ECHO 31/3/06

Is it possible that writers ‘share’ characters? Is there a kind of fictional gene pool which we tap into and end up dragging up the same people – archetypes even - whom we subtly alter each time? Some would argue yes; some would say mere coincidence. Or else they will put forward that old adage that ‘there is nothing new under heaven’. Either way, I am aware of it. I wrote a draft of a short story over the past ten days or so in which a character called ‘Jennifer’ appears. She was not based on anyone I know, merely a sketch accrued in passing during a walk through London town. She figured there in the drama and grew. Then I open a new novel to read, close on a week later, and the main protagonist’s wife is called Jennifer. I would put this down to mere coincidence; it is just a name after all. Sure it conjures a social class perhaps, or a look of the person in the mind’s eye, but it is a common enough name. However, to me it feels as if I have been cheated, that my decisions could be interpreted as being influenced. Or that I even knew it would be this way and that I would have to go further to find my originality. Take another step. Re-formulate what was written. Whether I will r not remains to be seen, but I get the sense I am walking into a Borges-ian labyrinth. A reflective library, teasing me into pretending I may have had an original thought, when in reality someone else was thinking it at the precise moment. Then, does it become a race, a duel even, with an unseen unknown competitor?

ECHO 28/3/06

Grand, rain drenched silence in the afternoon - filled Usebio with joy. Gave him a sense of freedom, peace. A contented link with his past, his childhood, which meant to him now that that he was okay as he was - this man. Then the lightning came closely followed by thunder and that made hime even happier there on the station platform, beneath the awning, dry yet exposed to the elements.

WINDOW 6

Silence now, the house is empty – big decisions have been made – important; now she is refreshed and has found some peace. Good. Her dreams were full again. The man beside her slept comfortably close and in this way the new week had begun better than the last. Even so, fear still rattled around at the edges of her mind and tickled in the pit of her guts. She now felt she could deal with that however.

When the call for work came it roused her from slumber – she had been aware of a number of things (the silence in the house, as mentioned; the call of a Blackbird from the park; the long, distant rumble of traffic on the roads; and the beginnings of her inner calm, also mentioned) yet her eyes were closed and she was replaying an image of desire, the last vestige of her true dreams, enjoying it. There was a portion of beautiful, unblemished flesh, her flesh around her belly, close up; and there was the dry scent of summer, tall trees and a camping tent with its zip undone and the flaps pulled right open to allow air in. She was within, making love with a man she assumed to be the man beside her now. She opened her eyes, looked to the closed window, the blind drawn down pale; then to the man, the top of his head nestled into the crook of her shoulder. She smiled a warm, motherly smile and closed her eyes again. The perfect swatch of flesh reappeared. It was lightly tanned and it moved beautifully as she breathed deep. Over it, casting a shadow, came a man’s profile, vague yet sure of its direction. Next came his eyes and the line of his hair, what little there was of it.

She opened her eyes again in quick surprise and looked once more at the man beside her. His thick, dark mass of hair flopped over her skin and on to the pillow. Nowhere could she make out either the scalp beneath or signs of recession at his brow. She closed her eyes again and sought for that final moment of her dream. Looking for the stranger, trying to ascertain his identity. But it was all gone. Instead her unconscious fought her off, she was left with the swirling patterns of light behind her lids, and a sense of confused lust in her belly.

She didn’t know it then, but another decision had been made.

OYSTERS

GREEN PARK – drunken business man and woman in their mid-forties – dressed in long grey overcoats – she has him pressed up against the red wall-tiles in a corner of the ticket area – he has an odd smile on his face, the aloof conqueror - she moves like a magnet joins them, when he sways left she follows, when he tilts backward she responds forward – his eyes are dark, thin smiles – she is all black tresses and briefcase and she pleads in a cigarette scratchy voice: “I’ve always fancied you.” There is nothing romantic about this clinch; it is desperate, groping, consuming and it stinks of wealth – mobile phone sex, dealer sex, intermarital sex, sex that smells of Thatcher’s needle edifice on the Isle of Dogs –
MUDCHUTE DLR – a haggard, grey man – never seen a man look so grey – like dust – his eyes are nasty, he stares at a woman across the carriage aisle with evident intent – deep folds in the flesh of his face either side of his mouth move and throb as he grinds his teeth in there – he wears a dark coat – there is a heavy aura about the space he takes up in the world – he turns his gaze to me when he realizes I am watching him, those deep-set eyes look into me with something like an immediate challenge – I have to turn away cold and suddenly frightened, thankful I am not a woman –
ISLAND GARDENS – Ramon sat always on an aisle seat with one arm hanging straight down into the aisle space, his large signet ring prominent there – he would tap a rhythm with it on the plastic base - with his other he would tip the brim of his baseball cap and pick his nose – then he would ride the open tracks back and forth and watch the reflections of people as they got on, sat close by, or left at their destination to be replaced by another figure in haste or repose depending on their day – most of all he liked to look at the young men and when he saw one he really liked he would pull out his thick gold necklace and play with it under his chin, toying with his long fingers and hoping they would catch a look and understand his semi-hidden signal – it had worked three times and he had pulled more than a link – rich men and poor, Zones 1 – 3 –
BERMONDSEY – a child in a push-buggy screams with such joy and gusto trying to compete with the howling noise of the wind in the underground tunnel, he tips his head up and with mouth wide open – when he is done he looks round the carriage laughing and looking for approval - his mother smiles, and the carriage smiles with her -

PLEASURE PRINCIPLES

The giant, red-robed Christ of Limehouse – white plastic face, cuddly cartoon features, and puffy fingers in grace – stuck on top of an old Victorian factory building, surveying the DLR –
A semi-deflated blow-up Spiderman climbing a chimney stack on a nursery outbuilding, his head and hands flapping in the wind –
Screaming schoolchildren caught on the train without tickets, the guard only feet away –

ECHO 23/3/06

Something red, bright red – tiles or lipstick
A hooked nose
Leicester Square’s worst busker
Twelve ghosts
A £5 note found on abandoned slipway close to the river
The dark stone skulls of St.Nicholas – death, fear, faith: the real history
A multitude of labyrinths between here and peace
Furious anger of the displaced

Journeyman 2

Journeyman

ECHO 21/3/06

Spotted a face from years ago walking through the high street – a woman who sourly dominated a shared house I lived in nearly 10 years ago near Oval – she was in her mid-thirties then, an office manager for a City merchant bank, a job with responsibility and some pressure – then (isn’t if funny how London repeats and never quite lets go of the same kind of people) she got into smoking grass and hash and taking Ecstasy at the weekends, often spending her Friday and Saturday nights at a club called Samsara in The Fridge in Brixton where she would report back tales of being in heaven, full of bliss, accepted; it became something of a religious experience for her every time – but it was an induced one – the rest of the house would live in fear of the week from Tuesday night onward when she would hit the inevitable mind/body crash, the come down – the swing in her mood was polar, she would become surly, angry and volatile; often she would scream and shout at people in the house for no reason, even once for just walking past her bedroom door and making the floorboards creak – she scared the hell out of me and thankfully after suffering it for 18 months I moved out – Seeing her now came as a bit of surprise, though the way she looked now I could have predicted even back then: her face had become a sullen, rubbery thing, worn out, pinched around her eyes and mouth and looking like it had long forgotten how to laugh or smile; her skin had turned the colour of a rotten plum, a kind of puffy red; her gaze was beady and suspicious, she gave daggers to anyone that came close to her on the pavement as if warning that she might explode at them at any given moment – she wore an oversized leopard skin pillbox hat (!) and an overnight leather jacket, which I could not help feeling was reminiscent of a strait-jacket – she did still look as if she had money to burn, there were a lot of accessories hanging from her neck and wrists – but she moved like she was made of wood, stiffly and without much flexibility left – I wondered if the strychnine they used to cut E’s with had finally damaged her spine?

ECHO 19/3/06

It is close on 5am on a Sunday morning – the boiler is chugging and rattling away downstairs and it is this noise that wakes me – it makes me angry – so I stumble out onto the landing and realize that the hall lights are on and the security door is unlocked – another light is on in the smoking den but there is no noise coming from within – I check the boiler, and discover the heating has been left on all night – I pull open the double doors to the den to see if anyone is still awake – on the sofa, still in his clothes but with a blanket pulled some way over him is A fast asleep; the detritus of a night’s marijuana smoking laid out before him on the coffee table and the TV plays the Austin Powers DVD menu screen over and over, repeating jingles of jaunty music that I am assuming have accompanied this thirty year old man into the land of hash nod – I switch the lights off and turn off the boiler –

Everything is about burning, using up, consuming without a thought for the planet - and it is people like this young man, selfish, inebriate, blinkered, without a care, that are sealing its ecological fate –

Once upon a time dope smoking went hand in hand with an alternative way of life, cranks who empowered themselves in the name of Mother Earth, motivators against war, poets who marched on Washington or started movements of change in the name of the future – now they are just wasted, lonely individuals whose eyes are turning redder by the day and whose faces look like joy is an ancestral commodity, and who feel the need to womb themselves in the unnecessary consumption of power and natural resources without thought, as if someone else will do the right thing and that will excuse them – its bullshit, it’s the typical human trait of passing on responsibility, its spoilt children messing up the garden and not clearing up after themselves – it is fashion – it is hip to care less – and we have no excuse with all the information to hand, all the evidence we would rather hide beneath the blanket, pull it right up over our heads and sleep on through, tranquilised until it is too late -

PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

The house meeting was entertaining. Whether it accomplished anything remains to be seen. But it brought some laughter afterwards. True to form, however, there was evident conflict in A towards J. He contradicted anything that J said, and the reasons he gave were thin. J offered to clean a stubbornly dirty window but A told him to leave it alone. J mentioned some advice given by one of the landlord’s associates and that info was dismissed by A as incorrect: “it doesn’t work that way, mate”. But there is a moment of checked hilarity when A asks quite honestly if everyone can keep the lid down on the toilets. Looking around the room where we are all sat, his smoking and TV den, piled with cigarette ends, rolling papers, ashtrays, blankets, DVDs of The A Team (of course, A and his A Team!) and the stench of stale marijuana smoke suffusing everything, his request strikes us as absurd and hilarious. At first we think he is joking and that he has thrown a comic moment purposely into the proceedings, and we laugh. But his stern look quickly changes that and we realize that he is being dead serious. For a moment the meeting looks like it might go pear-shaped as he evidently takes offence, and then he qualifies his request by saying “it looks better that way; and we don’t have to look at any pee or stray pubes”. That’s it for J; he holds back a huge laugh and politely ends the meeting there and then. In his room he rolls on his bed with laughter.

At 2am, waking after a dreamy sleep, J goes to the bathroom to piss. The toilet seat is up! He frowns, smiles again to himself and puts it back down.

At 6.45am J’s alarm goes off. The only other person awake in the house is A. J listens to him hawking and coughing in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, showering etc. When A vacates, J gets up and goes straight for his ablutions. What does he find? The toilet seat has been left up – by A! J finds it even more amusing. He wonders if the request was perhaps a test by the stoned A to see if his co-habitees would honour any request. Or maybe it is just A’s view that it’s one rule for him and another for everyone else?

If You Can't Beat It - Join It

Serious Poem Alert

Look out! here comes a serious poem
Avoid it at all costs
It’s a pompous bastard at the best of times
Like a broken-hearted bore at the bar
Who has to tell everyone
Just how much damage was done
And when you look you realise
Aw shit! It’s me!
The author of your own demise

Really what I want when that mood comes
When it tries to set me up on the stool
Is to hear nonsense in a cosy voice
Up close:

Sipping tea with a group of gambling ants
Laying bets on sugar lumps
Or a fat and irreligious monk
Who has got the hump
With God and upped and just run naked
To a cellar to get drunk

When I get that feeling
Sometimes dawn or maybe late
That profundity is here
I don’t want words of wisdom
I trip the wire, set the siren off
Stick my tongue in vices
Break my pencils in the river
Eat mahogany or oak
And get tired among the carnivales
Dancing on my neck . . . . .


London, March 2006

ECHO 17/3/06

Are we being led by the US Christian Right, the neo-cons, and by Blair’s assumed Christian devotion, into a second Dark Age? Would seem so. Tyranny, torture, suppression, and misinformation. It’s not an original thought I’m sure, but I read a book this week - Infidels – A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam by Andrew Wheatcroft (Penguin) - that lays out some historical parallels which I believe points to the answer.

Richard Perle and David Frum – figures in the Bush administration, have written a book entitled: An End To Evil: How To Win The War On Terror – they call it ‘a manual for victory’ and it is written in a version of Orwellian Newspeak. In 1984 Orwell wrote a lengthy description of the language used by The Party and handed down to the populus of Airstrip One (Britain). Words were divided into three categories: the A, B and C vocabularies. ‘A’ words corresponded to everyday words necessary for such things as work, eating, cooking, travelling etc. ‘C’ words were primarily scientific and technical. Frum and Perle, Andrew Wheatcroft argues, have written their book mostly in ‘B’ words. Orwell describes that vocabulary as those words ‘deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude’. Perle and Blum’s book is suffused with attacks on countries that opposed the invasion of Iraq and who they therefore believe engage in ‘thoughtcrime’. The book is a paean to Newspeak. To quote: ‘Terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause . . . There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.’

Wheatcroft maintains that the use of the word ‘holocaust’ (without its usual capital ‘H’) is clear use of Orwell’s vocabulary ‘B’; the authors being fully aware of the emotive impact of using that word on a modern readership and in this way connoting terrorism with Nazi exterminations. Wheatcroft goes on to ask (I am paraphrasing here): ‘Are America’s alternatives really ‘victory’ or the careful, planned, systematic, efficient and remorseless extermination of an entire culture?’

He highlights the fact that the ‘language, structure, intention and method’ in the neo-conservative’s book reflects that used in the medieval text The Hammer of Witches, more commonly known as the Malleus Malleficarum. This was a tract written in 1486 by two monks and provided canonical and biblical backing for the hunting down and destruction of witches. It is, to quote Wheatcroft again, ‘one of the most malign texts ever produced’. Both the 21st century book and fifteenth century manual use similar methodology. Each one presents the situations and causes of evil; each details how it spreads; each attacks any dissenting voice or anyone that may doubt their view; and finally they both offer ‘operational necessities’ and guidelines to perpetrate a war on evil.

ECHO 11/3/06

Saturday morning, early walking – empty streets, the silence lovely – broken glass across the pavement, brown bottles – up by the creek the wind and cold come in, whipping up eddies in the road dust – the same wind is channeled to a disabling strength between the steel and glass corridors at Canary Wharf, pummeling the face –

The café owner loves to talk. Delicate Portuguese accent; expressive. Talks to a customer, a woman in late middle-age pulling a shopping trolley and dentures, about his family and how he feels jumpy today and he doesn’t know why. Yes he told his wife this information this morning but there wasn’t time to discuss it properly because he had to get out and open up the café. Slick contemporary joint that it is: leather seats, wood-topped tables, chrome bar, coffee machine, selling continental bistro food, cakes and confectionery; Italian style.

He is charming yet capricious, fissile, and volatile – I’ve seen him explode on a number of occasions, though never without just reason – when it happens it is fierce and sure like a knife – strike, remove –

He chats next to a pretty young blonde woman who obviously comes here regularly – she orders a semi-skimmed cappuccino - they talk about their coffee consumption, he explains that he has had to cut down and she echoes the same, talking brightly about keeping things in moderation – questions about the success of the business, questions beyond the usual, a flirtation perhaps? He smiles, and his childish grin comes in to play – he has odd skin, dry and paper like, almost expect it to crack when he smiles, but it has a moon like quality to it so he appears to glow from time to time –

The young woman keeps chatting – there is a vivacity in her voice and body that reminds me of Pol, my lover – I recognize it because I don’t have that ability to be effortlessly sociable, gregarious; I am the polar opposite for sure: quiet, reticent, more a dark cloud than a sun – the café owner is distracted by another customer waiting to be served and so he has to move on, but before he does he gives the woman her cappuccino for free – people like that, especially women, often receive gifts because they give so much of themselves and they give it freely, they trust in other human beings (just like Pol) and the universe rewards them – personalities like mine, reserved, make their own way and receive such things less often – it is no matter, it is just the way things are –

ECHO 10/3/06

Odd acoustics through the day become a fascination – echoes and senses of distance even when in close proximity as if I were hearing the atomic ‘hush’ between sounds, objects, and surfaces. A violinist at Canary Wharf for example, playing a short piece by Vivaldi in front of a large pillar, yet the music is only fully audible in one spot directly in front anywhere else and it sounds as if it being played through a dense fabric. What strikes me about this is the passivity of noise as opposed to the usual aggressive London assault.

DEPOSITS

One face two trains – she is fast asleep, chin on chest, in the nook of a crowded commuter carriage – a thought comes to him: Do I know you? Something familiar about her, yet if he rationalized he knew it could not be possible. He recalled two girlfriends from long ago and wondered why he had not been happy with either. Later, he deposited a cheque in an ATM machine in a bank in West London and one of the women behind the counter rubbed her chin against her shoulder in a similar gesture to the sleeping woman. Again he stopped and noted it. It was something about the action, not the person, which resonated.

Andy hawking in the bathroom every morning – it is so loud you can hear it throughout the house - I wonder what he is trying to bring up – some rock chipped off his soul? A bitter seed? A block of ice? Whatever it may be it takes a huge physical effort – it’s a miracle his lungs don’t burst. Sometimes I think I might find him expired on the floor or else discover a strange bloody deposit in the wash bowl and learn that he has been rushed to hospital.

Wolves on a terrace in Hammersmith – prowling in large cages among placards and information booths – and those eyes, bright and golden, watching every move, the head low to the ground – nearby a video plays with images of vast tracts of snow covered ground and a pack of these creatures make their way across hunting territory accompanied by a voice-over describing their habits and the potential of extinction in certain parts of the world – a child is held close to one of the cages by her father as a few spots of rain fall on the terrace, she is scared and clings on to him looking at the cage over her shoulder and then burrowing her face back into the man’s neck – one of the keepers comes over having seen this and suggests something to them and the little girl nods her head through tears – having deposited a small lump of meat into the cage from her hand, the girl strokes the thick mane of the wolf and laughs.

ECHO 9/3/06

WHAT A WASTE

Fresh ground organic espresso blend coffee ready through a stovetop
The miserable face of a co-habitee in the morning
A giant pizza box in the kitchen forced into a bin too small
Urban birds don’t return often to a garden feeder
He never calls me by my name, only ‘Dude’
Is my life becoming too small?
A horizon on the floor of a train
Two peacocks at Canada Water, possibly plastic

- - - - - -

Strange that A. converses in clichés and epithets: ‘a day is what you make it’ – ‘seize the day’ etc. Even stranger is why he feels the need to impart them to me. Does he believe he should try to teach me a lesson? I can’t help wondering if these are, in reality, things he is trying to remind himself of. He knows nothing of my day after all, what I do at work or play – he can’t even remember my name calling me ‘mate’ or ‘dude’ all the time (I mean do I look like a dude?). Maybe he arrogantly believes that he is better than me in some way? Or that there is a territorial battle that needs to be fought between two males newly living in close proximity? His father is an archdeacon so perhaps this is hereditary sermonizing?

ECHO 8/3/06

Donald Rumsfeld blames the media for exaggerating reports of violence and insurgency, and potential civil war, in Iraq. He even attempts to deny the reports made today of 18 men found in a mini-bus, blindfolded and shot dead. His denial would be almost comical if it wasn’t so dangerously autocratic. If proof is denied then anything is possible – the power to rewrite history at speed, the power to change reality into political fantasy at will, the power to force feed the populus.

- - - - - -

TOPOS – 2

This night becomes a question
Sure the pillows are warm yet
Warmed by the acid – angry, bitter –
Of sudden truths

In valleys where two bodies lay
With sweat and heavy DNA
Of love - the blind lead the dead
Into the wind

Buckfastleigh

everything by the cankered hand
of a (imagine!) divine gardener,
weather worn, tending and nurturing his plot
amid a bestiary of nightfall companions:
tourmaline panthers, golden owls
creatures with patience in their necks
listening among the foliage to the nearby hearth
eyeing the icon covered walls
and the coming and going of lovers and friends
through a garden to cheat death
to capture memory and life
swimming in that deep invitation
the succulent moorland dripping
and feather-robed Crow Charlie
whose days were spent roaming the high ground
watching horse-back shepherds and calling the granite
“thee blood stone”………


Original draft - 18/5/99
This draft 5/3/06

ECHO 7/3/06

A couple – a conflict, based on irresolvable differences.

One of them is capable of great leaps of faith and hope, and possesses the ability to ‘switch on’ optimism and joy at will, despite any other feelings - a product of choice and a healthy upbringing. The other is a fatalist whose joy is a more sporadic visitor – a product of experience and upbringing.

We are witness to decades of conditioning through experience, life journeys resulting in two people falling in love but discovering a point where their essences differ incontrovertibly. How can these differences ever hope to be reconciled? This discovery is painful and is why their relationship is now in jeopardy.

One offers to change – treatment, drugs, a concerted effort. The other doesn’t wish that; they wish for change but nor that. Their concepts of life are steady monoliths that can never meet. Yet how it that together they are capable of great love, joy, laughter?

It is a situation that could be resolved given time. But they don't have much left.

TOPOS - 1

Unexplained death at the river’s edge in Greenwich, close to the old Royal Navy Academy – the yellow incident sign reads: A man’s body was recovered here on xx February and is believed to have entered the river at 1.20am – the wording is strange, that word ‘entered’ makes it sound like an exact action, premeditated, or that the man was void of life signs when it occurred, dumped and thrown away – the meridian calls and when it does time shifts and life leaves in all manner of ways – further along the bank something sinister in the huge disused jetty: between thick girders, an animal skin of some kind has been stretched like a sail, leathery, pale yellow, almost translucent in its degradation – are these disparate elements of the city, odd coincidences, or clues to the death further upriver? Something evil afoot? A representation of the city’s darkness, an essence given form as a monster or killer? Someone whose knowledge of the history and rituals of the river leads him or her to conjure old symbolism, archaic examples and thereby become another chapter in the criminal history of the city – an ancestor to Spring Hell Jack, or the Ripper? A ritual maker of simulacra? Hiding out among warehouses and abandoned power stations on the southern bank, the old hospital building built in 1616 for retired mariners overlooking Poplar and Canary Wharf across the wide curve of the river at the Isle of Dogs – the smell of the sea, the noise of canon fire, an admiral’s statue – There is the possibility that this body was another of the river’s cadavers whose deaths have never been solved – Roberto Calvi hanging from beneath Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets filled with stones, the conjecture being that he was killed by the mafia but has anyone ever been charged; the limbless torso of a child apparently used for witchcraft – Maybe this body at Greenwich was a simple suicide? A man driven to the action of drowning having taken a heavy dose of senecol, or Valium laced with alcohol to ease the cold and the fear once in the water?

ECHO 4/3/06

Early morning 6am – tired, but the joys of silence and solitude for a few hours before the house wakes are priceless –

The house stinks of marijuana from A’s lengthy smoking session last night – lights on and LEDs blink everywhere, a trail of energy waste in red and green -

So Blair believes history and God will judge and vindicate his action over Iraq – an action based on a lie, a fabricated piece of information that somebody’s secret service (US, UK, or Italy – the three way cabal of neo-con countries) doctored and tailored to meet the demands of the Bush fascist project, and Blair was the Goebbels, the propagandist prepared to hold hands with the devil and stand up first with a dossier full of falsehoods – would God really support that Mr. B? If so, you make your faith baseless, marred, and dirty (as dirty as the invisible uranium you claim was the proof for invasion). And in so doing give further fuel to radicals who see Christianity as decadent and lacking in moral strength – you prove them right. Why? Because you repeat all that Christianity has done to the Islamic faith in the name of God since the Crusades. You cannot stand up before God and history and claim yourself to be an emissary of His word while innocent people are dying in your name. We have entered into a Second Dark Age – where the rulers misguide their citizens with false words and myths, hypocrisy and subjugation; where torture is excused as a necessary result of war; where seats of archaic learning and civilization are raised to the ground through siege and bombardment; where humanity is treated no better than the lowest animal, chattels to be abused, wills bent to the powerful irrespective of their rights; where the law and its apostles are in league with organized crime; where mercenaries become heroes and secret forces are given sanction to work beyond the reach of justice. (NB Essential reading: Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh).

The 1950s UFO sightings epidemic – intriguing, mass psychosis almost – a sign of the times they say, the fear of communist invasion and fast technological progress creating (possibly) archetypes from the unconscious, giving form to hidden aspects of the psyche – yet despite that there are some mysteries remaining: the two RAF pilots flying their Meteor jet at 14,000 feet and followed by three fast moving discs also tracked on RADAR from the ground and which the MOD chose to suppress any de-brief or information on – the strange red lights and beams at a US airbase in the UK, seen through trees by a number of US guards and for which there remains an audio recording of the event –

Watching Oliver Stone’s movie Salvador – a serious film; almost unbelievable at first as the two main characters aim at a comedic double act – but it turns into an indictment of right-wing US foreign policy and military aid abroad in the 80s – another example of dirty motives, fear and paranoia driving US hegemony always into league with abusers of human rights – if history is to judge (as Mr. B claims it will) then surely it must eventually judge the US as a dangerous meddler, a bully preaching empty freedom at the end of a weapon; abusing words such as democracy which they have made meaningless, rewriting the dictionary as they go, rewriting what it means to be human. It would be interesting to have a crystal ball at this moment.

ECHO 3/3/06

Cormorants on the Thames, early morning, low tide – close to Chelsea Bridge – one of them arcs high leaving a point close to Battersea Park and heads upriver before circling twice and switching over towards the southern bank where it comes to rest on the water. Then another comes low to the surface, through one of the bridge spans – fast, a dart-like silhouette sure in its course – there is something primeval about these birds, from another time – they have a mocking look, tricksters – Close by, almost unmoving, living a different rhythm to the Cormorants, a Grey Heron stands in the shallows and exposed mud probing slowly through the surface with its fissile beak, long legs resting on the remnants of wooden jetties – surrounding it in frenetic pace are Black Headed Gulls, Herring Gulls and Fulmars mawking and bartering for space on the shore – the Heron, by dint of size, seems aloof and superior to these little squabbling relatives; gently it moves among them, stopping to check for minnows, focusing there, bringing to bear its immense quality of patience then stretching out that almost ermine neck to take its catch.

- - - - - -

Watching Fellini’s La Strada again – Giuletta Massina as Gelsomina is iconic, her performance is even more affecting second time round, with the knowledge of all that is to befall her throughout – if you break it down it is such a strange performance: half silent comedy, half Greek tragedy – never less than enchanting – and Anthony Quinn’s final scene is so harrowingly honest it is the lasting memory I will have of the film – pain, guilt, solitude –

- - - - - -

My Father’s 72nd birthday today – speaking to him on the phone so far away in his hospital bed, his voice like a pale version of its usual self – hoarse, gasping for breath and as weak as a little child’s – though brief, it is a harrowing conversation; I listen for signs of hope, for some glimmer of strength in him, but there is none and as we talk I pace the wooden floorboards in the hallway trying to send as much of my remaining youth to him, to transmit it down the phone, manifesting itself as phrases of encouragement which cannot cure him even if they do provide him with love.

TRACK OF THE WEEK

Police On My Back - by The Clash, from the album Clash On Broadway

ECHO 2/3/06

Still the ignorant live on among us, brandishing their juvenile insults at anyone they believe should be the victim of their words. They exist still in a cocoon of bigotry and hatred towards anyone they perceive to be ‘different’. They wear their hypocrisy with pride and hide their cowardice behind their gangs, egged on with liberal amounts of alcohol or drugs – this allows them to absolve themselves of any responsibility. Their belief system has been passed on by fathers, mothers, and by the culture they choose to expose themselves to – the popular push of hatred –

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And having to take control at rehearsals, seeing through the lack of preparation by the writer and director today – total confusion and inertia – so I take the script and rewrite elements of it to bring it to better life and it works – it’s a joy to know that it is possible to do so much so quickly now –

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There is an etched plate of steel in the water basin gazed on by twelve art students – hairy, skateboarding giggle-fits – but it is not of our world – the third floor of the university block has become a shrine to the winter migration of a falcon – the bird’s barbed edges have long gone but it has left this accident of chemistry ready for us - to attempt to understand the cypher there where it’s full strength urine has marked the plate, etching the surface – now washed and ready for ink – we like to think that maybe the creature has left us a message, some first for cross-species communication – its name – or a representation of a map of the places it has been in its pathway north – or a list of kills perhaps? - We move together, the students following me to the bench where the ink is warmed in its crucible and is giving off the rich oily smell as it gets close to readiness. I layered it on to the steel with a padded rag, working it into the shallow marks – we avert our eyes, not wanting to lose the surprise of what might be there, waiting for it to be transferred eventually to paper, the end of the process – and when it is, there is nothing immediately recognizable, it is literally the mark of bird piss, you can see where it had run slightly as the bird moved away – but that abstract form now delineated in black and white still maintains all the meanings we want there to be; each one a reflection of the individual - (NB it is a fact that falcon urine can be 3000 times more concentrated in uric acid than its blood levels and that is strong enough to etch steel) -

ECHO 1/3/06 - 60 die in Iraq

The Day Of Breath And Air -

Stale air beneath the Thames 24:7 – the tired sighs of a cashier over morning coffee – Eleni Karaindrou’s Eternity Theme plays – a municipal fountain splatters onto the paving stones – a plastic frog statue dressed in waistcoat and fez –

my father goes back into hospital during the night, unable to breathe despite the oxygen tank beside his bed – his condition is changing, he has not been able to shake the bronchitis for over three weeks now and in turn this is affecting his heart - the visit to the UK in January has taken its toll –

the action of flight by a falcon - actually able to breathe through its bones which are hollow and connected to its airsacs (lungs) - a more efficient respiratory system than ours -

breath – what a luxury that must seem to my father – inspiration – it makes me wonder if my father is running out of inspiration, running out of ideas and purpose as he ages – and that life ceases the inspiration fades –

so much potential departure around at the moment, time passing into the ultimate moments – maybe it is this recent proximity to the Greenwich meridian? Is it tuning me into a greater awareness of time? Sensitivity to its passing and the meaning of mortality? – I am afraid – winding my wristwatch on to change the date from February 28 to March 1, 48 hours in a matter of seconds –