The Shaping of Space

There are days that even the worst abuses of pain cannot spoil. Today is one of them. Beyond the charms of a strong September sun doing its best to pretend summer is not dead and the company of Tim Dedopulos, remarkable blessings flicker around me.

Time is spent gazing at Charles Robert Cockerell’s A Tribute To Christopher Wren. An assemblage of all the buildings once thought to have been designed by Wren. The imaginary skyline of the painting shimmers with light bouncing of the soft silver hue of Portland stone, giving it the quality of being a glimpse of an elseword. Even its foreground buildings of usually solid red brick and white stone seem to be gently phasing in from another reality. I lose myself in it, feel as if I am walking within its fictional streets. Feel as if I have become part of a dream the city is dreaming of itself.

Along the galleries and passages of the V&A, I float from Cockerell induced reverie to mind-expanding words of curator Charles Hind. His passionate scholarship walks me through an original architectural model of Easton Neston. He turns the purposeful lines of nearly 300 year-old plans into a greater appreciation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s playing with gothic adaptation and distorted classical themes. Better understand what his sometimes imposing, bullying stone dramas were trying to achieve.

My fingers turn the pages of one of Hawksmoor’s early original sketchbooks. Attempts from the early 1680s to capture the topography of English towns, castles and churches. The seventeenth century paper is crisp but firm, the sharp confident lines of his labels at contrasting with a hesitation in the drawings that comes from someone still learning the skill of perspective. As I flick through the book, it changes from relic to temporal transport. Through its pages I glimpse not just Nottingham or Oxford as Hawksmoor saw them, but Hawksmoor himself. An ink ghost telling stories in line and hatching

Later, we meet Iain Sinclair at Christ Church, Spitalfields. He graciously signs my copy of Orbital, comments on how the book records this building as one of his gates into and out of the imaginary city. I am long beyond the age of having heroes, but that does not stop me being in absolute awe at Sinclair’s talent. He is not only my favourite writer, but the possibly the greatest living user of the English language. No-one creates more perfect and powerful sentences than him.

He talks to us of the barbarism of Thatcherite Britain. Of how the detonation of its brute logic in the City of London resulted in an explosive front radiating out, obliterating the old symbolic landscape that had surrounded the church. The disruption of London’s ancient patterns and the excavation of plague energies.

He talks of memories, the ghost buildings of Cheshire Street and tangible psychic boundaries marked by Hare Marsh. The fear of fire wardens stationed on the highest point of Christchurch during the Blitz. Abandoned temples of primitive Christians, the visual echoes between this building and Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he used to work. Patterns seemingly encoded in the ether by Hawksmoor.

He talks of Hawksmoor’s buildings being plural in time. Of the dense codes of complex mysticism embodied within the structure of his elegant churches. Of the architect’s towers linking the forces of earthy commerce to the higher realms of the imagination. The church as a movement from Malkuth to Kether.

Sinclair talks of the inspiration of his own early works when he was a council gardener in the shadow of Christ Church. I ask him if the kabbalistic drama of the building and the energies spread throughout the surrounding landscape of the area had almost ridden him Vodou-style, kicked his arse and forced him to start writing. Surprisingly he agrees. Speaking of Moon card dreams and power of place to possess a writer.

The day ends in the last of Hawksmoor’s London churches. We arrive at St. George’s, Bloomsbury as the last burst of afternoon sun paints the interior columns with all the colours of the stained glass. The essential magic of the building is not in keystone carved with the Tetragrammaton, the alchemical pelican nor the echoing of Baalbek. It is in the shaping of space, reclaiming and revealing a glimpse of some sacred mystery despite the boiling rush of the city beyond its walls.

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.

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.'

English Dreaming, English Rain 2005-2007

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Existence on the Net is transitory. Pages disappear; whole sites get taken down for legal reasons or knocked off by low level cyber-attacks. There is no promise English Dreaming, English Rain will be here the next time you look

Post recent problems where English Dreaming, English Rain was cybered, I have been dwelling on its mortality. Created at the lowest point of my life, it been the base load of my creative existence for more than two years.

As Dave Sims once pointed out, every author has write a certain number of pages to flush the crap out of their system and find their own style. I think English Dreaming, English Rain has not only helped me to do that, it has evolved my writing to a level where I can at least produce the odd killer sentence. I cannot be Self or Sinclair, Moore or MacLeod, but I hope that being me, the words occasionally work. If for no other reason than that, I am inordinately fond of it.

Given I would miss it terribly if it were to vanish into binary oblivion, I am going to do something incredibly vain and publish my favourite extracts from it as a book. This will hopefully preserve some of my better output for a little longer than the Net can. At least unlike some of my other books, the smallest of print runs for English Dreaming, English Rain 2005-2007 will at least mean I do not have to spend a fortune on tree planting in Borneo and Scotland to make it carbon neutral.