The respite of Singapore is short. Within an hour I am back on the plane. It is the first time in my life I have not been eager to leave an airport.
Over the Java Sea, blood begins to trickle from my left nostril. Quickly soaking all available tissues, it keeps on flowing, falling onto my jacket with Pollockian intent. Great, just great. I will have to face Australian immigration looking like I have been in a street brawl.
The pain begins to build again till I am exporting a gloopy claret that would turn even the stomach of Clive Barker film fan. Somewhere in the back of my mind I see an image of myself being bled by a medieval surgeon, trying to relieve the sanguine humour – the classical element of air. Turbulence shakes the plane and I phase exhausted into my seat.
After hours of dark, I eventually see a band of orange. It expands to define the horizon before giving in to the inevitability of blue. Dead Can Dance fills my ears as I try to grasp the alien landscape below.
At first the lack of roads is breathtakingly strange, the miles and miles of earth unscarred by man a novel sight for European. I take in twinkling encampments of clustered light, separated from each other by three days harsh walk across scrub, sunburnt hills and red dirt. Pools of water, as rare and precious in the hard-baked back of Bourke as the smooth silver metal surface they show to the sky. The world speeding outside the window is one of bleak and dangerous beauty.
Clearly, I am not in Kansas.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
Beyond the Edge of England
On the ground, the screen in front of me shows London as a huge yellow boil growing from green skin patterned with thin veins of blue. Only three roads are marked: A4, M25 – the city’s magic circle – and A13, first ley of English Hoodoo and my ancestral road. I wish my journey only involved taking one of these paths. It is 5,767 miles/12 hours and 50 minutes to Singapore.
As we taxi, the engines whine like whale song, building to a storm crash as the bulk of the 777 finally fights gravity. At 5,000 feet the sodium orange of the streetlights below mark fiery labyrinths on the map. At 14,000 they are reduced to the smudged trajectories of civilisation, isolated villages and towns revealed as blazing worlds in the blackened landscape of the night.
We reach the Essex coast and suddenly the fires stop. Beyond the edge of England there is only a black void. We carry on with only a belief that there must be sea below till we reach the scattered clusters of light which signal Holland.
BA Station 12 plays Morrissey’s Vauxhall & I on continuous loop. Mozza is about the worst oracle soundtrack I can imagine. ‘There’s going to be some trouble…’
The stewards enforce a false night. When I sneak open the shutter I glimpse wonders. The Himalayas. The Bay of Bengal. At one point I see jungle mountains surrounding old Dagon. The trees an encircling army, providing paranoia that the vengeful spirit of the green may not be something the junta can hold back with chainsaws and conscripted labour alone. A thin string of white sand marks one border of the Andaman Sea. Part of my mind wants to translate it into a fractal equation, but my eyes only want to communicate awe at its simple, devastating beauty.
Descending into Singapore the pain starts. It feels as if my teeth are being pulled, yanked from my mouth in clumps by industrial pliers. There is a knife blade scouring the white of my left cheekbone. A pencil being pushed into my brain.
I want to scream. I have had bones snap, molars shatter, but nothing as bad as this. I want oblivion. Anything as long as it stops.
Hands tear the fabric off the seat as I fight the increasing destruction in my head. As we drop below the cloud, 200 ships appear below. Anchored in a rigid grid, clothed in emaciated gauze of mist, their lack of motion suggests death. We are falling towards land over a bulk freighter graveyard.
I stumble into the neon buzz of the airport already near blind with headache. Giant plasma screens blast RSAF propaganda. The Black Knight’s F-16C Fighting Falcons perform precision rolls, acting out action snatches from every big budget sci-fi film and computer game cutscene of the last decade. Slogans proclaim: ‘Air Force - Above All' and 'Careers – Like Nothing on Earth.’
With me, they are preaching to the wrong demographic. Right now I do not need any Manga technology death fetishation to fear aircraft. Right now, I bloody hate flying.
As we taxi, the engines whine like whale song, building to a storm crash as the bulk of the 777 finally fights gravity. At 5,000 feet the sodium orange of the streetlights below mark fiery labyrinths on the map. At 14,000 they are reduced to the smudged trajectories of civilisation, isolated villages and towns revealed as blazing worlds in the blackened landscape of the night.
We reach the Essex coast and suddenly the fires stop. Beyond the edge of England there is only a black void. We carry on with only a belief that there must be sea below till we reach the scattered clusters of light which signal Holland.
BA Station 12 plays Morrissey’s Vauxhall & I on continuous loop. Mozza is about the worst oracle soundtrack I can imagine. ‘There’s going to be some trouble…’
The stewards enforce a false night. When I sneak open the shutter I glimpse wonders. The Himalayas. The Bay of Bengal. At one point I see jungle mountains surrounding old Dagon. The trees an encircling army, providing paranoia that the vengeful spirit of the green may not be something the junta can hold back with chainsaws and conscripted labour alone. A thin string of white sand marks one border of the Andaman Sea. Part of my mind wants to translate it into a fractal equation, but my eyes only want to communicate awe at its simple, devastating beauty.
Descending into Singapore the pain starts. It feels as if my teeth are being pulled, yanked from my mouth in clumps by industrial pliers. There is a knife blade scouring the white of my left cheekbone. A pencil being pushed into my brain.
I want to scream. I have had bones snap, molars shatter, but nothing as bad as this. I want oblivion. Anything as long as it stops.
Hands tear the fabric off the seat as I fight the increasing destruction in my head. As we drop below the cloud, 200 ships appear below. Anchored in a rigid grid, clothed in emaciated gauze of mist, their lack of motion suggests death. We are falling towards land over a bulk freighter graveyard.
I stumble into the neon buzz of the airport already near blind with headache. Giant plasma screens blast RSAF propaganda. The Black Knight’s F-16C Fighting Falcons perform precision rolls, acting out action snatches from every big budget sci-fi film and computer game cutscene of the last decade. Slogans proclaim: ‘Air Force - Above All' and 'Careers – Like Nothing on Earth.’
With me, they are preaching to the wrong demographic. Right now I do not need any Manga technology death fetishation to fear aircraft. Right now, I bloody hate flying.
Flying to Oz by Winged Monkey
I am sorry for the lack of recent posts. I am even more sorry that I have not yet responded to everyone took the time to wish me a happy birthday last week. The desire to write has been obscured by the ill health of my Nanna and the preparations for shifting my flesh 10,500 miles to Australia.
Unfortunately I am not flying to Oz by winged monkey, but with the tepid assistance of British Airways. I may trust BA to get me safely over the Himalayas, but I have substantial doubt whether they will deliver both me and my suitcase to the same airport at the same time.
The prospect of a 22-hour flight tightens my flesh and knots my muscles. Whilst I have no fear of flying, the dread of being carried off a plane on a stretcher again still clings to me. There is no escaping this horror. It has to be confronted. I have to fly. My bag is packed. I have selected my two books for the journey – Sinclair and Lichtenstien’s Rodinsky's Room and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. There is nothing left to do now but finish typing this, shower, shave and lock up.
Unfortunately I am not flying to Oz by winged monkey, but with the tepid assistance of British Airways. I may trust BA to get me safely over the Himalayas, but I have substantial doubt whether they will deliver both me and my suitcase to the same airport at the same time.
The prospect of a 22-hour flight tightens my flesh and knots my muscles. Whilst I have no fear of flying, the dread of being carried off a plane on a stretcher again still clings to me. There is no escaping this horror. It has to be confronted. I have to fly. My bag is packed. I have selected my two books for the journey – Sinclair and Lichtenstien’s Rodinsky's Room and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. There is nothing left to do now but finish typing this, shower, shave and lock up.
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Simple Magic of Email
When a wonder becomes pervasive, there is a danger we become dull to its innate splendour. You can ignore any miracle if it is routine. Today I was reminded of the simple magic of email and Internet by unexpected treasure in my inbox.
On Friday, hobbling back to the canal, my mind still blazing with literary fire, I thought of the forces which shaped my relationship with words. I was wishing for chances to thank the links in the narrative chain that helped make me a writer. One important name summoned was Bee, my A-level English teacher. Her belief in me and the conversations I enjoyed with her in and out of her class are something I still treasure nearly 20 years later.
This afternoon I received an email from her. She had heard me doing a back on the farm radio interview on Radio 4, recognized my name and my ‘distinctive voice’ (probably a polite way of describing my Essex barrow boy consonant crunching) and looked me up. Bee’s words were wonderfully kind, taking delight that I had ‘not lost that alternative, quirky outlook on the world that took my interest when you were in my class’ and pleasure in seeing that I have ‘become such a fluent writer because I can remember how promising I thought you were and how frustrated you must have felt at times with study assignments.’
The power the Internet and email delivers to its users to connect is still breathtaking to me. Yet even more wonderful is being so gently remembered by someone I hold in high esteem. Thank you Bee. Thank you in the now for making my day and thank you in the then for being one of those forces that made me a writer.
On Friday, hobbling back to the canal, my mind still blazing with literary fire, I thought of the forces which shaped my relationship with words. I was wishing for chances to thank the links in the narrative chain that helped make me a writer. One important name summoned was Bee, my A-level English teacher. Her belief in me and the conversations I enjoyed with her in and out of her class are something I still treasure nearly 20 years later.
This afternoon I received an email from her. She had heard me doing a back on the farm radio interview on Radio 4, recognized my name and my ‘distinctive voice’ (probably a polite way of describing my Essex barrow boy consonant crunching) and looked me up. Bee’s words were wonderfully kind, taking delight that I had ‘not lost that alternative, quirky outlook on the world that took my interest when you were in my class’ and pleasure in seeing that I have ‘become such a fluent writer because I can remember how promising I thought you were and how frustrated you must have felt at times with study assignments.’
The power the Internet and email delivers to its users to connect is still breathtaking to me. Yet even more wonderful is being so gently remembered by someone I hold in high esteem. Thank you Bee. Thank you in the now for making my day and thank you in the then for being one of those forces that made me a writer.
Friday, February 08, 2008
A London Only Night
Aside from my author friends, there are only five writers I would break even a Belgrade curfew to go hear talk. Ballard, Moore, MacLeod, Sinclair and Self. Even if I was struggling with two broken legs, I would put the weight on my crutches and drag myself across the city for any one of them speaking.
Sinclair and Self on the same bill talking about psychogeography. Dream tickets do not get any dreamier. It was inevitable I would suffer the crashing pain of every concussive step it took to haul myself over to the V&A.
As I hobbled across Hyde Park, the falling sun left behind a wreckage of pink clouds. Twilight turned the walkers, skaters and geese feeders on the banks of the Serpentine to Lowry silhouettes. I limped on. Not even the throbbing curse of my foot could not undermine my excitement.
Brompton Road obtained, I arrived at the V&A ridiculously early. The great thing about having a date at a museum is that if you are premature – or the girl in the red coat is late – you cannot feel like you are actually waiting. You just explore by yourself for a bit. Shamble off to find Giambologna’s Samson and Philistine, a Westwood dress or David Reekie’s A Captive Audience?
When my companion arrived, she found me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the museum shop. It was hard to argue with her assessment that I was like a child overdosed on cordial. By my standards, I felt quite restrained given I was not actually dancing among the statuary.
Desperate for the event to start, I sat on the ornate ceramic staircase outside the lecture room. As two of the greatest writers in the English language arrived, I slipped among their entourage of family, Kevin Jackson and eager museum flunkies. As Sinclair and Self were miked up, I screwed my bottom to a prime spot in the front row, listening to the pair discuss the canonicity of a scurrilous story about a shared acquaintance in a New York elevator. I leaned my head back to take in the lavishly decorated domed ceiling. Gilded stars on a blue sky. Heaven. I was in a literary heaven. Behind me, the rows were soon thick with directors, photographers, actors, academics and fellow fans.
They began by reading from their latest books. Kevin Jackson moderated, trying to tease out the meaning of psychogeography as a term and its significance as a genre. Antecedents beyond Debord were cited: Thomas de Quincey, 1940s Parisians and Orson Welles walking the streets of London in 1955 in-between directing Moby Dick Rehearsed. Ballard was lauded. Stewart Home’s careerist head reared and Self neatly dismissed all the artsy wankers pushing repetitive walking.
Cutting through the crap, Sinclair summed up psychogeography as: ‘A way of thinking about the city.’ His words resonated with me, talk of ‘metatemporal journeys’, ‘landscape as parentage’ and the city an ‘anthology of possibilities’. London as ‘a dense series of memory controlled barriers’. Self’s description of Sinclair’s take on psychogeography as ‘secular shamanism’ made perfect sense when Sinclair said: ‘When I am walking, I am recovering and honouring the ancestors of the city.’
They were meanders into Olympic site conspiracies, secret underground cities in Epsom and the ‘shit one can get into trying to walk from JFK to Manhattan’. Sinclair and Self both fixed on psychogeography as one of the ‘tools of resistance’ the whole ‘Pods vs. Peds’ division among writers and a sense, as I would put it, of the power of walking to restore narrative to our lives. I was beyond chuffed when Sinclair said he ‘profoundly agreed’ with me when I questioned them about CCTV.
Afterwards my date spoke to Sinclair about me, making me feel more embarrassed than any child kissed by its mother in the school playground. She got him to sign a copy of London: City of Disappearances and even browbeat Self into signing his Charing Cross Hospital section on the book. We drifted downstairs to the Pre-Raphaelite glories of the green refreshment room. As we ate pies and roast parsnips amid William Morris plasterwork, Edward Burne-Jones glass and chandeliers resembling Dyson spheres, a pianist played.
Towards home, the tactful ignoring of a celebrity dog walker revelling in his sodium secrecy was the only incident. We tracked the canal, its black mirror bending the streetlight beams. The toll of concussion and tiredness slowed my hobbling, but I was still smiling. As my companion pointed out: ‘Iain Sinclair, Will Self and a pie at the V&A. That is a London only night. You would not get it anywhere else.'
Sinclair and Self on the same bill talking about psychogeography. Dream tickets do not get any dreamier. It was inevitable I would suffer the crashing pain of every concussive step it took to haul myself over to the V&A.
As I hobbled across Hyde Park, the falling sun left behind a wreckage of pink clouds. Twilight turned the walkers, skaters and geese feeders on the banks of the Serpentine to Lowry silhouettes. I limped on. Not even the throbbing curse of my foot could not undermine my excitement.
Brompton Road obtained, I arrived at the V&A ridiculously early. The great thing about having a date at a museum is that if you are premature – or the girl in the red coat is late – you cannot feel like you are actually waiting. You just explore by yourself for a bit. Shamble off to find Giambologna’s Samson and Philistine, a Westwood dress or David Reekie’s A Captive Audience?
When my companion arrived, she found me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the museum shop. It was hard to argue with her assessment that I was like a child overdosed on cordial. By my standards, I felt quite restrained given I was not actually dancing among the statuary.
Desperate for the event to start, I sat on the ornate ceramic staircase outside the lecture room. As two of the greatest writers in the English language arrived, I slipped among their entourage of family, Kevin Jackson and eager museum flunkies. As Sinclair and Self were miked up, I screwed my bottom to a prime spot in the front row, listening to the pair discuss the canonicity of a scurrilous story about a shared acquaintance in a New York elevator. I leaned my head back to take in the lavishly decorated domed ceiling. Gilded stars on a blue sky. Heaven. I was in a literary heaven. Behind me, the rows were soon thick with directors, photographers, actors, academics and fellow fans.
They began by reading from their latest books. Kevin Jackson moderated, trying to tease out the meaning of psychogeography as a term and its significance as a genre. Antecedents beyond Debord were cited: Thomas de Quincey, 1940s Parisians and Orson Welles walking the streets of London in 1955 in-between directing Moby Dick Rehearsed. Ballard was lauded. Stewart Home’s careerist head reared and Self neatly dismissed all the artsy wankers pushing repetitive walking.
Cutting through the crap, Sinclair summed up psychogeography as: ‘A way of thinking about the city.’ His words resonated with me, talk of ‘metatemporal journeys’, ‘landscape as parentage’ and the city an ‘anthology of possibilities’. London as ‘a dense series of memory controlled barriers’. Self’s description of Sinclair’s take on psychogeography as ‘secular shamanism’ made perfect sense when Sinclair said: ‘When I am walking, I am recovering and honouring the ancestors of the city.’
They were meanders into Olympic site conspiracies, secret underground cities in Epsom and the ‘shit one can get into trying to walk from JFK to Manhattan’. Sinclair and Self both fixed on psychogeography as one of the ‘tools of resistance’ the whole ‘Pods vs. Peds’ division among writers and a sense, as I would put it, of the power of walking to restore narrative to our lives. I was beyond chuffed when Sinclair said he ‘profoundly agreed’ with me when I questioned them about CCTV.
Afterwards my date spoke to Sinclair about me, making me feel more embarrassed than any child kissed by its mother in the school playground. She got him to sign a copy of London: City of Disappearances and even browbeat Self into signing his Charing Cross Hospital section on the book. We drifted downstairs to the Pre-Raphaelite glories of the green refreshment room. As we ate pies and roast parsnips amid William Morris plasterwork, Edward Burne-Jones glass and chandeliers resembling Dyson spheres, a pianist played.
Towards home, the tactful ignoring of a celebrity dog walker revelling in his sodium secrecy was the only incident. We tracked the canal, its black mirror bending the streetlight beams. The toll of concussion and tiredness slowed my hobbling, but I was still smiling. As my companion pointed out: ‘Iain Sinclair, Will Self and a pie at the V&A. That is a London only night. You would not get it anywhere else.'
Monday, February 04, 2008
‘That Tartarus may not Engulf them’
The world is full of time-honoured wonder, full of established brilliance overlooked in the blast of the new. I remember as a truculent teenager feeling out of step when friends were obsessed with latest suburban pop and I was discovering the joy of Revolver. How could George Michael ever compete with the sense of tumbling through alternate realities you got while listening to Tomorrow Never Knows? The latest band hyped to gills by NME usually seemed listless when compared to the classics. From God Save The Queen to Return of Django, I was time travelling when everyone else was hunting in the now.
Maybe it is a weakness, but I am still an occasional classicist. I can still find as much reward in the past as others grab from the frontlines of the fabled cutting edge. Until a few weeks ago, all I knew of Gabriel Fauré was he was French, dead and the composer of a cello piece I adore. Today I am discovering the glory of his harmonic structures and the gentle grace of his Requiem.
Listening to Fauré’s Requiem gives the intimate reaction to grandeur you get from walking into a cathedral. You hear an aspiration of bliss, the desire for a beyond. It a call for light in the abyss. You need no faith to respond to its beauty. It can be a hymn to the White Hot Room, a prayer to God or simply a work celebrating the power of love over entropy. For a man fighting the Black Dog, the phrase ‘that Tartarus may not engulf them’ is resonant, the splendour of its setting sustaining.
As I face my fears, turn my head to sharp wind of the future, I am stronger and my life richer for this music and all the other treasures living beyond their day in history.
Maybe it is a weakness, but I am still an occasional classicist. I can still find as much reward in the past as others grab from the frontlines of the fabled cutting edge. Until a few weeks ago, all I knew of Gabriel Fauré was he was French, dead and the composer of a cello piece I adore. Today I am discovering the glory of his harmonic structures and the gentle grace of his Requiem.
Listening to Fauré’s Requiem gives the intimate reaction to grandeur you get from walking into a cathedral. You hear an aspiration of bliss, the desire for a beyond. It a call for light in the abyss. You need no faith to respond to its beauty. It can be a hymn to the White Hot Room, a prayer to God or simply a work celebrating the power of love over entropy. For a man fighting the Black Dog, the phrase ‘that Tartarus may not engulf them’ is resonant, the splendour of its setting sustaining.
As I face my fears, turn my head to sharp wind of the future, I am stronger and my life richer for this music and all the other treasures living beyond their day in history.
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