FIRE ON THE LIFEBOAT

Journeys by car at night remind me of the great, modern Asian metropolises. Fragments of life, redolent in the shadows and giving fresh leave to the senses mark the pace of A to B, all the time experiencing a nothing landscape, shells of buildings and traces of roads, for without human activity, without dwelling, there is no place. It is all of the lights.

Today was untoward, profitable and meek. Sly agendas were reached by lunchtime, piping secret messages into the ears of subordinates. You will do my work, please. But meetings were held still, I had to attend them, the rules of delegation could not be applied (namely, that firstly you must chose the right person for the right job, and secondly that you must allow them to get on with it) and it proved productive, teasing out layers of detail and form, plugging them into my timetables and schedules which grow by the day, unwieldy behemoths of grid and yore.

Courier practice round town, acquainting myself with the players, the fractious divides in local politics and the governing of authority. Who leads whom? I sauntered about the streets with a frostbitten fettle, menacing my way down alleys just to stop my toes from curling with the impending late afternoon freeze. Down Grey Street past the bastions of architecture, a glance into the doorway of the Lloyds building and into the Theatre Royal, before cutting up Highbridge St and slipping through The Shambles.

In Central Square things change. As a new build it orchestrates itself and the complex is complex. No amount of water-bearing pyramid fountains will ease my shivers but I’m up to the fourth floor in the mirrored lift and back down again before you can say ‘cultural investment’. These people want to know what is good for us.

Meanwhile, but really after, the day finishes, seemingly not as cold as last night but cold enough to justify an early retreat into my bed. No poems yet again of course, and with the poetry evening tomorrow, I have begun to worry.

A brief retort at this late hour after a return to termlife and school. World literature and its comparisons this evening, setting us up for the term. It is nice to approach some theory, to reason with the structures of it all – even if the literature itself is in short supply due to the library’s erratic loaning systems.

 

Walking up the central staircase, the concrete column to the top, I thought of something, but have now forgotten it. Amnesiaced by Goethe, I don’t where to start. His oppositions of literature as a horizon, as a normative horizon, have startled me already. Goethe was always unapproachable, too bound in reverence and criticism to even begin reading. So perhaps I will; start with his ideas of criticism, his notions of a world literature that is dually universal – both to the lofty and the profane.

 

Within this, many rises and paradoxes are promoted. But most of all it is my tiredness that prevails. I live a languorous, ponderous journey during these long, dark days. It is a blessed grind though, full of exclamation and grounding, and I am learning, slowly, but I am learning. Most of all, I am looking forward to Goethe.

An excuse for a post, bare-boned, bare-backed, barely there or here.

A trial, a mediation, a reggae, a prophet, a dirge, an expectation, a rose, a rise, a set of pearl eyes, the motion of dragonflies, and then the end. You ended it for me.

Happy birthday king sturge, you am die bestum. 

Achieving something of a fad, these early mornings, pearl light and brisk skip across the traffic lights. Past the felled trees, a community centre is building, and round the punjabi restaurant, and to home - briefly - before setting off to work. Half a pint of orange juice, half a pint of water, the obligatory marmite and tea.

The occasion of my birth has happened twice. Once and first in a snow-capped, red mountain range sitting out upon a frozen veranda amongst the iced refuse sacks and frosted asphodels. It was Colorado Springs, 2003 and I was reading, clutching to something. Then the weather snapped and we got taken upon the highway in convoy, three of us in tan coloured people-shifters, long wheelbase and drinks-holders in the back. The drifts of snow got deeper and the herds of buff and cow grew more sporadic but also denser - they fought against the cold those animals. We stopped for petrol at a sloped, attended gas station. Inside, the fridge was full and the door was open.

The mountain whined and points of light shone out, a zig-zag of macadam just visible as space between the trees. the pines grew up and out, positioned preposterously on overhangs and bends. The drifts were true drifts now, footprinted and full of history and we peered through the reflections as the car slowed into gear upon the treacherous corners, looking for mountain lions and even bears.

Stopping at a small wooden bridge, filmed with ice, we wondered. I walked, accompanied by three men and two women, all brave enough against the cold. The children stayed in the cars, laughing and sleeping at intervals. We weren't long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, but it seemed long enough as we trudged up a compacted hill following the trails of our breath, much like this morning only more urgent and it was not work that we hurried for.

At the rise, just as fatigue began to break in, we summoned ourselves and paused. Looking around, we knew what we were here for, but the faces stared at each other first, in solemn silence, an approval of sorts before the act of looking.

At this height, the entire state could be seen.

Four crumples of mountain ridges, intersected by planes of sky and a delicate roll of land down onto the flats where valleys eased into farmland and the tiny collections of civilisation, commissioned to our eyes only by clusters of light. It was not dark but such was the scale of the thing that only the places illuminated were able to advertise, the rest was a dark guess, a landscaped grope before the uselessness of our eyes. The outlines we made clear, a difference in warmth more than anything, the sky simply registered as more nothing than the rest of the scene laid out before us.

Later, back in the car and returning home, we noticed the eighty-foot silent drop of the frozen waterfall just beyond the ledge, just beneath the land and the sky.

There is a man we know, we call him the stone. The stone is not a stone. He eats, breathes, smokes and sleeps. Every now and again we hear rumours of his commitment to another in a brief night-bound affair of intercourse, sordid amongst the trees. They – his partners - never come back to visit the stone.

 

Perhaps they fall into him as everything falls into him. In a room, he sits and waits, pulling on his cigarette, you can smell that pungent stench from down the street. Open the door and there he is, sitting, smoking, breathing. You take a step inside and fall into him.

 

This is his nature, he is impassive and impassable, from shin to ear.

 

Music is played in the room and he swallows it, note for note, without flinching. The electricity bills are huge, one cannot tell whether the light is on or not. One detects a flickering as the bulb’s emittance is cast into the room’s space and just as quickly it disappears. His processes begin and end at the same time, like an utterance in the present tense, no sooner formed than destroyed. He is carbon neutral.

 

The question of matter is often raised. What is he? One can see him, the stone, he exists and his edges are correct, they coincide with an environment. The stone obeys physics. His heart sinks the same as yours or mine. But there are questions that accompany his juncture. These questions are long and convoluted, they are often accompanied by rage or pity and their precise home is hurtful. Indeed, you recognise much of the spite deflecting away from yourself, reluctantly, as though it belonged there.

 

No-one sees the stone out these days. He used to travel far and wide; a roamer he used to be. But nowadays he just seems to wait, drawing in the long night. Long gone are the days where one could see him striding past a raised doorstep, chin tucked in jacket, avoiding the breeze. Nowadays he eats the stiff Northeasterlies that pass up and over the terrace wall and into the dusty yard. He eats the dust too, without noticing. The stone rarely notices, he rarely gives notice.

 

What he did on his roaming, no one knew. Perhaps this was the source of his entombment, the retraction into himself, the hardening of things that led to the perpetual absorption that he hides within? Is that what caused this? He saw too much. He grew accustomed to observation, to analysing the systems and signs around him, so much so that eventually it became not a task, nor a preoccupation, nor a daily literature but a reading. Then, things came to him. They rose and spoke and arrowed and flew into him, until he was backed up against a wall, round a crumbling corner and across the street, backwards through the spiked iron gate and blue front door and slammed into his seat, breathless.

 

And there now, he resides, for days and years, because neither matter and he owns them all, he takes them all and they fall into him, a drain upon the day. The stone is weightless because terms are an irrelevance, timeless because measurements hold no balance in his presence, and blind because his only directions are inward. The stone just sits and waits, he eats, sleeps and breathes, but mostly he just waits, waiting always, waiting for the tumbling of things.

The wilful urge to write, here at my desk, my body cropped in shirt and trousers. Occasionally this need burgeons; there is no direct quality assurance, nor any guarantee that writing will take place, but something gives a reminder of the click and process of it all, the warm satisfaction of words. Writing gains its authority from language, simply. No work today, or rather work but from home.

The slog into town just couldn’t be managed after all this weeks events, indeed it has been too long since I wrote here. There has been a pooling since my last post, a collection of ideas around the joints and sockets of my creativity. At all the bends and joins, the flexible connections between concepts, something resides, something with purpose and energy. In denying it space though, I run a risk. To deny an idea, to suppress it with the confidence that it will return, focussed and stronger, takes a little faith. It is not a question of memory or recall, but rather relevance.

 
In ignoring the rise of an idea, we hope that it resurfaces after time as timeless, or at least independent of circumstance, that it holds strength of its own. The work of the writer is then to ingratiate the idea back into an artistic calendar, back into an area of re-relevance, needle-and-cottoning the concept back into the stitch of the everyday.

Eighteen bands over fourteen hours, a murk between them in the haze that hangs over the moor. We’ve just finished tying leads, the remainders and I, pulling them and separating from the bundle, unplugging from the mixing desk and wrapping them in figures of eight.

Remembrance comes in hurdles, mountable and singular. Back then things worked in order, but now we face a retrospective, turning to see ourselves, held in the crux of a morning and the cradle of an afternoon. It ended with an evening, with dancing and polyrhythms, megaphone distortion and shattered beats, filling a room with intention and edge. But it ended long before that with mixes and breaks, glitches and beats. It started of course with balkan genius buffonery.

Previously we were haunted, stalked and driven to the shallows by pop epithets, tranquil lacerations upon a Daily Express Sunday, reprimanded juvenile sex and odes to mental health. We had drawn previously upon stand-up basses, twirling the mics and moustaches, a joyful frenzy, a rise and a breakdown, a breakdown and a rise, into glory and euphoria, all the measure of a train hitting upon blues and ecstacy, and a banjo elegy roaring at us from beautiful round man with a giant voice.

In the day we sat and waited and took filmed breaths between dulcet guitar absence-and-loss complexes, and a man with a black and white rickenbacker (but not a website), a scottish edge and a purring intonation. There were others of course, but names were never my forte. I drop them all too often.

Thankyou to all. x

Square-eyes and times-new-roman retina. Too long spent in front of dim screens and shrunken type, trying to learn about the world. The paper is full of radioactive scaremongering, informed decisions about secondary schooling and exposes into data addicts and high-street hunter-gathers. Meanwhile, the light fades and another evening prepares itself, hoping for dim lights and glasses of beer.

 

A lull before the storm, preparatory talks and mails completed, everyone briefed. There can be no more to do, just arrange and cajole and hope. The festival is in its final hours and all seems quiet. No alarms, no surprises. Lost of a couple of days somewhere, not too keen to get them back. Last night my drinking was curtailed by a sodden walk home, sobering up amongst the clouds of damp, the city’s moors held supine by a close set of skies. Still, we talked and resolved, earlier having drunk briefly and spoken of post-MA study, its benefits and focuses. Restricted to three pints, the conversation halted and we were up and out into the night, close in contact with those low, dark skies.

 

And before that even, we had talked of the poetry night, erroneously starting the evening with a sheet headed ‘concerns’ but gradually pulled the talk back, away from snapping and sniping and into the realms of constructive thought. Discipline was the centre, establishing a mind-set of respect and experimentation. We must think of the tiny things first, the openings and environs, think of a gloved control, velvet revolutions.

 

Now however, now to the streets, walking amongst the squawks of schoolchildren and lines of cars, off to deliver two sets of keys, having been relieved of my duty. I shall pace the streets and listen to music, setting the urban off against an invisible, inaudible soundtrack for me, and me only.

Avoidance, that pleasured discretion. At this moment, according to schedule and reason, I should be overlooking my essays, crossing the ‘i’s and dotting the ‘t’s, pulling out the strands of a bibliography and weaving in the footnotes. I have become meticulous, a learned response that saves time. Just so much as a secondary glance requires me to note the author, date, publishing house and title of the book at the top of the A4 lined sheet. Similarly when writing essays, the footnote is the first to go in, before the formatting or the quotation marks even. A tiny number, then a page number and an abbreviation, my shorthand unreadable to the outsider.

 

I skim the paragraphs, looking for clumsy over/undersized sentences, run ons, tautologies, and the reuse of adjectives. A thesaurus is the most important book I have. Today though, I am avoiding.

 

I will complete this task before lunch, but with the main body of the essay done, with the intellectual hurdles and hoops passed I can relax into my day for the first time in weeks. It is for the best that I know none of my tutors or students have found this writing. So much time spent lamenting, circling and discussing. It functions as a window into my boredom at times, or a playground for plagiarists at others. Then again, perhaps they have found it. I have no way of knowing, or caring.

 

In the mean time, I refresh my browser waiting for a mail. Outlook Express refuses to work, so to the internet it is, with all its potencies of avoidance; the newspapers, the music reviews, the mp3 downloading sites, the endless endless weblogs, the submission guidelines for publishing houses. In deed some of these are my next pursuits – buy some music, construct a manuscript from my recent body of poetry, write an article or two. In their own way, all avoidances of writing the necessary, flawed novel, the novel I know lies somewhere between the type and the floorboards.

Calexico and Iron & Wine combine with a pastoral scene that mimics the title. Bordered, edgily and untidily by white, it is not a border as such but unpainted canvas. The impression of the piece is formed in primary colours, bled out into various shades and textures by over indulgent watercolours. A red, translucent horse stands behind a viciously perspectived, In The Reins, by a mottled wooden fence, jagged and slanting. The horse’s mane is detailed, brush strokes of coarse hair, but everything else is left to outline, a mistake of green obscuring part of his front leg. A startling, luminescent white rein bridles his head and leads into the hand of the man.

 

The man is blue, framed by thin wavers of tight red, immaculate detailing given to the pockets and curt of his shirt and collar and also his hands, the grasp of the fingers highlighted above the lumpy, playful ridges of the hills in the background. The varied, darkening of the blue background is dominated by two large, pale circles. One surrounds the man’s head, or rather the absence where his head should be, and the other surrounds the sliver of a quarter moon lazing in the centre of the sky, propped in its position by concentric broken circles of small, curved pink lines.