FIRE ON THE LIFEBOAT

Fire On The Lifeboat's musical, diabetic brother can be found at the myspace site of Document: a sound project.

 UPDATE: Myspace is currently undergoing maintenance and may be unpredictable.

To the end of the day and to The River, to Disengage. Both contain hours of drone and lull, not always unchallenging but always acting as the creation of a non-silence. They enact bodily processes, ambient environmentals, the sound of the street.

They have accompanied my work and today has been profitable. I have be adapting and stealing from others.

In order to adequately investigate the modern nation we need a writing that transcribes the ambivalence of time & place with a nation's identity. These words are not mine, but they could have been, they are now.

(Still constantly fascinated by the internal/external aspect of language; that is, that language is an external expression of self which the internal self can no longer control. Ironically, this has been better said by others.)

The 'modern' nation is defined by: homogeneity, literacy, anonymity.

The real site in which the ambivalence of the nation becomes manifest is within the discourse of the minority; they are the limits at the limits. The voice of the minority is a recognition, is a beginning, a renewal and so their voice is the one of constant flux.

As a thief of ideas, I surely must exist at some margin.

Crook of a spine, legs crossed and in chair but then, and only then, standing and reading from paper. The occasion of an event, John's celebration, unaccompanied voices and the sparse, healthy intonation of space within song. What is said, what is not said.

Then performance from the judges: a short tentative poem, old at the edges but with reticent heart; a ballad stolen from a shanty, echoes of the man himself; finally, the Bach prelude, the philharmonic leader caressing violin fret and urging the room to standing applause.

Finally, the awards given, one-two-three. Tearful, dutiful winners boasting of a complex, claiming of a relationship more real in the moment of things, that in the sense of its terms. We owe a debt that we never knew and things continue to continue.

Crowded with light, an intense grey from the window and the sills reflecting as solid white bands. Yesterday's re-memories are close, apostrophed and footnoted and correct.

The academic push, works being completed at a progressive rate; this can be called progress. Three reading lists dispensed with, bibliographies intact and sources referenced. These are the final stages and come easily.

It is, however, the opening of a new chapter, the final research project of this semester, that sings loud. Moving into culture and imperialism once more, facts of nation and fictions of narration piling in, clamouring for weight and discussion. Nine articles to be read somewhere during the ensuing week.

Then to planning and more, the situation of loss, the culling of weak ideas and the promotion of a tight coil at the centre, a circle of linked concepts that turn back on themselves in order top prove themselves; the academic flux that plays at the heart of all my work must retain strength whilst commanding flexibility. The universal applicable, the local remedy, the questioning answer that refuses to lie still.

A drenching and yet more poetry. Hunger is in sight and the shoes dry on the radiator as slow, computer thought comes into an equation of its own. The end of the street is hazed with water, bust gutters as tap onto concrete yards, and I am waiting.

The daily occurance, keeping up an appearance of sorts has been made today. Judging a songwriting competition, live unaccompanied voices, my remit as poet - look at the words. I listen to the words.

Hurry across the streets, vault the standing water, there are no cars.

Third poetry reading in two weeks, this one impromptu and killed by fortifying, awe-filled preludes of Bach from solo violin immediately after. A follow, followed.

Poetry is becoming a nice habit.

Summer rain in spring, dampening and quietening onto the road and pavements,  a residue dimming and fading. The red wooden porch, black wooden porch, blue wooden porch, black wooden porch remain stiff in the wind. Blossom clouds into the air and then settles in doorways and up against kerbs, the brackish & tired plants in the windowboxes exhausted by the wind.

This is the street, and the site of evidence, the case in hand. And whilst contracts are up, time is over and deadlines of mid-August have been drawn between landlord and tenants, the street will remain. Not just in shell and postcode, nor simply in association and topograph, but in the actuality of my everyday.

The annual renewal of house contract has been rendered impossible by crumbling plaster, tipping doors, sparking, shorting electrics and dog-eared walls. We must move, we have to move out. Where to?

The perfect answer: upstairs.

Taking over the flat directly above, the flat with three bedrooms and two other rooms, the flat with the grand sloped kitchen and stepped yard, the flat from where a year of noise and sleeplessness originated. Some have been here longer.

Now however, we have taken a gamble; a musician and a poet, a photographer and a writer, a journalist and a musician, a writer and a composer - the combinations continue, flexing and rotating like Rubik's.

And the new living space will not just portray a kind of placed-in-place but rather a formative dwelling. The plans are afoot for the recording studio, the gallery, a writer's study, artists-in-residence, sub-letting to those who wish to contribute to a series of books, a series of albums all glued together from field recordings, environmental consequences and the chance of who might be passing through.

Such slowness, drawling over Freud's uncanny. The ideas fly around inside but any incision is stalled by the momentum of head to mouth to head to wrist to keyboard to screen. Each component of a sentence suffers a physical barrier. The headache I have - its origins desperately unknown, as always - offers the greatest blockage.

I have begun to worry about radiation pouring from my computer screen.

Non-photography is floating around and it is something that hits like a chorus. Many debates over smoky Sunday dining tables - my talk weak with hunger - have resulted in clenched fists and flung paper. A keen friend loves to Lomo. He searches events with his Russian automat, finger beaded with sweat, tension-strained-tensions, a tendon out of place.

Often, during these evenings, he attempts to persuade me to drop my rejection of cameras. I dislike them, I feel awkward taking pictures, they obscure an internal recognition a connection. I cannot write of something I have photographed. He claims our difference is the result of memory; his faltering, mine acute, if not entirely transient. In my head, odd little moments resonate, flight times dissipate.

For me, looking at other people's holiday snaps holds itself as numbing as listening to other people's dreams. And yet everyone takes them, as expert. There must be more amateur photographers than painters, poets and sculptors put together. And they function as dreary documenters, just as weblogs function as amateur Kafkas, manic Blanchots, reticent & shy B.S.Johnsons. The blanketing of standards, the sense of DIY mocks an elite both positively and negatively.

There is no sense of time in a bad photograph.

But of course, the antithesis of this is the reason of a good photograph, it transcends inks and the rectangular borders, moves away from geographies and pulls unapparent relationships into shot. Therefore, unhesitantly, I love the Lomo pictures of my friend. Not of all of the photographs, because not all of them work, not all of them do the work. But the ones that succeed are processes of survival, relationships created and exposed in trays.

I hate to photograph because I, like the majority of photographers, am no good.

The fascination with news and the reporting of news continues. Alongside, a sense of how I can conjoin my studies with a fictional discipline. The narrative contained within newstype holds a continuous attraction, and yet I cannot see journalism as a vocation. Things are happening, movements of peoples and movements of ideas are being recorded in the innocent serif and institution of daily journals.

The refugees of Chagos end exile from white beached homelands; Andalusian government pays for the demolition for of half-finished tourist monoliths on the graveyard of the costas; the systematic exposure of 4,500 former KGB agents in Latvia threatens to tear at heart of Baltics; alarming Bulgarian stability and market economy questioned in light of ascension to EU; Sri Lankan militants kill seventy as country moves towards fringes of war; anniversary of Chinese cultural revolution and its deep significances; US infringement of privacy issues at stake as telephone data patterns are scrutinised in silence; Escalation in popularity of Russian filmic works banned under previous Soviet regimes, gives rise to remakes and republished samizdats.

The poetry of world news is not to baulked at. Any fool can lay metaphor upon fact, but what we investigate here is not how rhythmical and dramatised reportage may be, but an examination of its techniques and inferences, its relevances and insight. There are narratives buried within, and the media exists as both a representation and a catalyst. These things do not exist for us without the word of another.

So must be quick, I have set a curfew of my own - head down and working by eleven. A delightful evening last night with my newly engaged friend last night. We haven't been casual for a while, no expectations or agendas, no forced meetings or structured time, just an ample evening in which to talk, smoke and eat.

She roasted cashews in oil, salt and chilli as we spoke of things, mining the exploits of the underpaid and underfunded while I drew back on the week-that-never-was. I opened champagne, accidentally. Then, asparagus tips drowned in butter and lemonjuice, creamed feta and dark large spinach leaves.

After eating,  we drew up lists of music for the wedding, spanning decades, whilst smoking cigarette after cigarette and giving ourselves fierce nicotine headaches into the small hours. The walk home was still and warm, lit by the moon, and gradually as I fell into exhaustion the headaches were released like balloons.