Life During Wartime

There are times when I can do chutzpah. There are times when my life has depended on me being able to do chutzpah. However, there is no way I can be brazen enough to return to posting and just ignore the fact that English Dreaming, English Rain has been dead for months.

I feel as if I ought to apologise and explain. I certainly feel like I ought to start pulling handwritten entries from the Moleskin into the digital realm before they become totally lost to the Southwell mound of paper. Yet the distance between ought and action can be tough to travel when illness cuts into your body and the Black Dog worries you like unprotected livestock.

Pain reduces you. Pain warps you. It crushes your spirit as it does the nasty business of crumpling and denting the body. Twisted out of shape for so long, you are often too weak to defend yourself from the Barghest growl.

It has felt like life during wartime of late, but that is no excuse not to write. There have been good days worth recording. Blessings of love and friendship that should have been caught with words. Giving up is not an option. English Dreaming, English Rain goes on and so does the verbose bastard writing it. There is even going to be backfilling. How can I not tell tales of Shadow London, Iain Sinclair’s indecipherable hand, Luke Haines and boys with dinosaurs?

The Black Dog Tracks Behind

The serrated knife edge of cold that had been at my throat every morning this month was dropped today. I walk without dragon breath. Sun blessing my bones as it cracks the thin crust of ice on the canal.

Not thwarted by sunlight, the black dog tracks behind. The combined joys of the weather and the first day in a week when I have not been blinded by a headache, means he is further back than usual. He might catch up later, but right now I have a start on him.

‘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.

Fading To Black

The last few nights have been blighted by asthma. Lying on the floor, each breath has been a hot, hard struggle. I have become reacquainted with the ragged gulps of air that are never enough to fill my lungs, the sensation of fire crawling across my upper back.

The asthma transports me back the seventies even more than my Nanna’s black and white television, circa 1971 gas stove and choice of brown upholstery fabrics. It was my childhood asthma that extinguished any boyish dreams of sporting glory. I was always cowered by the knowledge too much exertion on the pitch could lead me back to the isolation and oxygen tents I first experienced as a six-year-old.

The fear of asthma putting me back in hospital was nothing compared to the terror that would actually consume me during an attack. As the sense I was suffocating grew stronger, I would find myself fighting not just for breath, but against an irresistible panic. It was not some adult inspired existential dread designed to make children wary of ‘strange men’, it was total locked-in-blazing-building-hammering-on-the-doors-and-screaming panic. Sometimes when the fire of asthma raged in my chest burning up all the oxygen, I would begin to pass out with no certainty of coming back.

During one attack, when no Ventolin inhaler or adult was around, I found myself on the floor, fading to black as each breath was incinerated by the inferno inside. On the hazy edge of consciousness, I encountered a glimpse of self. Even though my lungs felt as is they were being blistered by smoke, my own calm voice was clear: ‘Everything will be OK.’ At that point, my fear was alchemised.

Right now, when panic about other areas could so easily engulf me again, I need to hear that voice. Need emotional alchemy. Need the growing black dog growl to turn to white light hope. Things will be better in London; it is my crucible.

Black Dog Growl

It is my understanding that the French do not say ‘I am sad’, but rather ‘A sadness is upon me’. The French have it right. Currently there is sadness upon me. I know it is only multiple clouds of small sorrow combining to feel like a severely bruised sky above, but there is no use denying the weather.

Part of the sadness is due to current gravitational pull of Essex. Tomorrow I have to go back to resolve a raft of Nanna related problems. The prospect of days spent battling with bureaucracy and desperately juggling the finances is fine. Knowing my nights will be spent sleeping on the floor of the council flat my grandparents lived in for 38 years is a black dog growl. A place once filled with the animating love of a couple who had been married for 73 years is now just a claustrophobic concrete shell. After the recent break-in at the place by people looking for me, I have additional reasons to feel uncomfortable.

Camomile and The Claws Of Axos

The insomnia is constant, but last night was the worst in years. After the turmoil of seeing Anne-Marie Forker for the last time and taking the rest of my stuff from the flat, not even three mugs of camomile and honey and the usual soundtrack of DVD commentaries could get me to sleep. To make it worse, they put the clocks back, so I had an extra hour to endure. Hopefully, tonight will be a little easier. Bone-deep weariness and The Claws Of Axos might win out over fear and sense of loss.

I suspect I’m not going to get much work done ahead of going into hospital on the 17th. I’d love to think that I’d get the iboga selling document done and after more than 13 years, finally sort out the Bill Hick’s interview within the next two weeks, but I also know that being in this much of a black dog, creative work will become a subset of surviving.

I've no desire to look at my current situation of impending surgery and the heartbreak of losing the love of you life after seven years in Pollyana mode, however, it has had some benefits besides rapid weight loss. I’ve enjoyed support from friends who I had not previously realised how much they actually cared for me. I’ve even found myself able to ask a couple of them for help. Asking for help is wonderfully out of character for me as I’d usually much rather give aid than receive it.