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.

The Centre of my Universe

The gravity of the Three Bridge Kingdom is impacting on my blood. Separating the settler from the gallowglass. One pools in my feet, the other runs only in my brain. The knowledge that there will come a day when I leave already projects a rupture in my heart.

As the attraction of place becomes stronger, it seems as if it is also warping the trajectories of others I love. Capturing them, creating orbits around the centre of my universe. Coalescing friends into an accessible solar system, ordered by the musica universalis of squabbling geese and boats gently rolling on the water.

The fact that my co-author’s partner lives canalside means the weekends he visits, my home feels like the terrace abode of The Beatles from Help. This week Tim Dedopulos moved from sleeping on my sofa to being a near neighbour with his own resident card. The gravitation even pulls in visitors from Verwood and Hadleigh who have been distanced for years. I can almost believe that one Sunday morning I will walk out for the papers and encounter my errant Canadian brother on the towpath.

These are harsh times and I need my mojo back. The echo of it at Worth Matravers made me realise just what I was missing. If I am to find it, maybe I should look closer to home. The sustaining magic of life is in the small wonder of friends and the soul-kissed love of my little patch of London.

A Tribal Affair

The new book is written and has been delivered to my commissioning editor. According to him: “It looks great.” My sigh of relief on hearing this was so deep I think the subsonic hum caused damage to the Westway’s concrete.

The good news keeps rolling with the discovery that the project is going to be copy-edited by Tim Dedopulos. This is a lovely bonus. Tim’s name was in the acknowledgements as one of my ‘brothers by other mothers’ long before I knew he would be working on the book.

Writing it with Matt Adams – whose name would have been in the acknowledgements of any project – then being edited by Tim makes it feel like a tribal affair. Sharing the spoils of a kill, turning one gig into work that helps keep three of us in the black. The running tribe model, the 21st century way,

The project is my first humour book in a decade. Unlike the crime against trees I put my name to help clear Anne-Marie Forker’s student debts, this one is almost readable. I am happy to admit it is a hack gig. When you need to pay for a funeral, there is no better way than to write a book about death. As Andy Warhol would say: “I’ve got to bring home the bacon, someone’s got to bring home the roast.”

However, doing this book has also meant being commissioned by someone I really rate and like, writing with one of the people I am closest to and being edited by a man who I consider a brother despite him having once stolen my name. It really does feel like the way forward. Working with my friends, dividing the score.

Now the book is over, there is only one more thing to do before I can get back to life. After I get back from the hospital I can concentrate on the important things. There are ducks to feed and brioche bread and butter puddings to make. A 99-year-old Nanna to spoil and lazing in bed with the Sunday morning papers to catch up on.

A Fragment from the Dreamscape

People often ask writers: ‘Where do you get you ideas from?’ It is a fair question, yet many authors sweat when answering. You can see guilty beads of moisture tracking the lines in their foreheads.

This is because most writers are thieves. We steal ideas. File down the ISBNs and respray or break them up for parts to be shipped out to distant lands. Illicitly obtained Peugeot 505 gearboxes go to Port Harcourt, plot devices go to Arthur Machen’s Baghdad of the mind.

In defence of my profession, it should be noted that poverty plays a part in most crime. According to Denis Johnston, there are only eight basic stories. With millions of writers around, that equates to a real shortage of resource and a breeding ground for criminality.

Some writers claim not to be thieves. They style themselves ‘literary DJs’. Remixing, sampling syntax and characters, pumping up the plot. Others claim to be scavengers, salvage merchants, saviours of stories that would otherwise be scrapped. Even when this narrative is self-consumed, it remains just a distracting lie. Every writer is a thief. Every one of us.

I could try to claim cleaner hands. Point out that I deal in non-fiction. No law against taking facts during empty afternoon raids on Kew. I even pay fair coin to my stranger sources. Vodka and tonic, a curry or provable gossip for sharing buried news. Tell me what is on the missing Diana tapes and I will tell you which of Philip’s bastards is scouting for a ghost writer to dish the dirt. Libertarian memories of the man behind Guido Fawkes for on the level fact about Charles Kennedy. Information brokerage. Legitimate exchange.

However, facts are not the same as ideas. The question remains: ‘Where do you get you ideas David?’ The answer is always the same, always honest. Dreams, talks and walks. There has been a shortage of curry conversations in July, so it has all been walks that drift unknowingly into Baghdad-on-the-Thames and dreams.

I do not know how it works for other writers, but for me the dreams that provide ideas come in two broad forms. In the first, I will find myself possessing the body of an alternate me in a parallel dimension. A place where I am guilty of fiction and published by Gollancz.

I twitch inside this other David Southwell. Make him switch on his computer to see the drafts of his latest project or else force him to pull his published books from the shelves. The Scarlet Faction by Tim Dedopulos and David Southwell; Before The Blood by Matt Adams and David Southwell; The Far Lands by Stephen Grasso and David Southwell; the collected Hellblazer comics. Half a Dozen Doctor Who novels written alongside Sean Twist. The Sherlock XIII series. In these dreams, I attempt to read as much as I can; I do as all authors do and steal. I could try to spin it, but taking my ideas from an alternate me is still literary theft.

In the second type of dream I take directly from the landscape and inhabitants of what Machen’s Baghdad. Map its streets; make surreptitious word sketches of faces I see dining in its restaurants. I sit alone in its bars, pilfering overheard conversations, recording them with my shorthand scratch.

Every dreamtime experience is mine for the taking. I can steal without fear of repercussion in this ideaspace, knowing that within hours I will be beyond reach of any law operating here. Safely over the Theta state line, safely across the border of sleep. If I ever manage a decent night’s sleep again, the Baghdad security force will nab me and I will be up upon a charge of grand larceny.

There will be those who do believe my answer as to where my ideas come from. They will assume it is my Verbal Klimt improvisation to excuse and justify my crimes, who think: ‘He is a writer, therefore a proven thief and liar’. There is little I can provide to counter such thoughts. I could try calling Alan Moore as an expert witness; cite his work on Machen as a record of case law. Then again, those who do not wish to believe ideas arrive fully formed from dreams are unlikely to be swayed by the testimony of a man who worships Glycon.

In terms of hard evidence, I doubt dream journals are classed as admissible. Regardless, here is a record of last night’s journey through the territory of the Oneiroi.

‘Albion at the margins of the 1348 apocalypse. Empty fields. Abandoned. After the abnormal, constant summer rains, everyone was expecting famine as the grain rotted on the stalk. Worse came when plague robbed the landscape of enough men to work it. Blighted vegetation, mutating under the cover of mist that will not yield to a watered down sun. Skeleton thin livestock left to fend from themselves stagger across the blistered and black earth.

It is a time of crows. Breakdown of social order. All law a hollow memory. Knights Hospitalier colonies fallen to ruin. No one to protect the crossroads. All maps mock the living. England now a country of abandoned ghost villages, the only inhabitants are the unburied dead that once inhabited them. Pilgrims and outbreak refugees alone on green lanes drained of all colour except the black and grey palette of road turned to mire. High death rate for abbeys and monasteries. Two thirds of all England’s clergy dead. Mass burials. Mud pregnant with corpses.

Rumours of infection and Judgment Day as rife as the plague itself. Doomsday cults and heresies infect all belief. Antisemitc riots, the plague seen as a Jewish conspiracy. Mass penitence processions drudging on across several days. There is so much death, even the Pope is forced to abandon any pretence of established doctrine, declares all plague victims saved. Seeking ways to assuage the wrath of God has become political imperative.

Hoodoo Crow Men try to arrange contracts with the old powers to keep their patch free of contagion. Village militias murder outsiders on the roads to keep any possibility of disease from passing through. Plague Doctors tour the country, peddling false hope. They all wear the same uniform of fear: a hat to denote their status as a doctor; a mask with crystal eyes and the spice-stuffed beak to purify the air; a wooden stick to push away victims who get too close; leather gloves; a waxed gown and full-length boots.

On the Border, Scots see the pestilence in England as a punishment of God on their enemies. They gather an army to strike while the English are defenceless. However, before they can march, plague hits their ranks. Pursued by English forces, the Scots flee north, spreading the plague deep into their homeland. First flood, then famine, plague and war. All horsemen free, Albion as a territory of hell.

An inquisitor for the local prince-bishop makes his way across the landscape. Moving towards an abbey suspected of heresy. Moving into the reach of Lord Carfax – the local embodiment of authority who is suspected of diabolism. Moving towards a church where a Doom mural is being painted. It shows people dancing with a crowned bear; a bridge of spikes; St. Michael wielding a flaming sword, leading an army of saints against a legion of living skeletons. The mural intended as both prophecy and protection from the plague.

The mural reflects the sense that the tide of life and light looks like it will be permanently out across all Europe. The sea of civilisation rolled back to reveal primal horrors; deep fears now free to surface and roam. The inquisitor is the protagonist, moving towards his role in a vampire story. All vampire fiction as a fear of plague, infection, contamination and contagion from the outside.’

This is a fragment from the dreamscape. A note scratched into the dreamtime Moleskine. I probably will never transmute it to fiction, never be published by Gollancz. However, I hope it at least helps clear up one third of the ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ question.