walkingtalkingwriting

What was it I came here to do? (ak)

Let's check this out. Let's check the arithmetic of memory. I was getting older but there was still (I estimated) plenty of time left, barring accidents and those well known Acts of God or plain and simple murder, come to that. The brief time of innocence between forgetting about nuclear weapons and the advent of global warming had just given us the window of opportunity to launch an attack on the unsuspecting world; heads in the clouds, feet barely touching the the wild flowers in the meadows.

    Fast forward to some time that might or might not be the present, limping along in a desultory fashion; a result of varieties of conflict and trauma, cynical but still raising the standard of hope. Crawling out of bed, aware that we are not going to do anything very much about anything until it becomes a major catastrophe, such as the iconic asteroid that threatens to bring life on Earth to an abrupt end. Come on, get real – it would not be politically expedient. Instead we have been given a gift: Buffoon Boris. We will elect him to oversee our final apotheosis. The process might well be dialectical: Buffoon Boris's apotheosis but BUT our nemesis. Even if we didn't vote for the Billy Bunter raiding the tuck shop lookalike. Was our collective act one of hubris? Of course I'm getting mixed up in my tenses; suggesting an act in the past when some might feel it belongs in the future. But the confusion of tenses is appropriate because the damage has already been done. It happened when I was asleep.

    Dreaming, in fact, of something very different; the sweep of brushstroke that has picked up the energy of the centre, pulling it towards the periphery but then surprisingly executing the most exquisite curve and leading us back to the centre. Or at least that is apparently what is happening. Is that Greedy Guts hanging helplessly from the centre?

    The question remains: how do we find our way our of the Hayek maze of wondrous hallucinations? Can we sidestep the dazed bankers, the shell shocked monkeys from News Corp facing criminal charges?

    Or another question: how to support and help democracy to evolve? Rather than, in our sense of powerlessness we opt out of democratic struggle even at the basic level of voting. Was it somebody writing in the Daily Telegraph who accused Danny Boyle of sneaking a Marxist analysis into the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics?

    We all have to fight our way into the future. Even if the advantages and disadvantages handed out are so weighted in certain socially conditioned ways. But at the same time we have to work out what happened yesterday in the face of rampant amnesia and varieties of dementia. We, obviously cannot see the myths that currently construct our thinking, not until they are broken and burning on the bonfire of the yesterday's vanities.

    Missy Sniper is a version of the Republican/Tea Party/NRA fantasy: it can all be sorted out at the end of a gun. Just make sure YOU are the one with the finger on the trigger. Don't let those other buggers get their fingers in on the act. WE CAN BE TRUSTED (oh yeah!) THEY CAN'T. Let's hear it for Pussy Riot. Dancing in the cathedral and offering a prayer for the demise of Vlad Putin. Well why not? What's the problem?

Questions? (ak)

On board the Dreamboat there were puzzles to be examined. Such as, who is Massimo?  Such as, why would anybody think that I might be his friend? And if I was what would it mean? And more importantly, would it be dangerous?

    Not that my potential interrogator hung around long enough for me to reply.

    Out beyond the harbour walls the Dreamboat encountered a lazy swell; the combination of that gentle lurching and the ever-present smell of fish stirred my intestines into high alert, a state of readiness to evacuate should conditions deteriorate.

    More questions flooded my mind, perhaps in an effort to distract attention away from the volatility of current peristaltic activity. Questions such as:

    Did Tony Blair wet himself when shown the instruments of torture? Or, even, did any of those convictions he was so proud to display, his façade of self-belief, wobble?

    Such as:

    What am I supposed to remember?

    Such as:

    Did the image of the assassin as woman turn you on?

    Such as:

    What sort of shoes was she wearing?

    Such as:

    What would it be like living in a de-growth economy?

    Such as:

    Was the captain of the Dreamboat called Pring? And was he indeed a poet?

    Such as:

    What are the rules of this vessel?

 

Get Real (ak)

At the worst of times I’m an anti-poet atheist; at the best of times I don’t give a monkey’s; it is so irrelevant that my mind remains unblemished by such filth. And more importantly I’ve got to get out of this place – the lyrics of a song swirled briefly – if it’s the last thing I ever do. Did the words refer to the factory the singer, or at least the song’s writer, worked in, still living, squashed, in his parents terraced house; dreaming of a future with his girl friend? Poetry, of course, is simply smashed up prose. What some people do instead of getting to grips with the real world.

    To be honest I have no idea how many ‘floors’ I have already descended. Didn’t she say two floors down?

    I was supposed to be finding the Trumpet Trawler courtesy of Pring the Poet. The thought of bashing my head against the wall suddenly appeared to be the height of sanity. It might help. But look, is this a hopeful sign? The landing I was descending towards was a blaze with lights and not only that but I could now see vast double doors; ancient polished oak with lustrous brass fittings. Surely this was worth a blast of trumpets! It was only later that I, with delayed panic, wondered what I would have done if the doors had been locked, but instead I yanked eagerly at the left hand door and it swung open with delicious ease and I was confronted with a dazzlingly bright morning. Half blinded I staggered down the few steps, ears assailed by the scream of gulls. Smells of the ocean, of fish, of diesel, of people bewildered me. All my senses were working overtime. I had to eat what saw. I had to taste it, touch it. Milling crowds pushed me this way and that, but always closer to the hive of activity on the wharves. But this wasn’t the non-world of luxury yachts this was work, real work. The life dragged from the oceans glittered in variegated mounds. The knives of those gutting and cleaning flashed in the sun with impossible speed.

    I felt the hand slipping into the inside pocket of my jacket but by this time my hands were trapped at my sides by the press of the crowd. It was too late to fight. And then I was falling on to the deck of the Dreamboat. I was grateful that nobody bothered me as I lay in semi-conscious dreaming only in some tiny part of my mind aware that the Dreamboat was edging its way through the throng of boats towards the open sea.

    But why was it necessary to have all evidence of my past and only life removed?

    Move up there, a male voice, harsh, brittle. I tried to move but it didn’t seem at all easy.

    Then he leaned in close, are you a friend of Massimo’s?

 

A sandwich and a cup of coffee (ak)

I hesitated, she hesitated or at least she failed to withdraw. Was it politeness that drove me out, looking for stairs, a lift, looking for a way down. Two floors down. I had left without breakfast and was beginning to feel that tremble and light-headedness of low blood sugar. And there was an accompanying shock of a thought: what if this was the wrong building? What if I in the haste of being a few minutes late had inadvertently entered the wrong building? Why hadn’t I realised before? What had made me so sure that this was the place? But even worse was the nature of this building I was inside. I had fallen into a challenge that I had no way of understanding. All agency was being removed from me. Kafka’s tales were metaphors. Ways of telling a story. How real were they? What is the nature of our emotional life? What bit had Kafka made up? What bit am I making up? Here I was trapped inside a radically changed set of rules.

    In the relentless gloom I found some stairs going down but saw no sign of the stairs that I had descended ten minutes before.

    The fish wharf (or was it Fish Wharf?) she had said. Though we are a hundred miles from the sea. With unusual briskness, which I suppose was a version of impatience to get this whole thing over and done with; done and dusted and returned to something that promised familiarity, I skipped down the stairs. Yes, I would solve this like I had solved all the other problems that had ever confronted me. Reaching a landing I noticed a figure, an elderly woman, wearing a sun hat and a blue silk scarf, a pale cream linen jacket.

    You’d like some coffee, I expect, and a sandwich if you’re hungry and I’m sure that you are hungry, aren’t you.

    She stood next to a small circular table on which was a silver coffee pot, a cup and saucer, a silver jug that must contain the hot milk, I could see the thin curl of steam rising from it; and a large plate of sandwiches. Smoked salmon, she informed me.

    You need to keep your strength up.

    I slowed and crossed the landing towards her. I compared her to the memory of my grandmother; my mother’s mother, and the implied line of women leading back into the past. A line of kindness. And I wondered as to how and where the past exists. Does the past descend as into a grave and do we rise into the future?

    I asked her about the Kazoo Dreamboat.

    Poetry, she responded, must be honest. Poetry is a chance for us to redeem outselves.

 

Does it always have to be so difficult? (ak)

I zipped up, waited a few seconds, grabbed at some oxygen, sighed and shrugged, then turned to face my interrogator. Expecting something altogether more solid, more muscular I was surprised to see a girl, well, a young woman, who could have been no more than seventeen, overwhelmed inside an oversized uniform, dark, black or possible navy, her waif like face locked in uncertainty was a striking contradiction to the questioning, challenging voice I had been subdued by.

    Are you, by any chance, looking for the Kazoo Dreamboat, her voice had mysteriously become dream like, soft.

    Perhaps she had a colleague with her, somewhere in the shadows, a senior colleague who was supervising her on her first day in the job.

    Kazoo Dreamboat? I wondered about the strange name but decided to press on with my mission to reach the conference on the ninth floor.

    I’m trying to reach the ninth floor.

    A sheaf of papers had appeared in her left hand. She carefully examined them.

    Apparently you must go down to the fish wharf, three floors down.

    Erm, I rather was hoping to . . . I need to  . . . erm pee. I never did like the word pee, so prissy, so pathetic, but my vocal apparatus had got strangled in the effort to say piss.

    Sorry, was all she said and waited for me to leave.

 

Necessary Confusions (ak)

Not really a circular journey because that presupposes that the person who comes back is the person who set out all those days, months or years before. But we are confined to our spherical prison under the stars and under the sun. Renzo Piano’s Shard points the way out. The straight line must be the stuff of imagination. It informs, lends a narrow beam of light to our lives. Enables us to pretend that we have pushed God off ‘his’ throne and replaced him with . . . what? Science, psychoanalysis, all sorts of possibilities come to mind. And we really can tell stories . . . well, some of us can and some of us are rubbish at it.

 

 

 

 The Flags Are Out

 

The flags are out – no I don’t why either . . .

but we may have to bend ourselves to the collective will.

 

The deer came out of nowhere; no, that’s not quite true

it obviously came out of somewhere.

 

It emerged in a rush from the hedge on my right

startled by my appearance before her, two or three metres

 

from her, she swerved and plunged into the opposite hedge.

A brief encounter with the wild – a second from

 

a collision that I imagine would have left me

sprawling in the road because she was all force.

 

A force intent on evasion and survival

making a life on the margins of the human dominated landscape.

 

Bright eyed maenad alive with perfection; one being intensity

tearing me limb from limb; flesh organs bones into

 

the mincer. The fat red-faced cook turning the handle

with gusto, eyes libidinously merry,

 

dreaming of such a dish to set before the king;

Spices and fruit bursting with juices

 

bursting on the jaded palates of a thousand diners.

Come overwhelm me, my darling –

 

this is something special: to be remade

to enter the hunt, to outwit time

 

to twist and shout exulting the joy, to fall

to touch the cathartic as an equal; to die as she dies

 

because each day I must enter her once more

in order to find what I must be.

 

(Alan Kirby 2012)

 

A Bad Smell (ak)

It’s hard to dance when there is a bad smell. Edward Thomas writes (in the couple of stanzas you quote): ‘That I may lose my way/And myself.’ I have long been puzzled by the phrase ‘lose myself’; it makes me become very literal minded: oh dear, when did you last see it? Losing my way is much easier to get to grips with; it happens a thousand times a day and might well happen during the writing of this short piece of prose but on the other hand as I have little idea of where I am going with it how would I recognise the losing of the way. If I set off for Paris and find myself in Florence then clearly something has gone wrong. Though in this case does the smell alert me: this doesn’t smell like Paris. There is always that handy medicinal standby, alcohol; a couple of drinks and I no longer care where I am. Florence will do very nicely, thank you. And, returning to the question of smell, with a couple of drinks inside me I can ignore the bad smell and get on with enjoying the dance; even losing myself in the wild gyrations.

 

    I suppose what it might mean is losing some sort of burden; self as burden. What I might be able to do, Pamuk suggests, is to store bits of burden in a museum. Let’s call it the Museum of Innocence. Or why not call it the Museum of Guilt. Little bits of guilt displayed safely inside suitably strengthened glass cases. We don’t want that guilt getting out and interfering with the free flow of glorious dancing life, a life that is free of bad smells. Though the dilemma is that unless I manage to forget your introduction of this bad smell, with or without the help of alcohol, I have to come back to it. And it’s not helped by the fact that you don’t give any clues as to what the bad smell is actually like. Surely there cannot be only one bad smell in the world. Not forgetting that a bad smell for you might be heaven on earth for somebody else. Cannot you, like some refined sommelier (could your butler help you with this? I’m not sure whether you have an actual sommelier on your staff, but your butler, he might be from the nether regions of Glasgow, but I always thought he was an unusually helpful fellow) DESCRIBE the bad smell. Give me some clues as to the subtle notes that reach your nostrils.

 

    Innocence surely does not smell at all or if it does it must be sweet; that’s what we say isn’t it: sweet innocence. Honey and meadow flowers; not the stuff that grows in the ditch you dug last year which is, by all accounts, already rather rank. Honeysuckle comes to mind; that perfume that pervades the evening air. But what about roses? Now it seems to me that roses can have a more dangerous range of smells. Smells that could lead one into dangerous situations: those assignations in a dark alleys; situations from which there is no escape.

 

    Let’s be clear and remember that we have an investigation on our hands. The question is: what was that bad smell? Have courage even if it leads you to places you would rather not go.

 

What, you’re not there yet!! (ak)

All this time as a maturing man . . . my goodness, when can we cut him down and serve him with a bowl of French fries and a glass of chilled champagne in that “night club” of his? Let’s get on with it. We need strength for the journey; we need sustaining for goodness sake even if we are heading for that crest of the wave when maturing slips over into dementing. Or perhaps it’s the same thing: maturing must mean getting old and smelly; dementing means that we are past caring – unaware – unconscious aging. The dictionary suggests that there is no verb to dement, therefore I should not use dementing, it gives the wrong idea, as though I am doing something to myself. But why not? To be is a verb and is not quite a doing word. So is maturing I do something with conscious intention. Not sure – yes and no. I suppose drinking alcohol would be an example of conscious dementing and going to chat to my analyst an example of conscious maturing.

    When did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver come out? Oh yeah, 1976, I checked on Wikipedia. Anyway, the point is I watched it last night having rented the DVD. The fact is I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen it or whether I only imagined I had seen it because it’s one of those movies that entered what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious (if there is such a thing?). After watching it I’m still not sure whether I saw it in 1976 or 77 but I'm inclined to the view that I didn't see it. Could be I didn’t, because I wasn’t getting to the movies very much as that point in my life. Checking the Scorsese filmography on Wikipedia I noticed Mean Streets which came out a couple of years before Taxi Driver. Perhaps that was the one I saw. So this might be about venturing into the territory, reminding me of Dartmoor once again, of my dementing. But for the moment let’s stay with the movie. Robert de Niro’s Travis is a fascinating creation of a character, coming into America post-Vietnam, an ex-marine, probably traumatised, cannot sleep, finds a job as a taxi driver and occupies a fine line between maturing and dementing. The question that is so gripping is, is he going to make it? Which mainly means, will he survive? But also demands some clarity as to notions of maturing/dementing. He seems to have little in the way of self protective mechanisms operating. Is that another consequence of the PTSD? To what degree does he represent a socially inadequate character irrespective of whatever happened to him in Vietnam. So, yes, the various Jimmy’s and their questioning of what it is to live and survive or not. Travis even has a go at falling in love which doesn’t get far when he takes his dream of woman to a pornographic movie because it is just another film and besides he doesn’t know anything about films. Later, her boss, a presidential hopeful, happens to get into his taxi and Travis makes out he really admires this politician, though he knows nothing about politics, which in turn invites the presidential hopeful to ask him about what he’d like to see happen. Given permission Travis spews out a stream of paranoid stuff about clearing out the filth of the city and then it’s not long before he’s buying guns.

    It’s a fine essay on maturing and dementing, the socially isolated and excluded, heading for an explosion of some sort.

    I better get along to my analyst.

 

There we were, walking . . . (ak)

Of course you should have been tipped out of your hammock, dreaming in that brief but welcome sunshine of early spring. Tipped out to suffer minor abrasions and some bruising; although we can never be quite sure to what degree you will wake up. What sort of waking up could we hope for? Even at your great age! The apprentices had gone wild, running amok. In the past it would have been safe to assume their gender/sexual identity – young men longing for a sight of a young woman – but let’s not make any assumptions in that direction. Let us simply assume the rising sap of spring, the spring in the step of those young apprentices, let loose; what were the authorities thinking of, taking their eye off them, indulging in lazy lunches with bottles of strong red wine that appeared as if my magic amidst the mounds of succulent dishes on the increasingly stained white table cloth. A slurring of words, coarser humour, raucous laughter leading to amorous fondlings or simply sleep.

    There we were, walking with little thought of direction or destination and there’s a point when the legs are tired after many miles, perhaps the feet are sore, and hunger begins to gnaw at the belly. My thoughts are worn thin and few coins sit in my pocket. Is that the junction of paths where I espy a tantalising beauty? Perhaps there will be no going back. Already the myriad paths behind me are shifting, bending their way to a new tune, new possibilities, forcing a future that I didn’t know I wanted. A glimpse of beauty has me by the nose. Sweetness beckons me into the dance to the tune of the dazzling, rippling of the stream.

    But my steps are clumsy and unwelcome as I lurch across the green sward. I would grab but she’s gone on the lightest, fleetest of feet. My tiredness forgotten as I give chase – there is no chance that she’ll get away, evade the passions that suddenly command me; leave me no choice.

    I must enter the trap or die in the effort. The waters that close over my head are sweet and welcome.

    Or I could just walk away. Sorry, darling, I’ve got an urgent appointment. And I will jump into my BMW something-or-other and roar away, tyres squealing, back wheels drifting out in the loose gravel.

Or I could just walk away. After all, it’s where we started: walking. This fact of walking I was reminded of by the piece, in last Saturday’s (31.03.12) Guardian Review, by Will Self. He’s become a spokesman for walking, even quoting Rebecca Solnit who we discovered and valued several years ago. Of course, we were also reminded of our shared history of walking by the film Patience (after Sebald) which we both mentioned on this scroll recently. How far does the average European (let alone North American) walk these days? I mean in the course of their day-to-day life. We’ve been busy creating lives that exclude the possibility. Will Self mentions that a hundred years ago 90% of Londoners walked their journeys if they were less than six miles. It’s a great loss.

 

Does she even notice that I’m making love to her? (ak)

Have we arrived? Are we here? The place we are meant to be? In the place to which some god or fate intended us to reach? An intention that was in place from the very dawn of eternity, not that eternity can have a dawn, or a sunset come to that. A sort of enlightenment without the fireworks? Surely fireworks were on the menu! A patch of boggy Dartmoor, a gentle rain, a mist, Schubert on the little wind-up radio and we have to squat because it is too wet to sit down. In the midst of a would-be heated male companionship but so exhausted that our chilly fingers can no longer grasp the weapons that now lie unused glistening in the tussocks. Clever weapons that I should have been trained in many decades ago when my mind was still supple enough, in the sunshine, not down here in the labyrinthine depths full of strange snortings, a dark world in which it’s certainly better not to trust any living thing. Or dead thing. Or even things that claim to be alive but actually exist in some dimension unknown to our current state of knowledge.

 

    Priest-king or war-lord? Excuse me, I just need to go to the lavatory. That’s better, now what was that you were saying? The thing with foreign names is that they are so mysteriously attractive. Take Smith as a for instance, take it in your left hand and then in your right take Dumézil. Chalk and cheese, I think you’ll agree. But we do have to move on, we can’t squat around here all day. Pinky Dave Cameron, of course, is a fully paid up lizard dressed up as a castrated war-lord. The fact of it is, is that somebody or other got the bags mixed up, the contents spilt all over the Piazza del Popolo during a benefit concert for that poor beggar Berlusconi. We did our best to pick up the pieces, but many were stolen or were washed into the sewers. And we’ve never been able to properly sort out the ones we were able to collect. There’s no time. I know it sounds like an excuse but . . . please be reasonable. Time is money. And you know how while I’m dreaming of what to have for supper some other guys are busy hoarding all the available cash. I must add that it is also in part a question of categories. It seems to me to be a good thing that we can begin to see the complexity of it all but it does make simple decision making almost impossible unless we shut our eyes and stab wildly with a pin. Can we really call that decision making?

 

    I’m not convinced that she realises I’m making love to her. Not like the old days when the heat was undeniable. Jenny Diski, who I believe to be a woman, (LRB 22 March 2012) quotes Roger Ebert: ‘One of the reasons that America inspires so many road movies that we have so many roads. One of the reasons we have so many buddy movies is that Hollywood doesn’t understand female characters (there are so many hookers in the movies because, as characters, they share the convenience of their real-life counterparts: they’re easy to find and easy to get rid of).’

 

    Of course we like to pretend that we have roads here in jolly old England but essentially we only have rather damp patches of Dartmoor on which to squat and shout at each other, occasionally managing to strike a blow that’s got enough umph behind it to cause a darkening of the flesh. Where are you Michelle? And is this Michelle playing the part of a hooker? In this Movie?