the market, these true landmarks uphold the dignity and inherent value of the common man or woman, regardless of their capital worth. It is with this achingly bitter sense of regret that I experienced that bus ride the other day. Something vital seemed to be disappearing down the plughole when I realised that a collective public space was being given over to yet another ‘sponsor’, that it was now a thinly veiled excuse for a subtle marketing strategy. Far from being a cut-off, outdated, and irrelevant plea for a rose-tinted socialist future, the necessary vitality and energy which the commercial sector so often injects into our lives needn’t come to be the very means by which we understand ourselves and the world. It is surely now time to draw the line.