Inspectors of the Heart

Apropos of nothing at all, here’s a poem I wrote a few years back. I was walking up St John’s Hill, past the hairdressers, when a siren cut through the moment and everything seemed to stop:

Inspectors of the Heart

A violent sound puts streets in shock -
cars stop to let the siren past.
It almost seems that nothing else is there;
just lights, that wailing and a fifth gear howl
that hurtles by, then up the road and on.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

Uniforms are knives to crowds,
slicing through them to arrest
someone maybe wanted, maybe not.
Pedestrians avert their eyes and freeze
resisting implication in this mess.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

They’ve gone, have left a space
where something trusting used to be.
Abusing stop and search they’ve shown us all
that they’ll invade us as and when they need;
remembered charges clog the muted streets.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

Smashing the piano

Well, it’s quite the weekend of music coming up.

On Saturday night, Stoke Newington’s legendary Drones Club hosts the awesome testosterone rush that is synth duo Raagnagrok, plus mash up Arabist mayhem from Djinn. More details here, it’s going to be a blast.

On Sunday, as part of Resonance FM’s Month of Sundays sessions, Raagnagrok offshoot Grok is playing with the even-more-legendary M. John Harrison, plus techgnostic Erik Davis, at the Corsice Studios down in Elephant and Castle. Details here, again it’ll be truly mind expanding.

Oh, and there’s also going to be comedy from Simon Munnery, science chat from Little Atoms, Dexter Bentley, Marvin Suicide and more.

I’ll be at both - see you there!

Flesh eggs, scarlet tracings

Bringing Iain Sinclair’s book of poems, ‘Buried at Sea’, into work this morning made me think about the impact his selected poems ‘Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal’, and his novel ‘White Chappell Scarlet Tracings’, made on me when I first read them.

I was at a very conservative boarding school in Dorset; every so often Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought Fox’ would get dusted off by some corduroy jacketed English teacher as an example of the finest, most dangerous poetry that modern Britain had to offer; appreciation of the contemporary novel stopped at Ford Madox Ford.

After Hughes’ tepid, self regarding, bankrupt Romanticism – a poetry that had and still has all the allure of a fly-blown egg salad sandwich rotting in an over warm chiller unit in a barely used Little Chef just off the A303 – and FMF’s (admittedly excellent, but simultaneously) seventy years gone Modernist novelising, Iain Sinclair was a revelation.

I’ve come to read his work as a driven Cockney response to writers like Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; people obsessed with the way history and geography combine to create an environment that the self cannot but rely on for definition.

He built on their methodologies, marrying berserk pulp mythologies with the seedier scrag ends of the Matter of London to look at how popular culture and mythology shape us.

London becomes a dense palimpsest of experience, a place where figures as diverse as Jack the Ripper, Stephen Hawking, Mithras and Nicholas Hawksmoor create intertwining narratives that echo in an absolutely contemporary way through the lives of all Londoners.

Within it we are are perpetual slaves to our environment, unknowing flaneurs being perpetually remoulded by the city that we are always strolling through, always observing, always being observed by.

There’s an obvious political edge to this, as well; those with the power to shape the environment have the power to shape us. Picking up where the Situationalists left off, riffing off the pulp innocence of H. P. Lovecraft and Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, Sinclair forces us to beware of such designs.

Iain Sinclair was using fictions I was deeply engaged with to build an argument about the nature of place, memory (both personal and cultural) that I found very exciting and relevant. Set against Ted Hughes and his dustily savage nature poetry – what took him a career to achieve was done better by Tennyson in four lines in 1849 – there was no real competition.

Time regained

Broken city. Shattered buildings, where they had climbed out of the ground, gnawing away at the dense certainties that held them down. I saw so much rubble, so much death - vivid and prowling through the streets, faces carved from chalk, flesh harder and so much more ragged than the bones that support it.

I thought of Erkenwald, summoning the dead to speak, and then dismissing them. These memories of men cannot be so easily laid. The graveyards from the Victorian stews emptied, the plague pits gave up their dead. Churchyards erupted. Bone warriors climbed out of long flattened tumuli, leading skeleton horses behind them. I saw a legion form up by Trafalgar Square, tarnished armour rattling against hollow, dessicated chests.

There is no more history, only now. The past has broken into our world and insisted that we acknowledge it. We are all immigrants in time, losing ourselves as the years pass. I thought I saw the shadows of old buildings staggering up, where the new ones had been shattered. I flew through it all. Ghost lights flickered in Cremorne Gardens as broken dandies danced with their dead ladies. A man fled through Victoria Station, he looked like Chris. The suburbs heave with the children of the necropoli.

Now I will go out into the city again. I have lost thirty five years to yesterdays, I hold a single precious second in the present, and as this broken city I have no future. Like these revenants I shall walk these ageless streets, and reclaim all the lost time that should be mine, and live in it forever.

Breaking out

Every so often there are low, rumbling thuds outside, muttering like thunder. I’m keeping away from the windows. I thought about taking the tube, but when the web was still up it said that no lines were running. There are all those urban legends about stations built through the old plague pits. So many tunnels must pass under churches and graveyards.

I can reach my bike without being seen from the street. Then I’ll go as fast as I can. Chris is coming with me, I hope he can keep up.

It’s worse now that there are no sirens. I thought I heard gunfire earlier, and screaming. Some colleagues went out, and didn’t come back.

There’s nothing at all now.

Unreal city

For some reason I can’t get the ‘unreal city’ sequence at the end of the first section of ‘The Wasteland’ out of my head. Must be the heat. The humidity clings. I’m beginning to feel trapped.

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’

Chris says his friend Hal up north has gone quiet, which is very unlike him. News of more ruined buildings in the City. The BBC news website is speculating about earthquakes. It took far longer than normal to load.

Silent builders

I can see the street outside from my window, looking down into the dead building opposite. Funny that I hadn’t noticed all the building works before yesterday. The builders don’t seem to be very active. Some of them are climbing around in the cellar, while the rest seem to be just standing around.

Apparently the rioters at Brookwood are illegal immigrants. Nobody can understand what they’re saying. They just appeared from nowhere. They’ve been contained, it says.

Chris tells me that another building’s collapsed, this time in Aldgate. The builders over there clearly more enthusiastic than the people over the road! They must be really badly paid. Most of them are dressed in rags. The ones without shirts look really skinny.

The building has been almost completely stripped out. Support struts gleam bone white in the sun.

Dead cities

Reading about a disturbance at Brookwood on the news. Then, I went to get lunch. The building over the road has been completely gutted, ready for development. Dead buildings rise again very quickly; in a couple of months it’ll be something completely new. People are more difficult to bring back.

But then again, London is built on dead architecture – layers of the stuff, running all the way back to the Romans and beyond. There’s a layer of ash half an inch deep that Boudicca left behind, when the city first burned; the remains of a temple to Mithras half exposed at Temple Court; street names in Fulham referencing a spring where Belenos was worshipped, 2,500 years ago.

Roman London, Celtic London, Medieval London; all buried, unreclaimable. Maybe it’s the redeveloped buildings that are anomalous, awkwardly reborn where all the rest have fallen away?

Glad I’m cycling home tonight, it’s a hot, sticky day. Just saw Chris Billett, he’s getting even twitchier about his sirens.

Dreams of sirens

I saw two or three unmarked police cars hurtling through the city last night, then again this morning - each the same shade of dense blue, temporary police lights clamped to the roof. They move with all the unreadable determination of a dream, forcing its way into the traffic of the mind and then as quickly disappearing…

Magic hour

I’ve got myself a new phone, and the new phone has a new camera in it, so I’ve been riding round London taking lots of photos and putting them up on Flickr.

I’ve realised that I’m fascinated by light. I’m out and about first thing in the morning, early evening; the magic hour, when sunlight runs across the world not down onto it.

And what surprises me is how blue the light always is.